And so that’s how the fourth movie in Universal’s
Frankenstein saga opens. In complete contrast to those Universal executives,
the inhabitants of the village of Frankenstein aren’t the slightest bit pleased
with the outcome of the last film, especially as Bela Lugosi’s Ygor, presumably
shot dead, is now alive and well again. “They tried to hang him and that didn’t
work,” someone says in a desperate scriptwriter’s attempt to explain why he
doesn’t look any the worse for wear for the bullets dealt him by Basil Rathbone
at the end of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. Mind you, two burghers who appear in this
opening scene (Michael Mark and Lionel Belmore) are the ones who were killed by the monster at
Lugosi’s behest in the previous film and they don't seem any the worse for respectively having had a cart driven over them and having been bashed over the head only a short while ago. Continuity was never Universal’s strong
point.
Universal’s Castle Frankenstein was a little bit like Jason
Voorhees of FRIDAY THE 13TH fame, having a completely different look from
film to film and surviving more or less intact despite having been burned /
blown up / flooded etc at the end of the last one. This time it gets destroyed
via some pretty impressive model work early on, allowing the release of the
monster from the sulphur pit it was knocked into by Basil Rathbone. “The
sulphur was good for you!” says Bela as the scriptwriter again manfully tries
to explain why the monster hasn’t just suffocated beneath all that eggy
smelling rock. It has however caused him to become rather less expressive, have
a different body shape, and look altogether more like Lon Chaney Jr than Boris
Karloff, but then that’s because he is. Helped out of the cave by Ygor and
subjected to rejuvenating lightning in one of the film’s most impressive scenes,
the two of them are soon off to find Frankenstein’s other son Ludwig, played by
baggy of eye and limited of expression Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who doesn’t look
happy to be in this film at all. He runs the Frankenstein Institute for
Diseases of the Mind, which seems to require him to have an old dungeon under
his house equipped with prison cells and ‘soporific gas’, presumably in case
his patients get a bit overactive. Sir Cedric’s assistant is Lionel Atwill who
unlike his co-star looks as if he’s having his usual whale of a time as one
of the true villains of the piece, the other being (of course) Mr Lugosi. Ludwig
gets visited by the ghost of his father (Hardwicke again) in one of the series’
few nods to the supernatural before everything went mental later on with the
monster rallies. Father Frankenstein tells junior that all the monster needs is
a new brain so why doesn’t he get on and sort it out? Planning to use the brain
of a colleague killed by the monster everything goes predictably wrong when
Atwill arranges for Ygor’s brain to be substituted instead. The monster awakens
and goes blind. Ludwig says some rubbish about the incompatibility of blood
types causing trouble getting oxygen to the neurones but we all know it’s that
poor writer being flogged by the execs to get the script finished in under 24
hours again so we forgive him. The house goes on fire and Evelyn Ankers and
Ralph Bellamy get to walk towards the sunrise as everyone interesting is now
dead and besides they have to fulfil some sort of function as the nominal hero
and heroine.
THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN isn’t bad. It’s a big comedown
after Rowland V Lee’s predecessor but it’s not a disaster. Lugosi and Atwill
keep things interesting from the acting point of view and director Erle C
Kenton manages a few nice shots (the lightning bolts hitting the monster, some
nice framing of Lugosi in the propped open lid of a grand piano) in amongst
what looks like a very rushed job. Clocking in at 68 minutes this breezy fourth
entry was a sign of the way things were about to go very quickly indeed as more
and more monsters were delivered by the studio at a vastly increased rate over
the next couple of years.
This movie, for me, was spoilt by the lack of a Karloff monster.
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