Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) - film review

Chick Young and Wilbur Grey are baggage clerks who, one day, are asked to deliver two crates to a waxworks museum.  According to the crates’ owner, these contain the last remains of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster.  Sure enough, as Chick and Wilbur are unpacking the crates, the two horror fiends are revived.  Dracula spirits the monster away to his island castle where he engages a scientist, Dr Sandra Mornay, to make the creature easier for him to control.  Dr Mornay suggests that she will have to replace the monster’s brain with that of someone who is more pliable and less aggressive, someone like the man she is currently dating, Wilbur Grey.  Meanwhile, Chick and Wilbur are visited by a strange man named Larry Talbot who insists that they help him destroy Dracula and his pet monster.  Unfortunately, Talbot has problems of his own.  When the moon is full he turns into a werewolf...

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was the first (and best) of a series of enormously popular films that Universal Pictures made in the 1940s and 1950s which pitted the legendary comedy duo Abbott and Costello against the monsters that appeared in the studio’s horror films of the ’30s and ’40s.  The film’s title is an obvious misnomer because, of the many weird and wonderful characters the duo meet in this film, Dr Frankenstein is sadly not one of them.  The film’s more lurid working title, The Brain of Frankenstein, would have been equally inaccurate.

The film is significant in that it marks the end of Universal’s run of films featuring three of its most successful creations – Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man.  Two of the actors who made these characters so memorable – Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. – reprise their respective roles – Dracula and Wolf Man – for the last time.  Boris Karloff was approached to play the part of Frankenstein’s monster but declined (he considered the film to be an insult), so the part went to Glenn Strange.  Chaney played the monster in one scene (the one where it throws Lenore Aubert through a window) after Strange sustained a foot injury.  

Considered by many as the best horror film spoof, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is a gloriously entertaining mix of knockabout farce and Gothic horror.  Unlike many similar films, this one respects the tradition that it so effectively lampoons.  The sets, cinematography, make-up and photography are all on a par with Universal’s best horror films of the period, whilst Lugosi, Chaney and Strange all play their monster characters for chills, not for laughs.  Lenore Aubert is deliciously terrifying as the femme fatale turned mad scientist.  Indeed, if Abbott and Costello were taken out of the picture, this could make a respectable horror film, and even with the comic duo it still manages to send a tingle down the spine in a few scenes.   This film is a delight – a glorious way to bring down the curtain on Universal’s association with Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolf Man.

© James Travers 2009

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