ABBOTT &COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN

Film scholar William K. Everson looked back on the rise of Abbott & Costello in film some twenty years later saying, “Their films were slick, streamlined, full of action and songs, and very much attuned to wartime tastes. The Abbott & Costello films dated very quickly and seem quite tiresome today…but in the 40s they delivered what the public wanted, and they also captured the juvenile market…”

            If Everson’s criticism of the boys is myopic (though perhaps not surprising given that, more so than that of the screen clowns who preceded them, the style of Bud and Lou was distinctly American in its roots and foreign to a British historian, even one as passionate about comedy’s golden age as Everson), so is his backhanded praise. It’s true that Abbott & Costello’s films grew lugubrious and silly beyond wit as the comedians aged, their success owed to a lot more than simply appealing to the lowest denominator.

            Abbott & Costello pumped the juice back in the dying art of slapstick, resolving what had hindered many of the Marx Brothers’ movies when studios (mostly M-G-M, the biggest and most glamorous of them all) began demanding their comedies be padded with pompous artiness. Insipid love songs and dilly-dally romances began drawing lines in otherwise fine comedies, creating really two films in one. On one side you had the world of the comedians (ostensibly the stars) and on the other the world of sentiment. Discussing how such redefined boundaries specifically affected Laurel & Hardy (though their situation was no different than that of the Marx Brothers), Everson also said, “Laurel & Hardy fitted easily enough into Fra Diavolo and The Bohemian Girl, and musical and comic elements could be enjoyed equally well. But the dividing lines between those elements were quite clearly drawn; plot and music would stop for traditional Laurel & Hardy material, and then we’d be back in Bohemia again.”

            Bud and Lou didn’t blur those lines. Rather, they played on them. At best, their films are a subtle, even incidental, mockery of the kitsch that would otherwise sink their pictures. Their best films worked because they worked with the heavy-handed seriousness rather than apart from it.

            This worked well enough to establish Abbott & Costello as the most popular comedy team of the 40s and they went strong for eight years and then Universal decided to pit them against its monsters and it was the best thing that could have happened to them. However accurate Everson’s evaluation was of the bulk of their work, it is irrelevant to Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, their finest hour and one of the great comedy classics.         

            On the first try, the mesh up worked. Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein has some of their funniest material and is scarier than what the monsters were being used for ever since Universal stopped taking them seriously some thirteen years earlier. Why it works so well isn’t hard to see. As beautifully balanced as it is, neither the comedy nor the horror is compromised. Both are allowed to exist freely in spheres of their own. When they do overlap, as they are expected to, the results (laughs of frights if you will) are all the more rewarding.

            Certainly the best moments involve Costello’s encounters with the creatures (Abbott is incredulous and oblivious for most of the picture until he realizes the danger near the end). Their first encounter is a classic. Costello is a baggage clerk assigned to move two crates into a monster wax museum. Though spooked, Costello is unaware that the crates contain Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster respectively, dormant but very much alive. But soon things start to get really scary. A scaly clawed hand creeps out of the coffin and Costello’s jitters are enhanced with the use of a vintage moving candle gag added for effect. More than anywhere else, the movie here creates a smooth, almost flawless dance between gags and thrills. It is a handsomely polished sequence making good use of lighting and darkness (where the Count retreats to avoid detection) to create a real sense of entrapment. The house of horror itself is a wonderful set, so creepy looking it isn’t too much of a stretch to believe any of its wax figures could come to life. But two of them are alive, as poor Costello finds out. If only Bud would believe him.

            The best moment of all is hardly ever mentioned, but it belongs to Costello and Lon Chaney, Jr. Lawrence Talbot (Chaney’s cursed traveler bitten by a werewolf in The Wolfman) has just checked in at the room across the hall from Bud and Lou. He has come to America to warn the boys that Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster have arrived and something wicked is going on. He also warns them of his transformation each night at the sight of the full moon. Costello doesn’t quite understand what he means so he carelessly wanders into Talbot’s room, blissfully unaware (though we are and hence the goose-bumps) that Talbot has morphed into the hairy snarling beast and is set to pounce on him. Costello’s cluelessness may be played for laughs, but the real danger it puts him in is scarier than anything in The Wolfman.

            As for pure energetic laughs the best remembered routine is Bud and Lou’s encounter with a revolving wall in Dracula’s new castle. It is so glorious a piece of knockabout that Mel Brooks molded it into one of the best moments in his own horror spoof, Young Frankenstein.

            We laugh, but Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein gives Universal’s iconic monsters a sincere salute. Their story is treated as seriously as were any of the sequels their original movies spawned. Dracula has brought Frankenstein’s creation to America for a sinister experiment. He wants to insert a new brain into the green monster, but this time he wants a brain so feeble allowing him control of the creature. What better candidate than Lou Costello? To lure his dopey victim into his new castle, the Count uses a sultry seductress (Lenore Aubert) to flatter the hapless sap and gain his trust.

            If all this sounds silly, it is. So much so, in fact, that The Three Stooges had made a short with a similar premise called A Bird in the Head two years earlier. But here, the backdrop is taken as seriously as horror movies began to take themselves when they realized they never should have in the first place. Somewhat to a fault, the first sound horrors (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, etc,) didn’t realize their potential for camp. To be fair, in the early days of talkies the true preoccupations for masters like James Whale and Tod Browning were use of sound, style, and preserving the bygone days of Expressionism.

            By the middle of the 30s, however, some of the horror legends (Bela Lugosi most of all) recognized that it was time to have some fun with the style they cultivated. Boris Karloff was slower to come around and refused to even see this film let alone reprise his role as Frankenstein’s monster before Universal could even approach him. As a favor to the studio that made him a legend he agreed to promote the film, but thought it too much a mockery of the monster. His objection is hard to understand. By all accounts he was a fan of the boys and agreed to play Jekyll and Hyde opposite the comedians in one of their later monster meetings, so it’s puzzling that he would find Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein any more disrespectful than what Hollywood had done with the story of Frankenstein since he starred in the creative sequel Bride of Frankenstein.

            The monster is treated well here and is really an innocent victim of Count Dracula’s devious plot. Chaney’s wolfman is the most sympathetic of the three and ultimately a martyr when he rids the town of the two other monsters and of his own curse. Dracula is the only genuinely evil monster and Bela Lugosi is a good sport about it. But Lugosi was such a serious believer in the myth of the vampire that even when he isn’t covering his face behind his cape, there is not a trace of humor in his portly Count. But the most disturbing representation of evil here is Lenore Aubert’s poisonous seductress. Too human to alarm the boys, she is able to penetrate their world and bring them to a castle of horrors.

            There is some debate among horror buffs as to how tightly Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein fits into the chronology of the original classics. If it’s mean to be a part of the canon, then we can surmise that Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Wolfman did not die at the end of their screen debuts (or at the end of Bride of Frankenstein in the lumbering giant’s case) but instead meet their demise here largely at each other’s hand.

            Bud and Lou had to alter their comedic style considerably to be compatible with the other players on the court. Their familiar verbal exchanges were minimized to make room for pure visual humor. Tellingly, the wonderful opening cartoons credits (animated by Walter Lanz, creator of Universal’s biggest cartoon star Woody Woodpecker) depict them as skeletons running amuck when the monsters disturb their repose. Their depiction is significant beyond humor. Just as we see the boys as cartoon skeletons we will see their comedy in an atypical form. The only hint of their gift for verbal routines is a nipped debate over why they should share girlfriends since they share everything else, which feels ripped from a more traditional Abbott & Costello movie and pasted on.

            Elsewhere, their gags apart from their scenes with the monsters are mostly throwbacks to old-school slapstick. These are largely concentrated in the beginning when the boys are still waiting for the crates carrying the creatures to arrive at the train depot. Knock-about ensues when Costello climbs atop a mountain of packages that begins to sway before toppling over. This is slapstick in its most puerile mechanical form (interestingly, “mechanical” was the pejorative term used by William K. Everson, who was never a fan of Bud and Lou, to describe Laurel & Hardy’s short horror spoof from 1930 The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case).  But this moment temporary lapse of talent is short-lived. The emphasis on slapstick is put to good use when the monsters show up and give them a scare, leading up to a terrifically frantic climax inside Dracula’s castle.

            Classic horror was fading by the post-war years. The horrors of the atomic age became the new (very real) fear of choice. Even Universal, Hollywood’s golden house of scares, began phasing out its iconic creatures. The folkloric origins of their curses fell out of fashion in favor of distrust in atomic research. Even when spawns of the creatures appeared in later movies, such as 1956’s The Werewolf, the cause of mutation was unregulated scientific research rather than age old legends. Their encounters with Abbott & Costello are what largely kept them on life support and a surprise cameo at the end, with a voice that is itself a cameo within a cameo, hints both at more fun to come and that Frankenstein’s monster may not have been the first mutant that Dracula had cooped up in the lab. But even here there were hints of a new era. The movie is consistently aware of the cheesiness of the rising B pictures and Dracula’s hypnotic spells sound like the arrival of flying saucers from any low-budget matinee shlocker.

            Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, however, was the swan song for the big three (the Mummy was at one point considered for inclusion before being dropped and given his own movie with the boys). Neither Bela Lugosi nor Lon Chaney, Jr. could have asked for a better send-off. Lugosi and Chaney were immortalized by the first time they donned their monster make-up, but this comedy classic is the best thing anyone involved, not the least of which are Abbott & Costello, ever did.