Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Film: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
Stars: Lon Chaney, Jr., Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles, Lionel Atwill, Bela Lugosi, Maria Ouspenskaya
Director: Roy William Neill
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

The Frankenstein movies might be my favorite franchise of the Universal Monsters (I also love Creature from the Black Lagoon, but haven't gotten to a lot of the sequels), but weirdly I skipped this movie the last time we did an October Horror Month on the blog, heading right into House of Frankenstein, the sixth movie in the series.  As a result, we're going to backtrack a little bit before we go forward (this will not be the final appearance of Frankenstein before our season is over), moving into a story that began the 1940's real cache of teaming up the monsters from multiple different pictures, something that would continue for the bad (some of the mid-1940's sequels left something to be desired) and the glorious (the genius Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, out-and-out the best film in the whole Universal canon).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, though it involves Frankenstein, really centers on the Wolf Man, who at this point had not had another sequel to the launch of the franchise in 1941.  The movie takes place a few years after that film, with Larry Talbot (Chaney) dead, and surrounded by wolfsbane, which is keeping him so.  When grave robbers take his body out, he returns, and of course there's a full moon, so he kills these men & starts terrorizing the countryside.  The Wolf Man knows what he's doing is wrong, and tries to stop himself by finding a cure, seeking out the gypsy woman Maleva (Ouspenskaya) who knows of Larry's curse, as her son Bela made him a werewolf.  She sends him to the home of Ludwig Frankenstein, whom she thinks might be able to help him, and though he's dead he comes across his monster (Lugosi), who is then unleashed & causes havoc upon the village, with the aid of another curious young doctor (Knowles) who is also treating Larry, and on the night of a full moon, both monsters are unleashed quickly.  The two face off in the final moments of the film, while a flood comes to rush & destroy the Frankenstein Castle, presumably sweeping them away to their death (but we, of course, know better).

The Frankenstein sequels, like all of the Universal movies, can be watched out-of-order without issue-they're isolated tales, and the plot is pretty easy to follow even if you watch them out-of-sequence.  However, they are all the same spectacular story, which makes Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man so odd because of the previous casting decisions.  Chaney, for example, plays Larry Talbot here, but he'd also just played the Monster in Ghost of Frankenstein (at one point Universal considered putting Chaney, the film's biggest star at the time, into both roles but Chaney refused considering the demands on him in terms of the makeup chair), so the Frankenstein role is one he had just played in the previous film.  Even stranger is that Bela Lugosi was also in that film, playing Igor, and at the end of the film Frankenstein's brain is switched with Igor's but his face was not so now he looks like the previous film's Igor as Frankenstein.  And even more bizarre, Lugosi is also in The Wolf Man, playing the role of Bela, so between these three films in the franchise, Lugosi is playing three different parts (and since in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein Lugosi is brought back in the form of Dracula, four characters in the original Universal Monster multiverse are played by Bela Lugosi).

If you found that paragraph geekily delightful, then you'll probably like this movie, which I did.  Neither Chaney nor Lugosi are as good of actors as Boris Karloff, but this is Chaney's best character in the canon, and the script isn't too demanding on his acting abilities.  The same is true for Lugosi (wasted as the monster), but the script hums, and there's a perverse pleasure in seeing the Universal Monsters' lives start to be interwoven into the same narrative.  It might not be masterful moviemaking, but it's fun & quick & hit the right balance between camp & thrills.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, Werewolf of London, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Mummy's Tomb, The House of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Masque of the Red Death