Son Of Frankenstein

Heir Gloom

Son Of Frankenstein
USA 1939 Directed by Rowland V. Lee
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilerage here.

So this next review of my rewatch of the classic Universal Monsters movies is another of my favourites... and it’s probably not hard for most people to see why. This is easily the best looking black and white movie of the 1930s that I’ve seen and the latest Blu Ray set from Universal certainly shows off the crisp monotone photography to its advantage. I’ll get back to the look of the film in a minute.

Son Of Frankenstein starts off a little differently to how I remembered it, with an opening sequence that highlights Bela Lugosi in the role of the convicted and hung murderer Ygor... who returned to life after being pronounced dead by the coroner some years before. This is followed by a town meeting scene which, if it does anything other than look nice, is all about reminding the audience just who Frankenstein and his creation were. We then cut to Basil Rathbone as the titular character, Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, his wife Elsa (played by Josephine Hutchinson) and his young son Peter (Donnie Dunagan), on a sleeping car train bound for the town where Wolf’s father did his infamous work. For some reason, the village is now called Frankenstein itself which, as we are aware from the mood of the villagers in the earlier part of the film, does nothing good for the tourist trade. This sequence, as they rumble into ‘Banhof Frankenstein’ shows off just how good the dialogue writing is here. Wolf is talking to Elsa about his father’s accursed legacy and he just gets up to the bit where he is about to say the family name...

“... nine out of ten people call that misshapen creature of my father’s experiments...”

when the railway porter shouts out “Frankenstein! Frankenstein!” to announce the stop. It’s a wonderful piece of early dialogue juxtaposition, taking two pieces of dialogue of differing intent and then rubbing them together to push the meaning of the first. It also nicely underlines the mistake of the commonly held assumption that the monster itself is called Frankenstein when, clearly, it is not.

Now lets talk about Rathbone here for a minute because he was at a turning point in his career. He did, however, detest appearing in horror movies although he would appear opposite Boris Karloff again in Jacques Tourneur’s 1963 AIP Edgar Allan Poe cycle entry, The Comedy Of Terrors, of course. His lack of respect of the horror genre might explain why this one is a little bit ‘all over the place’ in certain scenes he performs here but it’s easy to watch and a lot of fun too. I’ve always had a soft spot for Rathbone and you have to remember that this was only a year after he had played the villanous Sir Guy of Gisbourne opposite Errol Flynn in the definitive Robin Hood  movie, The Adventures Of Robin Hood. His very next film after Son Of Frankenstein and released in the same year would be the one which was the first time he played the role which he is probably best well known for to this day... playing Sherlock Holmes opposite Nigel Bruce (as Doctor Watson) in the first of a long series of films and, also, a large number of radio shows starring the pair too.

He is, of course, ably supported in this by some great Universal regulars such as Boris Karloff, reprising his role as the Frankenstein monster. Now, despite the monster being able to speak in the last installment, The Bride Of Frankenstein (reviewed here), here he is once more rendered mute with no real explanation as to why. I love what he’s wearing in this too... instead of the dark jacket he’s wearing what can only be described as a furry tank top and it looks great. This is my favourite fashion look for the Frankenstein monster, for sure. This was the third and final time Karloff would play the role of Frankenstein’s creation but not his final role in a classic Universal Frankenstein movie, as you will see in an upcoming review. His scene with Rathbone as he discovers himself reflected in a mirror is quite long but expertly done as we see the monster pantomime various emotional states while he tries to come to terms with his hideous looks. This is pure cinema although, it has to be said, that when we have assassinations performed by the creature who then stages things to look like an accident with some considered thought, he does at times become the very thing that Karloff was afraid he would become with more exposure in a series of films... a professional killing machine.

Then we have Lionel Atwill, who appears in a number of these Universal monster movies but whose career was ruined just a few years later due to a scandalous sex orgy and rape party which took place at his home. Although he’s going to appear in a few of the films I will be reviewing after this, he died of lung cancer only seven years after Son Of Frankenstein was released. Of course, in this he plays the wonderfully Germanic Inspector Kogh, the one armed police inspector who is trying to find out who is doing all the killings in the village (funny how all the people who died are the same people who condemned Ygor to death). Even without the one armed police inspector in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein being based on him, his handicapped shenanigans in this do often border on the comical... especially when he plays Wolf at darts and sticks them all into his arm to store them as he is taking his turn.

By the way, when did it become normal to have only three darts to throw per player? Not before 1939 I guess because here they are playing with five a piece. The reason for Kogh's handicap however, is far from comical. His history goes that, when he was a young toddler, the Frankenstein monster was busy terrifying the villagers and he ‘tore his arm out by the root.’ Of course, once this information and disability is introduced, you just know it’s going to come back and be revisited on him again and, sure enough, in his final confrontation with the Frankenstein monster in the film, his artificial limb is torn from him by the monster, who tries to use it as a club to keep everybody back.

The basic plot of this is of Wolf trying to restore the long surviving monster in his father’s laboratory while trying to ignore the obvious that Ygor is using him as a killing machine while warding off the questions of the inspector... until he is finally threatened himself and after shooting Ygor dead with three bullets to the chest (although this is not enough of a mortal injury to prevent Lugosi reprising his role through the course of the next Frankenstein movie). He then finds himself trying to rescue his son who the monster has stolen from him in revenge for the killing, ready to throw him into the pit of sulphur which the laboratory was somehow built over. And, again, once you know there’s a pit of sulphur under the lab, it’s no prizes for guessing just how the creature will meet its supposed end in this film, after a bit of swashbuckling action from Rathbone saves the day when he swings from a winch and knocks Karloff into the pit. Then we watch a not so great dummy of the monster sink below the bubbling surface.

But enough of the story... it’s the look of the film which is where the strength of the picture lays. This is the Frankenstein film where the set design and lighting go ‘the full Caligari’ with amazing twisted geometry and dark, distorted blacks which reflect straight back to the German Expressionist form of cinema from which they derive, as fleeing film crews deserted Nazi Germany and pitched up into Hollywoodland. Just amazing angles and things that sit strangely within the beautiful, slanted compositions such as, for example, chairs with amazingly tall backs that only a giant would truly be able to appreciate. These are further highlighted by some beautiful shadow work. You know that scene at the start of the bar fight in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, where Spielberg emphasises people by having their shadows arrive first... well that style was always straight out of the 1920s/30s where that kind of emphasis on the look was common.

For example, there’s a wonderful moment where Rathbone follows Lugosi into a kind of tomb-like approach to the laboratory. Rathbone’s silhouette, completely black, is framed perfectly in the doorway at the centre of the shot with his shadow cast down below him and into the laps of the audience at the foreground of the shot... then Lugosi lights a torch on the wall which instantly allows Rathbone’s full figure to materialise out of the silhouette, while still maintaining the shadow... expert stuff. Another shot where Rathbone’s shadow precedes him up a ladder, through a hatch in the floor before Rathbone follows it up into the shot, is also mesmerising. And even the shadow of a ladder that Rathbone descends from in one scene, has a twisted rung accenting the strange and angular set design. Like I said, it’s one of the best looking and best lit movies of the 1930s you are ever likely to see.

There’s also an interesting addition to the Frankenstein legend in this one. Wolf’s research reveals that, unknown to his father, it wasn’t just the lightning he summoned into the creature which gave life to the creation that Karloff so brilliantly plays on screen. It was, in fact, according to this iteration of Shelley’s creation... cosmic rays. These had already been known about when Victor Hess discovered them in 1912 and my guess is they were still fresh in people’s minds since Hess had won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery only three years before this picture was released. So that’s kind of interesting I think (and yes, I had to look that up when the words were uttered on screen... I had no idea as my first exposure to the term myself was as a kid in a reprint of the first issue of Fantastic Four from 1961).

I’d better mention the music too, while I’m here. This was the first of the classic Universal horrors to feature the music of Frank Skinner (who was often paired with Hans Salter in later movies in the various monster series). It’s a classic score and the one which, despite the strength and influence of Franz Waxman’s score for the previous Frankenstein film, ended up becoming the classic, ‘brand sound’ for the Universal monster movies that followed it. Lots of this was recycled into other horror films by the company over the years and it became quite evocative of a certain kind of genre package, especially after the various films aired on television in the late 1950s when it gathered a lot of recognition and a large following with film music fans. The montage sequence where Wolf cures the ailing monster is almost as splendid as Waxman’s creation music from The Bride Of Frankenstein and the score is even used, in this film, in a metatextual manner in two scenes. In those scenes, Ygor is seen playing a bizarre looking kind of flute/horn and the tune he plays is... Skinner’s main monster theme to the movie. So, again, a nice touch and, perhaps, somewhat ahead of its time.

And there you have it. Not much more to say about Son Of Frankenstein other than... it’s an absolutely brilliant film and worth the time of any true lover of cinema to sit down and study. I can’t over emphasise the sheer spectacle of the mise en scène in this movie... it’s absolutely gorgeous and there’s absolutely no way you can go wrong with a film of this calibre. The last great Frankenstein movie... not the last fun or watchable one, for sure but, in terms of greatness, this one was the absolute peak of perfection for the Universal Horror series and the success of it convinced the company to resurrect its now, almost retired, monsters for a huge amount of sequels throughout the 1940s... all of which I hope to review for you on here some time soon. If you are any fan of not just horror movies but the art of cinema in general then, this one is simply not something you’d want to miss out on. So good.

Metropolis (1927 - 2010)

Helm’s Deep

Metropolis 1927 Germany

Directed by Fritz Lang

Eureka: The Masters Of Cinema Region 2

Spoilers:

Yeah, they’re here...

if you’ve never actually seen this movie.

“There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.”

Maria, Metropolis

I don’t even know where to start! This is going to be a tough one to write methinks.

I mean, how daunting is it to force oneself to review a movie that is considered by many to be the pinnacle of artistic success in motion pictures for the 20th Century? Especially when it has such a convoluted path to it’s present incarnation... a version which I never thought would ever happen in my lifetime. One of the true holy grails of modern film miracles which gobsmacked the film going populous only last year when... but I’m getting ahead of myself already here.

Another reason why this film is such a problem for me is that... my personal response to Metropolis has not always been that good either, at various times throughout its ever changing incarnations. So I really need to also come to terms with my own feelings about the movie as I write this. If it’s anything like my normal process, I might discover new things about myself as I type and my brain starts sorting things out for me.

Okay.... so where does Metropolis come from, other than from the mind of Fritz Lang and his wife? It’s been nearly three decades since I read anything about the film or about German Expressionism but this is what I remember...

Like a lot of countries in the early days of cinema, Germany was suffering from having way too many American motion pictures monopolising the cinemas and holding films produced in other countries at bay in a weird, creative stranglehold... and to be brutally honest, nothing has changed to this day, all countries including my own still suffer from having 95% or so American movies playing on our cinema screens at the exclusion of almost any other country's works. Most countries couldn’t find anything they could do about it but Germany was smarter. They formed an artistic movement called German Expressionism and my understanding of it is that they did wilfully create it (a bit like The Monkees were a group formed for a show) as opposed to it springing up naturally. The cinematic arm of German Expressionism was a direct way of competing with the opposing American product by giving their films a completely distinct visual look from all other countries. This started around about 1913 and involved very stylistic sets and also, very stylistic acting which to modern audiences (and probably some audiences back then too) may look a little silly, wrought and overstated. In fact, what is often thought of as silly silent cinema acting today, by many people, is based on the Western perception of a handful of very famous German Expressionist films such as The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (hmmm... where have I heard that name before) and the last big hurrah of German Expressionism, Metropolis in 1927... which pretty much finished the movement off is my understanding of it. Probably because it cost so much money to make, was a completely unwieldy size and flopped abysmally at the box office (both domestic and overseas).

I say it died in 1927 but it didn’t really... at least it’s my personal opinion that it didn’t. A lot of those directors and cinematographers fled the beginnings of Nazi Germany to go to Hollywoodland and it’s my belief that you’ll find a lot of German Expressionism in US movies of the 30s and 40s... it was a big influence. I can’t imagine how we’d have got the genre known as Film Noir without it’s heavy leanings towards the expressionistic lighting styles of those early silent German films and likewise with the classic horror movies too. Watch Son of Frankenstein (1939) for example... the set design is amazing. It could be perhaps more precisely titled Son of Caligari to give an appropriate feel for the movie.

But I digress... not that it’s unusual for me to do so.

Metropolis flopped for its studio UFA and after two US companies, Paramount and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, joined and merged with UFA to make a new company, the less than imaginatively titled Parufamet (Par-UFA-Met), they decided to cut the film pretty much in half... so they excised over an hour of footage to make their new cut and... yeah, that’s right, you know the story... they destroyed all the footage they had cut. Every last frame of it in that negative. Gone for good? Well.... as we now know, that’s only half the story. But the story and sense of Metropolis was completely gone and it was heavily simplified and jumped around somewhat... I reckon it’s always needed a little leap of faith to stay with what became of the narrative, based on my own experiences of it.

I first saw Metropolis as a kid. It was shown on TV in the UK in a print of some sorts, either a year or two before Star Wars came out or a year or two after. I knew nothing of its history so just assumed I was watching the film as it was made. So somewhere between 1975 and 1979 was my first viewing of it. And of course, I loved the famous and iconic robot in it... a robot which is in it for only a few minutes and moves around for... well... seconds. She was beautiful, that curvy girl of steel. I always wanted to see more of her. It could have been love at first sight. The rest of the film was okay... it was kind of intriguing. I loved the set design and the people at the clock faces in the factory... but ultimately it really didn’t do much for me and I wasn’t that bothered about seeing it again.

There seemed to be a long lean period for releases of silent films soon after that... apart from a ridiculous Giorgio Morodor version of Metropolis with some added footage... which was truncated down even more and had silly pop songs grafted on to it to impose yet another form of narrative contrast over it which, in all honesty, is the last thing it needed. But yeah, silent films were getting hard to see for a while... I remember pining away to see stuff like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari in my student days and finally, an obscure UK VHS label from a private collector known as the Aikman Collection released a few of these titles... including Metropolis. So I snagged one as a Christmas present and was again intrigued by the movie but... again the film disappointed me as a single viewing experience. It just felt wrong and unsatisfying somehow. I saw it a few times but it never really grabbed me as much as it seemed to grab other people. I much preferred The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari as my all time German Expressionist film (and probably still do to this day as it happens).

But the historic landscape of Metropolis shifts periodically, as I said, and every now and then a bit more footage turns up from some unexpected source and we get a new version of it released... to much publicity.

However... my view of this movie changed radically when I saw the Eureka: The Masters of Cinema restoration from 2002 back in...um... would have been 2003, I think. This included more footage than I ever thought possible and the story was completely different to what I'd remembered. This print from 2002 was, for me, a revelation. This version made sense, had a much more pertinent storyline to match the visuals and was just a joy to watch. Metropolis and I were finally bestest buddies... and I knew I was seeing it finally in the best light I would ever see in my lifetime...

But, of course, the story doesn’t end their either. In 2008 a scratchy copy of the original length version (more or less) was found in a private collection in Argentina. It was badly deteriorated but, asides from a few minutes, it’s pretty much the whole thing... or is it? Well it took nearly two years to restore to something that is, in some ways, watchable and this is the version I saw last week now that Eureka: The Masters Of Cinema have re-released it again in this format. It’s a great film but something seemed different... although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Turns out that Fritz Lang had several cameras going on it all the time and printed many different takes. This version comes from at least three different sources (including the Argentinian one, obviously) and utilises some different takes and angles from the previous one in addition to the new sequences which, I have to say, look pretty scratchy. Not the most ideal but it has to be said the people doing the work are absolutely brilliant for doing as good a job as they have with it. What a find! A holy grail movie has now pretty much finished its long path from its initial release in 1927 to something not far from its original form in 2010. I am absolutely thrilled to have been able to see this one happening (now if somebody could only turn up a true print of London After Midnight I’d be pretty pleased).

And my favourite part about this magnificent story... well they found the original notes on the original score written for the performance of the film and this is what allowed them to piece all the footage back in together and get the correct running times for the takes etc. So you know the old director rushing in to the composer and asking him to “save my film” story that’s often told when the first print of a movie is seen and it sucks... well the new restoration of Metropolis is literally a case of the score coming to the rescue. This makes me smile big time!

So yeah, I watched the new version of Metropolis and was once again bowled over by the way it all works now as a whole. The acting is decidedly over-the-top expressionism from the leading man, in my humble opinion, but it was deliberate and therefore must be taken as an enhancement to the art form in the case of this kind of stylistically “rendered” movie (for a more naturalistic acting style as an introduction to the appreciation of silent film performance as an art, check out the dinosaur epic The Lost World from 1925).

I love the way this film uses shafts of light and smoke and other visual metaphors to create the illusion of sound (which in some cases, it has to be said, is rendered unnecessary when you see it against the original score, which does have a lot of Mickey Mousing going on in it) and those brilliant sets and street miniatures which have influenced loads of movies (including my favourite movie Blade Runner) are all still real eye openers. Doubly so when you realise that all those cars and planes whizzing and flying by were done as stop motion animation. Yeah, I’ll repeat that and let it sink in for a second. Stop motion animation! one of the crew commented that it took them over a week just to get ten seconds of film. I never even realised that it was stop motion until I was told. I mean... look at it! That’s amazing.

And I’ll tell you another thing that’s amazing... Brigitte Helm! What a beauty! And those scenes where she plays the evil robot incarnation of her character Maria... what a dish with all those sexy dances. She has two roles and one of them gives the movie heart while the other one sexes the movie up. She’s worth the price of admission alone.

Okay... as far as the DVD itself goes... well the restoration is excellent but obviously the state of the print is not something they could magically erase without spending millions on it (I guess). Also, the tin and the accompanying booklet (which I’ll confess I haven’t read yet but was slightly dismayed at the very thin paper stock they’ve used to print it on) are both pretty “right on” in terms of making you feel you’ve got a nice little movie package (something which will be completely lost when digital downloads come in big time and which will severely shrink the audience of such movies I suspect) but the accompanying documentary, which runs for nearly an hour, is a different matter. For, while it’s an interesting and fascinating education as to the different versions of the print used... it failed to deliver any oomph and I just wasn’t as excited or enthused by it as I’d hoped I would be. I mean, come on guys... film restoration is a fantastic subject... how do you make it all sound so boring? That minor grumble aside though, it’s still worth a watch to get some of the facts and figures of this movie delivered in a, slightly, quicker method than reading it in a book.

And as for the film itself... well if you call yourself a film lover and you’ve never seen Metropolis then you should hang your head in shame and acquire a copy. It may not be everybody’s cup of tea but you will marvel at the amazing craftsmanship involved with this film and it’s a good lesson on the visual power of film. Whether you like it or not... you need to see this movie!