Pre-Code Parade: BROADMINDED (1931)

You can see the first hints of the road-trip comedy in Mervyn LeRoy's film, which offers Joe E. Brown as a dubious chaperone to a wastrel friend on a cross-country trip to California. But most of the action takes place at the end of the trip, and overall Warner Bros. hasn't yet figured out how to best exploit Brown's slapstick athleticism; here he's pretty much a guy with a big mouth, a figure whose clowning borders on the pathological. He's the guy who shows up at the young people's "baby party" and takes the act to extremes, arriving in a pram and really, really getting into the role more than anyone else. The story is conventional stuff, having both Brown and his sidekick (William "Buster" Collier) fall for California girls but having their romances complicated by the arrival of an old flame from the east, for Collier, and the reappearance, for Brown, of an enemy made on the road. This enemy gives Broadminded its main interest today, for he is Bela Lugosi, six months after the release of Dracula.

For Lugosi this movie represents a road ultimately not taken. It's an attempt by Warners to try him out as an all-purpose ethnic, in the role of a tourist from the country of "South America." That role requires Lugosi to be very different from Dracula. He must be loud, he must talk relatively fast, and when Brown really annoys him, as when the comic sprays ink on Bela's dessert, the offended man gives chase at a vigorous, elbow-churning pace. It's not really a great performance, but it belies any notion that Lugosi's Dracula represents the limits of his English or his acting style. He's not exactly convincing as a Latin American, especially by today's standards, but if you pay attention you can hear how he's modulating his accent slightly to fit the part. But if Broadminded gives us a rare glimpse of a non-typecast Lugosi, LeRoy clearly appreciates Bela's essential gifts. The most Lugosian moment in the film comes when Brown's party are dining in a restaurant booth and Brown recounts his dealings with his Latin antagonist, not realizing that the man himself has just been seated in the next booth. Lugosi hears Brown's boasting and, recognizing the hated voice, gets up and peers over the partition behind him at Brown. Naturally, this is the last place Brown expected to see Lugosi, and his reaction to seeing Bela's face is an easy gag. But then LeRoy holds a shot of Lugosi peering over the partition, now with only half his face showing, most importantly those eyes. If more directors found ways to exploit Lugosi's most obvious gifts without relegating him to what was quickly becoming a ghetto for horror films, we might think of Broadminded as a different kind of milestone in a very different career.

THE BLACK SLEEP (1956)

I could understand someone wanting to make a movie in the style or spirit of Ed Wood in our time, after his posthumous canonization as a cinematic outsider artist and long after he made the films that made his name. What's harder to fathom is someone wanting to make a film in the style or spirit of Ed Wood back in 1956, when Wood himself was toiling thanklessly behind the camera. Of course, I'm sure that comparisons with the likes of Wood were the last thing the producers of The Black Sleep wanted at the time. Posterity makes its own judgments, however, and comparisons between Reginald Le Borg's all-star poverty row horror film and the Wood canon are not necessarily flattering to Le Borg. To be fair, the resemblances between Black Sleep and a Wood film are a matter of common influences, not of any conscious or unconscious imitation by Le Borg, producer Howard W. Koch or writer John C. Higgins. The common reference point is the poverty row horror cycle of the 1940s, the films of Monogram and PRC, though Black Sleep is ambitious enough to beg comparisons with Val Lewton's more upscale B productions, and Le Borg himself directed for Universal toward the bitter end of that studio's great horror cycle. While Wood looks forward, adding more sci-fi elements to the poverty-row formula, Black Sleep looks backwards. It's a period piece in the manner of House of Wax and The Mad Magician, not to mention Lewton's Body Snatcher and Bedlam. But at heart it's a monster rally in the late Universal style, only with has-been horror stars as the real attractions, rather than the monsters they play.

A young doctor (Herbert Rudley) is condemned to death for a murder he did not commit, but is saved from the gallows by a fellow physician, Sir Joel Cadman (Basil Rathbone). Dr. Ramsay doesn't know that he will live; Cadman only promises him a narcotic so he won't disgrace himself. Soon, however, he awakens in his coffin to find Cadman and Udu the gypsy (Akim Tamiroff) leering at him. Cadman had administered nind andhera, the "black sleep" drug that simulates death, and then claimed Ramsay's body. He has done this because Ramsay, a promising surgeon, has skills Cadman needs for his own experiments on the human brain. Like many a mad doctor of the 1940s, Cadman has a sick wife and wants to cure her. He must try different brain surgery techniques on live human subjects before choosing a procedure. The earlier experiments, as Ramsay discovers to his mounting horror, have not gone well.

The Black Sleep is probably best known as the last film Bela Lugosi completed before his death. It was Lugosi's comeback after his highly-publicized drying-out from drug addiction, but he was clearly cast for name value, as a matter of exploitation. His role as a mute servant -- a victim of one of Cadman's experimental surgeries -- wasn't exactly a vote of confidence in Bela by the producers. Lugosi himself admitted in an interview that even without lines it was a struggle to get through the picture due to his age and ailments. He shuffles sadly through the picture, sometimes vacantly, though there are occasional reminders that he's actually giving a performance. He uses pantomime to relay information to Rathbone, and in a few shots the indulgent director invites him to steal scenes. Here's an example:

This is supposed to be Tamiroff's scene, as you can tell from the setup, but note how Le Borg keeps the upper right corner of the screen open over Tamiroff's shoulder so we can see Bela respond to the tale the gypsy's spinning. Lugosi doesn't do much, scratching his chin every so often, but moving at all while Tamiroff talks is scene-stealing -- and the theft is more blatant now when, with no offense intended to a great character actor, no one is interested in Tamiroff when the moribund Lugosi's on the screen.

By comparison, Lon Chaney Jr. is sadly docile as another mute, though he most likely does exactly what the director asked of him. Creighton gets a weird backstory explaining how Mongo, one of the insane inmates, was once Dr. Monroe, a colleague of Cadmon's who ends up one of his experimental subjects after suffering a stroke. Cadmon actually cured Monroe's paralysis but destroyed his reason. Monroe's daughter lives at Cadmon's house and works as an assistant nurse, despite her dad's newfound urge to kill her. For some reason, only Daphne (Phyllis Stanley), Cadmon's head nurse, can control Mongo. Her voice reduces him from mania to a crestfallen sulk that probably came easily to Chaney. He'd gone mostly without dialogue in The Indestructible Man, released in the same year, arguably a career trough for the actor. Both better and worse were in the future for him.

Mongo's troubles are more described than demonstrated, and The Black Sleep works as if the producers thought it sufficient to show the old horror stars to jolt the audience or tickle their nostalgia bones. Once it becomes clear that Lugosi and Chaney -- not to mention Rathbone, who may have modeled his cold, stiff performance on The Body Snatcher's Henry Daniell -- are rather boring, Le Borg takes us into Dr. Cadmon's dungeon, where our hero discovers more failed experiments. One is the very man the good doctor was accused of killing; instead, Cadmon has turned him into Tor Johnson -- I really should have screencapped the ID photo of a toupeed Tor as this character's former civilized self, as it's one of the funniest sights in the picture. Johnson can hardly make an impression, however, once Le Borg unleashes John Carradine, who has been vivisected into believing that he is the Crusader king Bohemund, awaiting news of the fall of Jerusalem. Long John was fresh from the set of The Ten Commandments and has prophetic fury to spare here, though contemporary viewers would most likely have been reminded of the old man who'd been guarding Jack Benny's vault since the Civil War. You see, the further back in time you think you're in, the scarier rather than funnier it is. Current viewers who don't know Jack Benny will more likely believe that Le Borg sent Carradine onto the set and told him to wing it.

Everything breaks down once our hero accidentally leaves a key to the dungeon where Tor, though blind, can reach it. While Tor takes the initiative, Carradine naturally assumes leadership of the breakout; he's a king, after all! These two, along with a laughing lady covered with random tufts of hair and a disfigured dude whose makeup figured prominently in the advertising, run amok on the upper level, Carradine bopping first Daphne, then Mongo on the head in regal rage. It takes three lunatics to drag the mighty Mongo down, sans any payoff his backstory may have made you expect, while Cadmon, carrying his sick wife, takes a dive off a railing-less stairwell. Scotland Yard takes over soon afterward, and while Tamiroff and Lugosi are taken alive, the fate of the more dangerous lunatics is left unclear. Maybe someone had a sequel in mind, since Tamiroff reminds the detectives that like his feline namesake he may have nine lives. Carradine and Tor Johnson rampaging through the Victorian countryside: who wouldn't pay to see that???

While The Black Sleep has superficial resemblances to an Ed Wood film -- Bela, Tor, cheap sets -- it lacks any of Wood's naive authenticity. Wood's films are dramatic in their incompetence and by virtue of that incompetence bear an unmistakable auteurial stamp. They are as much about the struggle behind the camera to render his vision on film or speak through his actors as they are about their stories. There's no such struggle in The Black Sleep, and thus no drama worth seeing, not to mention no horror worth remembering. Koch, Higgins and Le Borg seem to have believed that their film could make itself if they assembled all the pieces on screen that had worked in the past. They depended on our thrill of recognition of the old stars, the old situations -- as if they thought the audience would make the film work.  Technically they outclass Wood easily, but unlike him, they made a completely soulless horror film. That may sound horrific in its own right, but not in any entertaining way.

RETURN OF THE APE MAN (1944)

A childhood memory: It was a Sunday morning, I think, sometime in the autumn. We had the channel on for the football game, and water was already boiling for an early dinner and steaming the windows. I remember almost nothing distinctly about this movie except a strange sense of awe at the thought of scientists trekking to the Arctic to thaw out a man frozen for centuries. The stark stillness of it stuck in my mind, the lack of a soundtrack somehow making it seem, if not more real, then more true. The film didn't scare me, really, but the idea of it left me with a vague dread that lingered long after I forgot all the details of what happened after they brought the block of ice and the man in it back to civilization.

Since then, of course, I've read all about Phil Rosen's film, Bela Lugosi's last Monogram release for Sam Katzman's Banner Productions unit. I knew better than to expect any confirmation of my ancient memories when I clicked Play on the Netflix stream, but I hoped for some moment of recognition, to see something I could remember seeing nearly forty years ago. Needless to say, the shots of parka-clad Lugosi and John Carradine, with two extras picking away at studio ice, in front of a now-unconvincing backdrop on an ill-dressed set, couldn't be as evocative as the ideas they symbolized were when I was small. The nearest I came to a frisson of recognition, I think, when I saw a closeup of the block of ice in Lugosi's lab, as he's about to take a blowtorch to it. Something stirred then, barely. I could still appreciate how the simplicity of it all would be more suggestive to a child than a more colorful, more musical, more elaborate presentation. There was an emptiness you could fill with your own imagination, if you chose.

Or you could just laugh. To the extent that I saw Return of the Ape Man with fresh eyes, it was pretty damn hilarious. Despite the title, it isn't a sequel to The Ape Man, in which Lugosi had accidentally regressed himself into a missing-link state and could cure himself only with that Poverty Row cure-all, spinal fluid. But the title is literally true if you accept the "Pithecanthropus" specimen ripped from a glacier as an "ape man" who "returns" to life under the dedicated ministrations of Professor Dexter (Lugosi), for whom an anthropological expedition to the wintry, presumed habitat of early man is but a continuation of the experiments undertaken with his colleague, Professor Gillmore (Carradine), in freezing and reviving live human subjects. The film opens with the scientists thawing out a hobo they'd lured off the street and paying him five bucks for his trouble. So far, so good. Dexter believes that persons frozen as the hobo was could be preserved for years or centuries and still be revived as good as new. Gillmore points out that it'd be impossible for them to live long enough to test the theory, but Dexter argues that thawing an early human out of his icy tomb would prove his point without taxing his longevity.

So off to the Arctic they go, the trip illustrated with stock footage and inexplicably festive library music. Gillmore soon grows homesick, protesting to Dexter that he's married, after all. "I'm married, too," Dexter answers, "A true scientist is married to his profession." Gillmore grudgingly perseveres and is rewarded by the discovery of an icebound body moments later.

"I'm back!" The returning Ape Man acclimatizes himself to his new surroundings, including Bela Lugosi (left) and John Carradine (right).

Transported and thawed, the caveman (Frank Moran) is confused and violent. Dexter can only control him with the blowtorch he used to thaw out the primitive. "He knows his master!" Dexter proclaims, on the presumption that his subject never understood fire in his first life. Getting more information is difficult, since the ape man appears incapable of language. Dexter's solution is a partial brain transplant, grafting just enough grey matter to make the subject articulate if not reasonable while avoiding the confusion over identity that complicates so many brain-transplant pictures of the time. Still, Gillmore is troubled by the idea, since the modern brain matter must come from a live subject, and that would mean murder. "Murder is an ugly word," Dexter counters, "As a scientist, I don't recognize it."

Lugosi's Dexter is a classic absent-minded professor. He now wants to harvest brain matter from a live, modern human despite his colleague's qualms. You or I, being practical people, might go about this well out of range of the colleague's scrutiny, choosing a complete stranger, or maybe the hobo again, and maybe taking the extra precaution of disguising yourself in a gorilla skin to throw off suspicion. The guileless Prof. Dexter, however, goes to Prof. Gillmore's party and instantly targets the beau of Gillmore's niece. Dissembling is alien to Dexter's scientific nature. He states what's on his mind quite openly, observing: "You know, some people's brains would never be missed." Gillmore himself figures out quite quickly what's up, thwarting Dexter in the nick of time and breaking off social relations with him.

A scene from an unrealized Monogram James Bond picture? Not quite.

(I must throw in a speculative historical note. Dexter's designated victim happens to be named Steve Rogers. That fact compelled me to wonder whether Stan Lee or Jack Kirby had seen this film and recognized the name as the civilian identity of Captain America, Kirby's creation for whom Lee was writing at Timely Comics when the movie came out. Did such a mental association of the film with Cap inspire either man to bring the star-spangled hero back to comics in the 1960s by having him thawed out of a block of ice? Or is this just one strange coincidence? You decide.)

Unable to improve his charge's mind, Dexter must be constantly careful lest he break free of his cage and run amok in public. During one such misadventure, the caveman kills a cop before Dexter rounds him up with his trusty blowtorch. Now he can think of only one way to redeem the situation: he must lure Gillmore back to the lab with a promise to destroy the primitive, then take the professor's eminently useful brain. Lured, Gillmore steps into Dexter's trap, a carpet wired so Dexter can hit his former friend with a paralyzing current. The paralysis allows Dexter to explain what will happen while allowing Gillmore to chide Dexter some more and nobly resign himself to his fate.

"I have advanced his mind 20,000 years in a few hours," Dexter boasts after the surgically enhanced apeman responds with a nod when asked if he feels all right. He grows more verbal gradually, but it looks as if Dexter has used too much of Gillmore's brain. The poor creature thinks he's Gillmore, and he has the dead man's aptitude on the piano, playing the Moonlight Sonata when he breaks into the Gillmore home one night. As with some brain-transplant subjects, the ape man is torn by conflicting impulses: Gillmore's affection for his family and his own primal compulsion to kill everything that moves. Snap goes Mrs. Gillmore's spine and the conflicted creature is on the run again. Finally, now that the cops are closing in on him, Dexter realizes that the experiment has to be brought to a close. But before he can light up a rolled-up newspaper, the caveman breaks his back and bolts out again, soaking up bullets with ease as he goes. Our ancestors were bulletproof, you see, the best proof of that probably being that they didn't have bullets in those days. But if bullets can't hurt Pithecanthropus, Dexter knows what can. The cops' only hope is fire....

It's not the same woman in both shots, in case you were wondering.

Obviously, Lugosi fans will enjoy some of the great man's mighty utterances here, and the sight of him caveman-wrangling with his blowtorch is an inspiring one. But because the apeman carries the burden of terror for most of the picture, Bela inevitably takes a back seat after a while, making this something less than a definitive vehicle for him. As for Carradine, I don't know whether it was more humiliating for him to play an idiot servant in something like Voodoo Man or a complete straight-man character in this film. His career was clearly in crisis, already, and that seems sadder than Lugosi's situation, since the Hungarian was arguably still at a career peak of popularity here. In any event, Carradine contributes nothing in a thankless role. As the Ape Man, Frank Moran is a fairly unformidable subhuman, but it's still a fairly amusing spectacle to watch him run around. Return of the Ape Man is almost irredeemably dumb, but I still say that its absences and lapses, its very impoverishment, might still allow it to make a moody impression, entirely unrelated to its narrative or performative virtues, on people of an impressionable age or temperament. You never know what a child will make of something.

Talbot vs. Dracula, Part II

When Larry Talbot responded to a woman's distress call in Dr. Edelmann's house, he had no idea until after the fact that he was about to have a close encounter with Count Dracula. It's unclear from the evidence of House of Dracula whether Larry even knew that "Baron Latos" was a fellow patient of the great scientist. Yet the next time we see Talbot, he is a sworn enemy of the Count and all his evil works (whether Dracula knows this or not), tracking him across the Atlantic to thwart his latest scheme. Asked why he must battle Dracula almost on his own, and definitely without police aid, Larry tells a new friend that going to the cops would require him to explain "why I know what I know." But what's to explain? Why can't Larry simply say that he was being treated at the late Dr. Edelmann's clinic in Visaria when he encountered the vampire? Leave aside whether American cops would believe the vampire part; unless Talbot has a compulsion to tell the whole truth he shouldn't have to say that he was a werewolf, or believed himself to be, at the time....that is, unless Larry was talking about something else that explains why he knows what he knows about Dracula.

There's an obvious temptation to try to draw a line of continuity from House of Dracula to Bud Abbott [and] Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), to give the film its full title, but is it necessary to try? My friend Wendigo says he used to wonder how Larry's cure from the previous film failed. For amusement purposes only, he speculates now that Dr. Edelmann's surgery simply lacked lasting effect. The pressure on Larry's brain may have reasserted itself, or his curse may have. While there is no compelling reason to identify Charles Barton's comedy as a sequel to Erle C. Kenton's monster rally, Wendigo, like many people, can't help thinking of it as one. When Larry talks of what he knows, then, he could just be referring to the events of House (which Dr. Edelmann would have to have filled him in on in the doctor's declining moments of sanity) or he could be dropping a hint of a to-date untold story that may link Talbot's pursuit of Dracula to the resurgence of his curse.

My own view is that A&CMF is as much of a cartoon, if not obviously more so, than House of Dracula was in their common disregard for continuity. While HofD barely acknowledges its predecessor, House of Frankenstein, A&CMF acknowledges HofD not at all. Dracula never calls himself Baron Latos (it's "Dr. Lejos" instead) and no attempt is made to explain his latest escape from exposure to sunlight. Since it's unclear whether Latos even knew that Edelmann was keeping the Frankenstein Monster in a separate lab, HofD can tell us nothing about how the master vampire hooked up with the creature. There's definitely a tale to be told here if you feel a need to explain how everyone got from House to Florida, but we can just as easily take House out of the equation altogether and consider A&CMF a kind of default Universal Horror film with the classic monsters in what might be assumed was their typical state. And because Larry Talbot was essentially a good and righteous man when he wasn't the Wolf Man, he's naturally going to be Dracula's enemy.

Pitting Talbot against Dracula and the Monster is actually a stroke of genius on the part of Abbott & Costello's writers -- all veterans of Bud & Lou rather than the horror cycle. Compared to the House movies, A&CMF is a masterpiece of plotting with all the monsters integrated thoroughly into a single story. Larry's alliance with Wilbur Gray and Chick Young also integrates the comedians into a fairly straight horror-fantasy story beyond Dracula's plot to implant Wilbur's brain in the Monster's body. It makes Bud & Lou more than hapless scaredy-cats constantly on the run. Instead, they're part of a team that can take the battle to the enemy, even to the point of Bud Abbott, normally a monster of selfishness in his own right, rallying a guilt-stricken Talbot to invade Dracula's lair to save Lou from doom.

Lou Costello stoically faces Bela Lugosi's silent command (above) and Glenn Strange's silent scream (below).

The writers actually magnify this team effect by adding not one, but two femmes fatales to the mix, one on each team. Dracula's ally is Dr. Sandra Mornay, who's seduced Wilbur to lure him into their trap. She's both a femme fatale and a mad scientist over whom Dracula has (at first) some blackmail power because she's wanted in Europe for some questionable experiments. With Sandra, Universal was thisclose to an awesome trifecta of villainy: femme fatale, mad scientist and Nazi. Against her, the good guys have Joan Raymond, an intrepid insurance investigator dedicated to tracking down the "museum exhibits" Wilbur and Chick allegedly stole from the obnoxious wax-museum owner Mr. McDougal. She's a femme fatale because her method is also to seduce Wilbur, in the hope of finding out where he's stashed the "exhibits." The women are strong enough characters to have an important scene to themselves as they try to spy on one another's activities.

Dr. Mornay (Lenore Aubert) spies while Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph) scans The Secrets of Life and Death at a costume party. Below, Mornay likes to dress up as an evil crypto-fascist nurse for professional occasions.

It's another great feature of this film that McDougal remains a wildcard factor throughout, making mischief for the good guys while remaining clueless about the true nature of his stolen goods. This movie is full of great characters, with the glaring though minor exception of the dull scientist Dr. Stevens, Mornay's unwitting assistant, who ends up with Joan by default.

For many monster fans, the highlight of A&CMF is Bela Lugosi's return to the role that made his name, whose name he made. Wendigo thinks it's always great to see him back, especially since he looks in much better shape than he did in the (still good) Return of the Vampire. Compared to that film of five years earlier, it looks like at least five years have fallen away from him. But have the years changed his approach to Dracula? One change that occurred to me was that the character now has to deal with the legend of Dracula (by concealing his identity) in a way that Tod Browning's Dracula didn't. For his part, Wendigo sees some subtle differences in the two performances. There's a hint of doomed melancholy to the 1931 Bela, and a sense that Dracula is an unnatural force of nature. In 1948 Dracula is more evil, more of a schemer, more inclined to revel in villainy. But there are more differences between Lugosi and his imitators (Latos, Alucard) than between the '48 and '31 models. For starters, those so-called Draculas are hapless creatures with few survival instincts. More signifcant is Dracula's dominance of a briefly-defiant Mornay compared to Alucard's virtual victimization by the femme fatale of Son of Dracula. Bela makes it plain: "I am accustomed to obedience from women," and he gets it. Another difference: the pseudo (or crypto?) Draculas from the Forties get by with mesmerism, a learned skill almost, while Lugosi's Dracula dominates people by overwhelming force of pure will. He can command from a distance in ways his emulators can't dream of. However you may feel about the way the monsters are used here, Bela's Dracula is the real deal.

Lou mugs like mad, and brilliantly, in the "young blood and brains" scene, but he has to to keep Bela from stealing the scene just by wearing that smoking jacket.

It wouldn't surprise us if fans don't feel the same way about Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolf Man. As Larry, Lon is impeccable, as impressive and heroic as he's ever been despite his bouts of despair and guilt. But the Wolf Man is still under the constraints necessary for the film to treat Larry as a good guy. That means he has to be an ineffectual monster in two scenes in which he proves incapable of even pouncing on Wilbur, instead tripping and tangling himself in every possible impediment. It's fair to ask what's worse: the fact that the Wolf Man can't escape from a locked hotel room or the fact that Lou Costello bops him on the nose, mistaking him for a masked Abbott, and survives? It's also fair to remind ourselves that the film is meant as a comedy, and that, as Wendigo reminds, me, Chaney was a very good sport about taking his monster's pratfalls. None of this compromises Larry Talbot's role as a hero, if not the hero of the movie. Wendigo adds: if he can't consider The Munsters a travesty of the Universal monsters, he can't complain about this film.

"Grrrrrr!" Even Bud makes fun of the Wolf Man, but his playacting gets him in trouble later in the picture.

In any event, the Wolf Man redeems himself a bit by taking down Dracula after a rather absurd battle that sees the desperate vampire throw everything he can lay hands on at the persistent lycanthrope. Bela even resorts to hitting him with a chair, rasslin'-style. You can ask whether the Wolf Man attacks Dracula because he knows the vampire is the enemy, or just because Dracula is there? On the other hand, the vampire's enmity toward the werewolf seems to be a matter of panicky disgust, as if Dracula had seen a large rat. In any event, Larry gets the job done even if it means a dip in the rocky drink. Do they both die? Well, Dracula is clearly out of action because the plunge breaks his power over Joan Raymond, but on the evidence of Talbot's suicide attempt in HofD it's definitely debatable whether the drop would kill the Wolf Man. It may be best for us to wish Larry Talbot godspeed on his long, long journey home -- or back to Europe, or wherever.

A&CMF, of course, is the top-billed team's big comeback film, restoring a declining pair to audience good will by riding their lingering good will toward the Universal Monsters. The comedy is knowing rather than contemptuous (unless you disapprove of the Wolf Man's clumsiness) and is arguably the first filmic expression of the fandom that would blossom with the spread of television in the next decade. As for Bud and Lou, once upon a time you could see a movie of theirs at least once a week on cable TV. Now this film is one of the few Abbott & Costello movies that turns up occasionally on stations like TCM. It's been a long time since we've seen any other besides their awful public-domain films. A&CMF shows the team in top form after a series of non-team experiments. Lou gives as good as he takes here in an incredible performance, talking back to everyone, going nuts with pantomiming the monster's movements, reveling in the attentions of two beautiful women and coping with the creatures with childlike credulity. Costello often strikes me as a progenitor of the obnoxious infantile men of modern movie comedy, but Lou brings something extra to the show: a self-consciousness that cracks the fourth wall and invites you to share his enjoyment of the ride. His character may be a sap, but he's a sap and he knows it, and in a redeeming way he seems to know more than he thinks he knows. You can't leave this film feeling contempt for Lou Costello, and the more you watch the more little details you catch, including his titanic scene-stealing battles with Lugosi. His interplay with Abbott (and Chaney, for that matter) is note perfect.

"Back...back... He thinks I'm Dracula."

Abbott & Costello are Wendigo's favorite comedy team, and he has many fond memories of Sunday morning double-features on WPIX. I didn't like them as much as he did back then, but every time I see A&CMF I get an urge to see more of their films. Some time ago I put this film on my list of ten favorite comedies, and I'd say that Lou Costello gives one of my favorite comedy performances ever in it. With Bud and Lou in top form and the return of the monsters, I'm inspired to ask: does any other Hollywood studio have a film in its library that is as definitive an expression of its creative identity as this film is for Universal? Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is Universal's monument.

And here's the Realart trailer, uploaded to YouTube by horrormovieshows

Wendigo Meets THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943)

My friend Wendigo and I take turns selecting vampire films for our weekend viewing; he picks one from my collection, then I choose one from his. The collections are a little unequal, but this week it was my collection's turn and the film at the top of the pile was the dreaded Dracula the Dirty Old Man.

"Couldn't we do something different?" Wendigo asked me.
"Why, are you afraid of this one?"
(If he isn't, he should be.)
"No, but the new Wolf Man movie is coming out and it's putting me in the mood to do a Universal picture."
"We've already done one."
"We could do a Hammer movie."
"Already done one of those...What's next on your pile, anyway?"

It was a Columbia Pictures film by Lew Landers with which we were both quite familiar, but if we were to go retro, I thought we might as well do what we would have done next week, anyway. But Wendigo wanted to know why I chose this one instead of a Universal or a Hammer, and the answer is that I sort of sympathize with the underdogs of cinema. Return of the Vampire is often disparaged as an exploitation film, a rip-off of Universal's cycle featuring Bela Lugosi as a second-rate Dracula and a gratuitous wolf man. But I've always liked Return because of the ways it differentiates itself from the Universal films, particularly the way it exploits its historical moment compared to Universal's retreat into the neverland of Visaria.

Bela is Dr. Armand Tesla, a renegade Romanian scholar who reportedly died in 1744 but had been so corrupted by his researches into the supernatural that he rose again as a vampire. The year 1918 finds him in London menacing a young woman under the protection of Lady Jane and Sir John Ainsley. Sir John, perplexed by the little bite marks on the girl's neck, consults one of Tesla's books and deduces that she's been attacked by a vampire. The Ainsleys manage to track the vampire to its coffin and spike it through the chest, though Sir John never notes the resemblance between the man in the coffin (who we admittedly never see) and the face on the frontispiece of Tesla's book.

Tesla's apparent destruction really inconveniences Andreas Obrey (Matt Willis), "some loathsome creature of the vampire's" in Sir John's description. Andreas was introduced to us earlier as a depraved, servile and fully articulate wolfman, but Tesla's demise transforms him into a human being whom the Ainleys basically adopt and rehabilitate. By 1941, Andreas is a trusted assistant in Lady Jane's patriotic work of smuggling dissident scientists out of occupied Europe. But a German air raid blasts the cemetery where Tesla's body lay, inert but perfectly preserved, and when two comedy-relief wardens pull the spike from his chest, the vampire returns to life, immediately reasserting his control over an Andreas who just happens to wander across his path. Now a wolfman again whenever Tesla needs him to be, Andreas will aid his master in wreaking vengeance on the Ainsley family, unless he should retain some sliver of the goodness that Lady Jane has instilled in him during the interwar years....

Tesla plans his misty revenge on the Ainsleys and their loved ones. Bela really could use an opera cape in the scene below to hide his painful posture, and he'll get one later.

Many people regard Armand Tesla as Dracula in all but name. Wendigo admits some justice to the charge, but he notes some important differences in the way this film presents the Lugosi vampire. Tesla lacks Dracula's suaveness and even the sliver of tragedy ("to be truly dead...that would be glorious") that Tod Browning's film gives Stoker's vampire. Tesla really puts the master in master vampire, since his primary role in the story is arguably as Andreas's mean-spirited taskmaster. Wendigo sees differences in Lugosi's performance, too. Bela expresses Tesla's bitterness and lust for revenge, which here seems stronger than his lust for blood. You might be able to say that Dracula is a monster on a beyond-good-and-evil level, but Tesla is pure malevolence with a grudge. Wendigo cautions that credit for this difference may really belong to the writers, but Bela deserves credit for the interpretation, which anticipates his return to Dracula in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein more than the Browning film itself does.

Tesla tries to put the moves on Lady Jane (Frieda Inescort's pioneering female vampire hunter) only to find that he's been played like a pipe organ by the devout heroine.

Wendigo regards Return as a landmark in the horror genre, primarily because it's the first movie to present the now-familiar conflict between vampires and werewolves in the form of Andreas's struggle to free his soul from Tesla's control. He also thinks it's important for embedding horror in the real world of World War II at the same time that Larry Talbot was romping through a Nazi-free Europe. As far as werewolves go, Matt Willis's makeup proved to be more influential than Jack Pierce's work on Lon Chaney Jr. The makeup on Willis is very effective, more wolflike in some ways than Pierce's apparatus, but also more expressive, allowing Willis to express Andreas's depravity at its worst and his despair, first when he loses his master and later when his master spurns him. The role is Matt Willis's one big moment in the spotlight of movie history, and it's a great performance from a man who mostly did uncredited bit parts throughout his career.

Andreas means something more in the wartime context than Larry Talbot was ever allowed to express. If Armand Tesla is an undead symbol of German aggression (his actual nationality notwithstanding) then Andreas is a stand-in for the German people. Just as they were liberated from the yoke of Prussian imperialism in 1918 and given a chance at democracy, so Andreas is allowed to develop his good qualities and become a useful citizen. But though he falls back quickly under the spell of the mesmeric leader (if the Browning-Lugosi Dracula is a kind of Svengali, according to some critics, then Tesla is Hitler), we're meant to understand that despite the atrocities he again willingly performs, he's still capable of redemption. Our attitude toward Andreas is what enlightened Allied propaganda wanted us to take toward ordinary Germans (though not necessarily toward the Japanese). They aren't expected to rise up against Hitler any more than Andreas resists Tesla until he is shot. But when Tesla refuses to save him and orders him to "Go into the corner, remain there and die," Andreas has the realization that the German people were expected to have once they suffered bombings and other privations. Once Andreas realizes that he has been duped, that his leader doesn't really care for him, that the master's promise of eternal life (or a 10,000 year Reich, if you prefer) was a lie, then he can be redeemed. His destruction of Tesla in a bombed-out ruin was probably many viewer's fantasy of what angry, repentant Germans might do to their Nazi leaders.

Wendigo thinks that Columbia Pictures should be given credit for not simply trying to imitate Universal but for trying to differentiate its horror films from and topping the work of the rival studio. Return's budgetary limitations are obvious, but Landers and the rest of the production team do their utmost with set design, cinematography and effects to make theirs a distinct vampire film. Wendigo isn't saying that Return did top Universal (Son of Dracula came out two months earlier), but Columbia definitely gives the legendary horror factory a run for its money with this film.

IMDB has a trailer I can't embed here, but you can go look at it here.