SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939)

“One does not easily forget, Herr Baron, an arm torn out by the roots."

Following the takeover of Universal by investors from the Standard Capital Corporation on April 2^nd 1936, the owners at New Universal struggled like their predecessors to turn a profit. That year they made a loss of almost $2m and still lost over $1m in 1937. This downturn in fortune was soon reversed though in 1938 when a New York theatre owner discovered a box office bonanza in reviving Universal’s two most famous properties Dracula and Frankenstein for a one-week engagement. At least Cliff Work, the studio’s new head of production, had the insight to see that profit could be made once more from the House of Horror. He instigated Son of Frankenstein later that year and kick-started what became the second cycle of Universal monster movies, a gold-rush of sequels featuring all of their back catalogue of famous figureheads. For a while, bust would again turn to boom. Horror was back in business.

Son of Frankenstein lacked the close supervision of all elements by director James Whale that had made the earlier two films such successes. He and star Boris Karloff had both been prescient enough to see the cheapjack level that the series would eventually descend to and only by having a great deal of control would Whale agree to make The Bride. By the time the second sequel went into production, the studio’s desire to simply release product as quickly as possible to capitalise on this possible new wave meant that artistry was of less importance than speedy workmanship to a deadline. 

By now, Whale was out of favour at the studio for whom he’d made so much money in the past. Despite being key to their first lucrative horror wave with the Frankenstein franchise and The Invisible Man (which would become a belated money-spinner series of its own), he’d had a hit with a genre closer to his sensibility in 1936’s Showboat and even given Universal a successful war picture with the All Quiet on the Western Front sequel The Road Back. His justifiably demanding artistry caused conflict though with employers and after the studio softened the latter without his permission to avoid offending German audiences, he opted for a freelance contract with them, retiring comfortably after only a handful of other films until his untimely suicide in his own swimming pool in 1957.

Whale’s artistry was replaced by studio contract director Rowland V Lee as both director and producer in what turned out to be a far more potent choice than expected. Stephen Jacobs detailed how aside from effective direction, behind the scenes he was able to demand the budget be upped from a proposed $250,000 (actually less than the original cost) to double that, thus embarking with a fighting chance of quality from the start.

Karloff was retained, re-teaming him with Lee with whom he’d worked on 1931’s The Guilty Generation, but this would be his last time as the Monster. With such haste in its gestation, it’s remarkable that Son holds up as well as it does, which is principally due to the performances, both leading and supporting. Not only does Karloff still manage to earn sympathy in a return to mute status after his speaking Monster in Bride - an aspect he always felt had detracted from his pathos -  but Universal’s loss of another key player, Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein, was covered with great aplomb by Basil Rathbone. Clive had sadly died in June 1937 from tuberculosis, possibly exacerbated by his ruinous alcohol addiction.

Born in 1892 in Johannesburg, South Africa as the middle child of five to British parents, a mining engineer father and a violinist mother, by the age of three Philip St John Basil Rathbone’s life was already the stuff of adventure movies. The family was forced to flee the country when Rathbone’s father was accused by the Boers of being a British spy in the inflamed period leading to the Boer War. Like many well-meaning sons of well-meaning fathers, Rathbone began his professional life in insurance to please his old man before taking to the stage in Sir Frank Benson’s company, which took him to America and the Savoy Theatre in London’s West End. WWI provided him with a distinguished services career that earned him a Military Cross.

By 1938, Rathbone’s film credits cornered the market in a type of suave English villainy that still seems to entrance Hollywood casting directors to this day. His lofty bearing had graced such illustrious costume dramas as the Errol Flynn vehicles Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood in which he played Sir Guy of Gisborne. Additional lustre to his name were the two Supporting Actor Academy Award nominations he’d gained for Romeo and Juliet (1936) and If I were King in 1938. Best known to film fans ultimately as the title role (and for many the definitive interpretation) in Fox’s Sherlock Holmes series, he was actually waiting to start work on the first, The Hound of the Baskervilles, once Son of Frankenstein was wrapped. His pedigree explains why Karloff was to receive second billing to him – and under his full name now rather than simply Karloff. Rathbone had never made a horror film before and despite later disparaging this one, he gives Baron Wolf Von Frankenstein a shaded and developing character as the film goes on.

The task of writing this all-important revival was given to Wyllis (credited as Willis ) Cooper, a busy radio script writer who had made his name creating and directing the famously grisly radio horror series Lights Out for NBC. Having seen The Bride of Frankenstein first, he’d realised there was no sensible way to recast Clive’s performance so instead he focused the plot around a son, Wolf Frankenstein, whose inheritance would be inescapably more than the title and property of his notorious father. The original title was announced as After Frankenstein which had the merit of being a little more subtle than the final choice. Ultimately, Cooper’s script was treated by Lee as a blueprint rather than a set text. The director was prone to rewriting on-set which translated into extra energy of performances albeit with the accompanying unsettling of nerves from actors struggling with last-minute changes.

The supporting performances are as vital to the success of Son as the lead actors. Lionel Atwill, highly-regarded as an urbane character himself, is a memorably intrepid Inspector Krogh - later spoofed with wickedly funny accuracy by Kenneth Mars in 1974’s Young Frankenstein. I believe the secret weapon of the movie though is Bela Lugosi’s broken-necked servant Ygor, pulling off a supporting performance of rare and surprisingly poignant effect.

The former studio stable-mate of Karloff had seen his name lose its sparkle over the years since Dracula in 1931, a fatal turn of events in a hard industry where a perceived success image can be as important off-screen as on. Ironically, by mostly clinging to a kind of frosty imperious auto-pilot in his acting style that always recalled his most famous part as the Count, he had failed to capitalise on where else that name value could have taken him. Nothing would have become him beyond Dracula more than the leaving of it – behind. He needed the money though and with his finances always in a parlous state, had to take what he could get including vampire-related personal appearances. Such was his lack of bargaining power that Universal reduced his salary by 50% to just $500 a week and to attempt a dirty trick of cost-cutting even further by having all his scenes filmed in one week. Happily, director Lee once more proved a champion by in turn pulling the fast one of contriving Lugosi’s services to be needed across the entire shooting schedule.

However, there were glimmers of the real actor beneath the endless regurgitations of caped, glowering faux-bloodsuckers and scientists. As the downtrodden sailor of Phantom Ship and here as the crippled peasant Ygor, somehow playing blue-collar victims released a humanity and subtlety within Lugosi that was far more touching than the hardened regal shell of his villains. Lee gave Lugosi free reign to develop Ygor acknowledging “the interpretation he gave us was imaginative, and totally unexpected”. Perhaps also it was dawning on him that he needed more humility in life than the damaging high-handedness with which he would react to the offered roles he considered beneath him. He regularly citing his previous fame as a Hungarian matinee idol, telling the pre-TV journalist Ed Sullivan: ‘I played every type of role in Budapest, but here they only think I can scare children.’

Ygor was not present in Cooper’s initial drafts of the script. Lugosi was actually first considered for the Inspector role, named Neumüller originally, before Lee transferred him to henchman duties. Grinning with sickening pleasure through mangled teeth and a rough beard of yak hair courtesy of Jack Pierce and sporting a raised frozen right shoulder, Lugosi’s eyes burn into audiences and his village accusers. Ygor’s broken neck is the result of a failed lynch mob that took eight men to hang him, all of whom he has remembered for a future day of reckoning. Lugosi had fun in the part, and to his credit allows the facial disguise to dampen the temptation for histrionics, rendering him as pathetic as the Monster, but saving his most telling means of expression for a pleasing delicacy of pointed line delivery. His is the first face we see in the film, fleetingly surveying proceedings from the window of Castle Frankenstein.

One of the major themes of Son of Frankenstein, that of manifest familial destiny, emerges almost immediately. The old town of Frankenstein’s councillors led by the Burgomeister (Lawrence Grant) hotly debate the imminent arrival of Baron Wolf Von Frankenstein who will take over his infamous father’s castle. Inspector Krogh coolly looks on while the Burghers are forced to accept their leader’s decision to hand over to the son what may be the means of reliving the nightmare caused by his father.  "The old Baron Frankenstein gave me this chest of papers to deliver to his son, and deliver it I shall."

We switch to the Frankenstein family on the incoming train, and what a beguilingly wholesome and modern family they are to plunge into this touchy time-warp. Rathbone’s Wolf and his wife Elsa (Josephine Hutchinson) are clearly a loving couple with a healthy sense of humour. “Not much like America is it?” remarks Wolf as the rainy bleak landscape goes by. In tow is their personable four year-old son Peter (Donnie Dunagan), a ringleted male Shirley Temple of cheeky insouciance. They are met by a huge turn-out of the villagers yet soon disabused of any pretence to being welcomed: “We come to meet you, not to greet you”, says the Burgomeister, bluntly fulfilling his duty of delivering the inheritance chest to Wolf and blocking their new neighbour’s attempt to ameliorate his father’s reputation.

The new Baron’s innate confidence brushes off this hostile reception. Greeted better by their staff, butler Benson and housekeeper Amelia (Edgar Norton and Emma Dunn) he even sees the potential medieval charm in their cavernous new home of Castle Frankenstein. What we observe is a marvellously spooky Expressionist set courtesy of Supervising Art Director Jack Otterson, whose decorative design work adorned parts of the Empire State Building and would go on to include other universal horror films and the Sherlock Holmes sequels. There’s a subtle sense of unease in the off-kilter shadows thrown across the sparse furnishings. Look out as well for the carved wild boar heads looming over either side of the family dining table as they eat. If that doesn’t hint at impending danger, Amelia decodes the strange bed positions with the famous omen: “If the house is filled with dread, place the beds at heat-to-head”.

It is when Wolf reads the old Baron’s letter bequeathing his research that we see Rathbone’s skilful performance begin to change shade. His breezy bonhomie and the naïve candle held for his father’s innocence darkens as he becomes seduced by the forbidden fruit of knowledge tantalisingly dangled before him. Baron Henry was indeed guilty of the blasphemous arrogance that revived uncontrollable life from the dead, misunderstood, vulnerable then hounded into homicidal rage – and offers his son the drug-dealer’s hook that now Wolf has the means to improve daddy’s design:

“If you, like me, burn with the irresistible desire to penetrate the unknown, carry on. The path is cruel and torturous, carry on. I put secret after truth, you will be hated, blasphemed and condemned. You have inherited the fortune of the Frankensteins. I trust you will not inherit their fate.”

Surely this well-balanced, compassionate chap would reject such a ghastly irresponsible inheritance? But he is a Frankenstein and that perverse reverse psychology calls to him down the blood-line. No-one leaves this family business. His fate, and once again that of the townsfolk, is sealed.

As if listening in, Inspector Krogh makes a timely appearance, offsetting the earlier coldness of the local councillors with a decent man’s sincere desire to be of assistance after warning Wolf that his family is in danger of villager vigilantism if they ever suspect him of continuing his father’s work. Krogh admirably controls any desire for retribution he has, considering the Monster ripped off his arm: “"One does not easily forget, Herr Baron, an arm torn out by the roots.".  He also informs Wolf of a series of unexplained murders whereby the victims’ hearts burst and all featured discolouration at the brain base. Even this doesn’t perturb the Baron. “Why should we fear anything?” he blithely asks his wife in private.

We know only too well how powerful the genetic tractor beam is pulling Wolf to his father’s laboratory, hidden away on a hill-top next to a splendid indoor sulphurous pit of mud bubbling away. Here, Ygor makes his presence known and delivers a beautifully judged speech recounting his punishment at the hands of the townsfolk for body-snatching:

“…They broke my neck. They said I was dead. Then they cut me down. They threw me in here, long ago. They wouldn't bury me in holy place like churchyard. Because I stole bodies...they said. So, Ygor is dead!...Nobody can mend Ygor's neck. It's alright.”

The past pain capped by the resignation in that final line is heart-breaking and probably represents the finest moments of Lugosi’s film work. Like Michael Caine’s Peachy Carnahan at the end of The Man Who Would be King, he shows us a rogue spirit brutalised into a touching, seemingly broken humility.

Ygor’s competitor for the violins though is the Monster, who shocks Wolf with his belated appearance lying injured on a slab. Ygor soothes the encounter by perversely bridging a thematic connection between Wolf and the Monster as the unlikeliest of brothers. Henry is in a real sense father to them both, giving a second life to the Monster as much as the first to his biological son. Ygor extends the notion in pointing out the bizarre actual co-creator of the Monster: “His mother was lightning” – ironic in that the same natural life-force that revived him has also struck him into near catatonia since. Since they share the same paternity Wolf is arguably now his brother’s keeper, a legacy burden of responsibility that locks him into a fated path as an even more ‘modern Prometheus’ than the old Baron of Shelley’s novel. To emphasise his determination, he corrects the villager’s disrespectful burial plate on Henry’s coffin from ‘Maker of Monsters’ to ‘Maker of MEN’.

Such is Wolf’s scientific modernity that for the first time we understand the superhuman intricacies within the Monster: blood-cells that battle each other as separate entities and a heart-rate of over 250 beats per minute - even more impressive when we discover this is in spite of two bullets being lodged there.  Despite Wolf’s new-fangled education, the secret of the Monster’s unearthly physicality seem to be the nebulous-sounding “cosmic rays” which probably aren’t part of a medical student’s syllabus.

The locals don’t need to be in the laboratory to sense that a slumbering beast of infernal danger has been awoken. Ygor is interrogated by Krogh and the committee about what may be going on at the castle. He gloats at the dark absurdity behind their threatened re-hanging of him for non-compliance. As if the Grim Reaper operates as his defence counsel, he knows what rough justice is befalling each of his original executors : “They die dead. I die alive!” The theme of death is ever-present. Just as persistent on the case is the good Inspector, whose detective instincts are further heightened when young Peter mentions being visited in his room by a giant.

Before Krogh can act on his hunches, we witness a touching sequence where the newly-revived Monster sees himself in the mirror. Karloff’s gentle humanity characteristically comes through the elaborate make-up and sheepskin-bedecked costume. Though the actor is somewhat more well-fed than the lean and hungry actor of first inhabiting the role, there is real poignancy in his child-like confusion and fear at seeing his own monstrous reflection. Being rendered mute again makes his inability to communicate that vulnerability even more touching.

The Monster’s step-brother however has lost touch with his own humanity. Wolf is now fully seduced by the dark side, his natural confidence inflated into omnipotence by the same God Complex fatally aroused within his father. He will bend the laws of nature and others to his will: “My problem is how to make Ygor obey me” he muses, a Machiavellan sentiment unrecognisable from the benign chap we saw at the start.

As the villagers gather outside the castle for the obligatory storming, we focus on a marvellous scene of actorly duelling between Atwill and Rathbone as Krogh attempts to crack Wolf’s mask of innocence over a darts match. The darts serve as little rapiers of venom exchanged by each combatant, amplified by their thrust and parry of verbal attack and defence. Atwill delivers his blows with steely composure to Rathbone, who deflects them with a suitable mounting nerviness. Admittedly this scene is hard to watch without referencing the hilarious parody version in the aforementioned Young Frankenstein where Kenneth Mars and Gene Wilder take the situation to gleefully inventive sight-gag levels.

Meanwhile, Ygor has been using the Monster as a weapon of his own.  Far from the resigned victim figure he appears, he has been a shadowy assassin of retribution, aiming the Creature at those committee members who tried to hang him and adding the interfering Benson to the death-toll.

Even that most innocent of all protagonists, the Monster, loses control to ruthless desire, much like his brother. When Ygor is shot dead by Wolf, the Monster’s grief is palpable yet the director wisely allows time for a disturbing transformation inside him as that mourning is expertly morphed by Karloff into snarling, homicidal intent hell-bent on revenge.  He wrecks the Frankenstein family laboratory before the spell of evil breaks over Wolf just in time and he incongruously Tarzan-swings to knock the Monster into the ugly sulphur-pit.

The epilogue is so rushed as to be unintentionally funny; Wolf and his family leave by train but not before bequeathing the Frankenstein estate to the villagers. The almost unseemly haste suggests they daren’t linger in front of this mob. 

The same unseemly speed was applied off-screen to the completion of the film. Production on Son of Frankenstein over-ran until the 4^th January 1939 which meant a frantic post-production period. Lee managed the astounding feat of readying the film for a preview two days later – which meant it was able to honour the set release date of the ominous-sounding Friday the 13th of that month. Sadly, one of the unfortunate casualties of necessary cuts for timing was the small villager role played by Dwight Frye who had struggled to capitalise on his acting association with the earlier Dracula and Frankenstein.

Son of Frankenstein single-handedly put Universal back into profit, confirming that there was lucrative life left in the reactivated corpse of the horror film and enabled the studio to confidently put more franchise sequels into production. Although Karloff and Lugosi would stay with the Frankenstein franchise in varying roles and mixed success, during the filming of Son, Karloff’s wife Dorothy produced another legacy of their own in the form of their first child Sara born on Karloff’s own 51st birthday of Wednesday 23rd November...