Films: 1940s
(1943) Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
Director: Ryan William Neill
Release: 1943
Curt Siodmak delivers another barely comprehensible script for Universal, and director Ryan William Neill does what he can to make up for the narrative lack of cohesion by filling the screen with elaborate shadows and expressionist lighting.
Lon Chaney, Jr. returns as Lawrence Stewart Talbot. Dead four years since "The Wolf Man," Talbot has apparently only been waiting for someone to lift his coffin lid. He's freed from the Talbot tomb by two gold-seeking grave robbers. As soon as the moonlight touches Talbot's skin, he's awake and angry.
Soon, he ends up in the village of Cardiff and is brought back to strength by Dr. Frank Mannering (Patrick Knowles, who played a previous Frank in "The Wolf Man," as Talbot's gamekeeper). Talbot's story creates a mystery in Cardiff, since the constable in his home village maintains the man is dead.
Talbot spends most of the film moaning for death and fleeing the people who want to stop his suicide quest. The despair of "The Wolf Man" transforms into outright self-loathing in "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man." Neill does little to restrain Cheney, and what results is an hour of Talbot throwing a tantrum at everyone he meets, minus Maria Ouspenska's graceful Maleva, the gypsy woman who got Talbot into all this trouble in the first place.
Maleva leads Talbot to Vasaria, where she knows of the Frankenstein family. By her logic, only the dark science of the Frankenstein family could successfully end Talbot's life - now that it is clear silver won't keep him dead.
The Frankenstein family, however, has dwindled to a single lovely baroness (Ilona Massey as Elsa), and she wants little to do with the neurotic and semi-enraged Talbot (other than inexplicably appearing to find his aggressive, puffy, baggy mess attractive).
The moon returns, the werewolf breaks free, and a village maiden is killed. The Wolf Man is pursued to the ruins of Frankenstein castle and falls through a burned-out floor into the remains of Frankenstein's laboratory. It is also the de facto tomb of the Monster.
When Talbot awakes he breaks the Monster free and Siodmak's script takes another turn for the worse as Talbot returns to town and acts out at the Festival of New Wine (featuring an out-of-place musical sequence).
The film manages to drift for another quarter hour as Mannering catches up with Talbot and promises the village to dismantle the monster. The script lurches along, Siodmak is unable to find any momentum in this hiccuping string of misshaped motivations.
Eventually, and without much in the way of development, Mannering loses his mind and decides he must drain Talbot of energy and juice the monster up to full capacity, hoping to witness the upper limits of Frankenstein built.
Elsa manages to short-fuse the whole operation as the village barkeep produces heavy ordinance (giant bundles of dynamite) and detonates the dam above Castle Frankenstein. One would think he accidentally wipes out Vasaria by unleashing a fairly massive looking river, but the credits roll and "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" is mercifully over.
It's a mess, but not without some inherently good material. The first 30 minutes are effective, especially the grave robbing sequence (although this is mostly a product of R.A. Gaussman's sets). There is some hint at a mother-son relationship between Maleva and Talbot, which creates an interesting counterpoint to the original father-son dynamic of "The Wolf Man," but Siodmak can't get out of his own way. He writes Maleva out of the story, for all intents and purposes, almost as soon as they arrive in Vasaria.
There is also a sorely neglected subtext regarding the two monsters. Frankenstein's Monster wants to live, Talbot wants to die. Those two innate motives could have made the third act of "Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man" rich with meaning, but instead of providing any focus Siodmak spends precious minutes in taverns and pointless close-ups of whirling machinery in the lab. The final confrontation has nothing to with life and death, but merely a kind of spectacle in which the monsters trash the lab until the water sweeps them away.
Makeup takes a positive step forward in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." The Wolf Man transformations are more ambitious and fluidly executed than those of just two years before. There are two gorgeous sequences (in the hospital and in the woods) which showcase cinematographer George Robinson's and Special Effects Director John Fulton's grasp of the technique.
On the other hand, Bela Lugosi is an unfortunate choice for the monster. His lips and mouth certainly convey menace, but the towering skeletal magnificence of Karloff is lost in the 61-year-old actors sagging and trembling face. Gone are the austere and funereal features of Lugosi's Dracula. He seems dismal and dumpy, here.
Universal wanted to sew its monster films together, but writers like Siodmak failed to create an overarching logic. "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" verges on the self-conscious and then fails to deliver its promised confrontation with enough screen time and gravity to justify the hour of mostly garbage that preceded it.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
