The Bargain Nexus - Son of Frankenstein

I feel a touch of sadness when I watch Son of Frankenstein. Any film featuring both of the classic horror masters Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff should be brilliant, but here you have Lugosi playing a role I consider far beneath him, while Karloff ends up taking part in the one thing he wanted so passionately to avoid - namely, the conversion of the creature into nothing but an inhuman monster. This film does have a saving grace, however, in the form of Lionel Atwill, who steals the show time and again as Inspector Krogh. Basil Rathbone starts out quite swimmingly as Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, but this actually works against him in the long run because the mania that overtakes him in the second half of the film just doesn't ring true to me, especially when the man's sudden desire to justify his father's work takes precedence over the safety of his own wife and child. Then there is Lugosi's character Ygor, whose only accomplishment in life is having survived the gallows - and don't even get him started talking about his broken neck.

Let's get our ducks in a row here. Some twenty-five years have passed since the events chronicled in Bride of Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein himself apparently died just a few years later, but not before seeing a son of the house of Frankenstein brought into the world. That child, Baron Wolf von Frankenstein (Rathbone), has now returned to the family castle, with wife and little boy in tow. As you might expect, the villagers do not welcome the return of any Frankenstein and immediately start getting the rakes and farm implements sharpened in preparation for their inevitable storming of the castle. The old castle isn't exactly empty when young Dr. Frankenstein arrives, for Ygor (Lugosi) has made a place for himself there. The son of Frankenstein can hardly wait to see his father's old laboratory (suddenly, we are expected to believe that the big creation experiments all took place in a little round hut in the castle's backyard rather than in some dark, isolated, forbidding castle). Ygor shows him around the place (after attempting to kill him, of course), and lo and behold whom should we find in an underground crypt but the monster (Karloff) himself. He's not quite himself these days, but young Frankenstein immediately sets to work reviving the monster in an attempt to vindicate the family name. Unfortunately for Frankenstein, however, Ygor commands the monster to do his own bidding, although how this all came about is never really made clear. When a number of individuals are found murdered in the village, suspicion naturally falls on the house of Frankenstein. Enter Inspector Krogh (Atwill) and his ridiculous yet entertaining artificial arm; without this fascinating character, Son of Frankenstein would be a wholly forgettable movie.

With no lines and few chances to express any real emotion other than murderous fury, Karloff's monster is a shadow of its former self. Even the makeup job appears second-rate and less than imposing. Lugosi goes through the motions quite well as the deformed Ygor, but he brings no real passion to a role I am sure he could not have enjoyed playing. I found Ygor's character to be much more of a hindrance than a help to the effectiveness of the film (and I say this as a devoted fan of Bela Lugosi). Frankly, I'm really unsure what so many others see in this movie; it really didn't impress me in any way whatsoever. All it did was turn Frankenstein into a big dumb monster that would be forced to stumble and bumble its way through one film after another for decades to come. It's impossible to feel much sympathy for him in this context, and I eventually found myself hoping they would just kill the monster already and get the film over and done with.