The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) - film review

It has been several years since the village of Frankenstein was terrorised by a rampaging monster, but the locals are still haunted by the curse of their troubled past.   To put an end once and for all to the evil that blights their community, the villagers set out to destroy Frankenstein’s castle, but, in so doing they unwittingly release the monster from the sulphur pit that has imprisoned it these last few years.  Ygor, the madman who has survived the hangman’s noose and a hail of bullets, is delighted to be reunited with his old friend and guides him to the safety of the surrounding countryside.  Here, a lightning bolt re-energises the monster.  Realising that the monster needs the services of a specialist brain surgeon, Ygor intends to pay a call on Dr Frankenstein’s second son, Ludwig.  The latter has perfected a technique for curing any mental illness by removing the brain of his patient from its skull, operating on it, and then returning it to the body.  Ludwig will have no part in Ygor’s plan and decides to destroy the monster by dismembering it.  After the monster has killed one of Ludwig’s assistants, the scientist is visited by the ghost of his father, who persuades him that if the monster had been given a good brain he might not have turned out so bad.  Ludwig performs the brain transplant operation, unaware that his colleague, Dr Bohmer, has given him Ygor’s brain.  Far from being a reformed monster, Frankenstein’s creation will now pose a much greater threat for mankind...

Universal’s Frankenstein series had had quite a good run until it got to this, the fourth, outing for Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror creation.  Prestige productions, crafted with care and imagination by a highly talented team, the first three Frankenstein films - Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939) - are enduring classics of the horror genre.  Not so for what came afterwards.  The Ghost of Frankenstein marked the series’ sudden downgrade to B-movie status, with a lower budget and noticeably smaller pool of creative talent.  By this stage, Universal were more interested in making a quick buck than in delivering high quality pictures for a discerning movie audience, and it shows.

The Ghost of Frankenstein is not a particularly badly made film.  In fact, the production standards are well above average for a B-movie.  The sets, although less ambitious than in the previous Frankenstein films, are atmospheric and appropriately lit in the expressionistic style that befits a Gothic horror film.  The story moves at a fair pace, and with a run time of just over an hour, the audience doesn’t have chance to get bored.  Of course, Lon Chaney Jr. is a poor substitute for Boris Karloff - the make-up is less convincing and there is none of the heart-wrenching pathos that Karloff brought to his portrayal of the monster.  But Chaney’s lumbering monster still delivers the requisite thrills and conveys genuine menace, unlike the uninspired dial-a-monster thing seen in the subsequent Frankenstein films.

This film has much going for it, but unfortunately it also has one major failing: the screenplay.  Okay, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too vexed by the obvious continuity lapses.  Ygor looks remarkably well after having been riddled with bullets at the end of the previous film, but maybe he was wearing a bullet-proof jacket?   And why should Basil Rathbone be Frankenstein’s only son?  A man who was so keen on creating life could have had any number of offspring, all potential monster-makers.  Admittedly, the strange displacement of the sulphur pit into which the monster fell (from deep beneath Frankenstein’s laboratory to near the outer walls of his castle) takes some explaining...

No, what is so frustrating about the screenplay for this monster mash is that virtually none of it makes any sense.   Every one of the characters looks as if he is suffering from an acute logic bypass which compels him to do the most unutterably stupid and incomprehensible things possible.  The eminent neurosurgeons Frankenstein and Bohmer are reluctant to dismember the monster because they know this is tantamount to murder.  But they then happily agree to take out the monster’s brain and replace it with the brain of one of their colleagues (who was conveniently killed a few hours previously).  Presumably the monster’s brain is destroyed, so isn’t this also murder?  And just why does Bohmer allow himself to be duped by so obvious a rogue as Ygor?  Just why does Ygor want to end up in the body of an overgrown misshapen misfit who has next to no chance of forming his own appreciation society?  And why, oh why, does the monster himself want to be given the brain of a little girl?  I could go on for hours, but you probably get the message.  This script looks like it was written by someone who clearly had his mind on other things.

Significantly, The Ghost of Frankenstein is the last of Universal’s Frankenstein films in which the monster makes a solo appearance.  In the three subsequent films, he/it appears with Universal’s other horror creations, the Wolf Man and Dracula.  Whilst all these films are great fun to watch, they are a mere shadow of what went before.  It would not be until Hammer came along with its own Gothic horror revival in the late 1950s that audiences would once again become acquainted with the true horror of Frankenstein...

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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