The trail of the wolf has led us now to the end of an era. Not the end of Universal’s classic horror movies (not quite), not the end for Lon Chaney Jr’s career as a wolfman, not even the end of things for poor Larry Talbot, though it would be a long time before he was to be dusted off again. This is, however, the last werewolf movie of the 1940s, and it’s the capstone for the three greatest monsters in Universal’s stable. Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Wolfman are all united here one last time, and then retiring for the rest of the 20th century. There really wasn’t anything else they could have done after this, because here was the most ambitious crossover yet. They crossed over not only franchises, but genres. It was a big deal when the Wolf Man met Frankenstein, but that was nothing compared to both of them meeting, and nearly killing, one of the greatest comedy duos of the 20th century. This week, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein!
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are legends in their own right, the epitome of the silly fat man / serious thin man pairing that is the fundamental yin and yang of comedy. I first encountered them in their 1952 film Jack and the Beanstalk, which was one of only two color films the duo made, and one of only three VHS tapes I remember my grandmother owning. That movie introduced me to the basic concept of fat man / thin man antics, some elimentary vaudeville patter, and the basic structure that Abbott and Costello (and Laurel and Hardie, and the Three Stooges, etc.) relied upon: take a familiar narrative framework, drop your established comedy team into it, and let them do what they do against whatever backdrop they’re in. It’s simple, and it’s often not surprising (unless you get some real anarchist lunatics like the Marx Brothers turned loose), but it works. It works especially well when everyone outside your comedy team is trying to play it absolutely straight. You throw the Three Stooges into a Hercules movie, for instance, and the guy playing Hercules should act like he has absolutely no idea anything funny is going on.
In this case, that meant playing up the gothic horror and monstrous ferocity exactly as they would in a standard monster movie, and letting Bud Abbott and Lou Costello bounce off some monsters who are entirely unprepared for this kind of tomfoolery. Now, by this point, Universal’s scare-making power was not what it once was, so there may not have been a whole lot of meat left on the bone, but there turned out to be enough to make this work. Bela Lugosi is his old suavely menacing self, returning Frankenstein Monster Glenn Strange is once again perfectly cromulent as a lumbering man-mountain, and Lon Jr. is just as frustrated, depressed, and ultimately ferocious as ever. Nobody dies in this picture, but Larry Talbot definitely acts like he’s trying to fix that when the full moon comes out.
The monsters, the Wolfman in particular, are in a very interesting place with this movie, and it’s the ultimate result of the evolution that we see in the previous films. Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man establishes that the monsters all inhabit the same universe, and affirms that the Wolfman and Frankenstein Creature are fundamentally unkillable. House of Frankenstein adds Dracula to the perpetually resurrecting crew, and reiterates the essential bond between mad scientists and hunchbacked assistants, demonstrating that Frankenstein’s relationship with Fritz and Ygor was not an individual quirk. It also plays out like a greatest-hits collection, boiling the prior films down to their essential beats. Finally, House of Dracula abandons all pretence of continuity, establishing a world where the characters are familiar from previous films, but the specifics of those stories no longer matter. The monsters in House of Dracula all died in House of Frankenstein but all appear, with no explanation or justification, alive again at the start of the film. At this point even Larry Talbot, by far the most dynamic of the monsters, the only one to change and grow as a character across three separate movies, has settled into repeating an established schtick.
All this is to say that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein starts with the assumption that we all know who Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman are, and that we do not give half a shit about the details of anything any of them have done in the past. Dracula turns into a bat, drinks blood, and hypnotizes people. The Frankenstein Monster stumbles around smashing stuff. Larry Talbot is a depressed-looking guy who turns into the Wolfman and tries to disembowel anyone who crosses his path. All you need to know, end of story, shut up and enjoy the show.
Now, the interesting thing is how well this approach meshes with what Abbott and Costello are doing. Like the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Martin and Lewis, Laurel and Hardy, Hope and Crosby…like pretty much any established comedy act, they had very well-defined personas that remained consistent across all their movies, with the same quirks and same relationship to each other, even though they’re technically playing different characters in each one. It’s worth noting that the characters the duo is playing in the movie are not named Abbott and Costello (nor do they meet any member of the Frankenstein family, since Frankenstein isn’t the name of the Creature, as any joyless pedant will tell you*); but it’s still their names in the title, because they’re not really playing characters: they’re doing what they always do, in whatever context the story calls for. The monsters are now ready to do exactly the same.
The plot of the film is not complicated. Abbott and Costello are baggage handlers named Chick and Wilbur, and somebody’s shipped the remains of Count Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster to a Florida wax museum, so the crates fall into their hands and get the two bumbling porters embroiled in what turns out to be Dracula’s latest scheme. Well, actually they were already kind of embroiled in it, because it turns out Wilbur’s beautiful fiancee is also a mad scientist who’s studied Frankenstein’s notebooks, and she’s in league with Dracula. The vampire wants to use the Creature as muscle, but to do that he needs to give it a more pliable brain. Wilbur is possibly the dumbest, weakest-willed human being on the planet, which is exactly what Dracula wants from a henchman, so they gonna stick his brain inside that monster. Talbot is trying to stop it, but his condition makes that difficult, at best, so he’s dependent on the help of our hapless heroes. There’s also an insurance investigator trying to track down the missing monsters for the museum, just for good measure, and she’s also manipulating Wilbur. Very quickly the players all start ricocheting off each other at high speeds in an increasingly manic escalating farce, culminating in a showdown that leaves the three monsters apparently dead in the Atlantic Ocean. Not as absolute an onscreen death as we’ve seen in previous films, but a more final one: there would be no resurrection this time, not for any of them. Universal would make more monster movies over the next twenty years, and eventually the 21st century would see them resurrected in Van Helsing, Dracula Untold, and the Wolfman remake with Benicio Del Toro, but for their classic incarnations, this is it: the movie definitively closes the book on three of the greatest monsters in movie history, and that book stays closed.
Perhaps the most notable thing about this movie is the return of the O.G. Count Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi. Universal kept him very busy in the years since he first played the Count for them, and he did plenty of spook shows for other studios as well: a long succession of mad scientists, hypnotists, murderers, beast-men, even a recent turn as Frankenstein’s Monster, with one or two less famous bloodsuckers in the mix as well, and of course Universal had kept the Dracula business going with Dracula’s various offspring and with an ersatz replacement, but here, at the end of things, Bela dons the cape of the Big D once again. It’s appropriate, as Lugosi’s Dracula really started the Universal Monsters boom, and it works out well here because Bela could play the Count in his sleep.
Lon Jr. is similarly comfortable in his role at this point. Larry Talbot was always a character who suited the actor like a glove, and after playing him as the emotional centerpiece of four films, he knows how hit every note. Talbot hasn’t evolved as a character since House of Frankenstein, and here he’s still locked into the basic cycle of trying in vain to escape his fate, trying in vain to convince people of how dangerous the situation is, and then running amok when the change hits. It’s a ritualized performance now, but he’s still got it.
While Talbot’s character hasn’t changed, one thing has: for the first time in almost twenty years, it’s a Universal Monsters movie with no Jack Pierce makeup. Instead, the Creature and the Wolfman both get rubber prosthetics, something Pierce was never really comfortable with, and the result does not look as good. It was definitely a lot easier to put on and take off, though, which unquestionably improved the quality of life for both Lon Chaney and Glenn Strange. If you really wanted to, you could read a larger metaphor into this: these characters are no longer painstakingly handcrafted works of art, they’re something familiar-looking, comfortable, and ready for mass production.
We’re primarily focused on the werewolf, and how he evolves, but most of the discussion you can have around this movie doesn’t touch on the Wolfman. It still holds up as a great classic comedy, and stands as a milestone in Abbott and Costello’s careers. It set a template Universal would continue to explore, having the duo meet the Mummy and the Invisible Man soon after. It’s another short-lived moment of success in Bela Lugosi’s long slow slide into tragic obscurity. It’s an early high-water mark for high-concept genre mashups. And there are certainly worse ways to end a worn-out franchise. In the 90s, the Weinsteins were kicking around the idea of doing something similar with their various played-out horror franchises; having sucked all the marrow out of the bones of the Halloween, Hellraiser, and Children of the Corn movies, the idea of getting Kevin Smith to make Jay and Silent Bob Meet Pinhead was very much on the table for a while. Full disclosure: I would absolutely watch that movie. I’d watch it right now.
All that’s getting away from our primary point of focus, though. We’re here to talk about the werewolf, and here’s what you can say about him: this is a movie where Larry Talbot appears, and for the first time ever he ends the movie completely unchanged.
Once the Wolfman was a man with a father, a brother, women who loved him. He had talents, hobbies, a life. Over time, all of that is stripped from him. He’s died again and again, and again, and it never takes. He walks the earth like the Wandering Jew of European folklore, cursed to outlive everything and everyone, never able to settle down, and never able to end his pain. Despite the madcap comedy going on around him, he never stops looking sad and tired in this movie. Not until his other self comes out.
And there we leave him. Forever. This is what the werewolf is, and even now, seventy years later, it’s a persistent image. It supersedes everything that came before, and it influences almost everything that comes after. The werewolves of the sixties and seventies, in particular, are almost all cast in this mold. Before too long we get to Hammer Films’ one attempt at a werewolf movie, and we get Paul Naschy’s era-defining Waldemar Daninsky movies, all of which build directly on Larry Talbot’s foundation. The cursed and haunted outcast, the protagonist who tries to fight the other monsters with the monster inside himself, doomed to kill those he loves, or be killed by them instead…everything that comes next grows out of this soil, and silly as it is, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein plays the same crucial role House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula do: these movies boil the character down to the essence that can endure.
*Frankenstein is the rightful name of Frankenstein’s creation, his unacknowledged son. If the Monster were to choose to call himself by his father’s name, who could deny his right to it? Pedantry only gets you so far.
Brad Ellison Writes 