Budd Abbott and Lou Costello trod a very thin line. When they missed that line, one of two things happened: Either Abbott veered off from his anti-comedic straight man persona to plain abusiveness, or Costello went from wise-cracking idiot to helpless loon, and the whole confection collapsed in either case. However, when they found that line they had few peers.
In 'Meet Frankenstein' they tread that line well for the most part. Yes, Budd starts off being overly nasty but it evens out pretty quickly once the parade of Universal Monsters starts pouring through the film, with Lon Chaney jr reprising the Wolfman, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster. It seems ridiculous to think about it now, but Universal had the Sherlock Holmes pictures, its iconic monster movies, and Abbott and Costello all in the 1940s! Three sets of hits in one decade, and probably more I don't know! In all likelihood they tried to get Rathbone and Bruce to pair off again Budd and Lou too. What a movie that would have been: Nigel Bruce trading barminess with Lou Costello as Budd and Basil traded sarcasms over their heads!
'Meet Frankenstein' is pretty funny. I prefer 'Pardon My Sarong' from the few Abbott and Costello movies that I've seen, but this is pretty good fun. Yes, it degenerates into an overly long panic session at the end, but there's amusement to be had at the expense of Dracula trying to get out of his coffin while Lou reads his legend, or the Wolfman suffering more consecutive full moon nights than you could reasonably expect to see in any given month (oddly reminiscent of the 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea' werewolf episodes). It's strange to see this and realise how urbane Dracula was as a screen character at the time, more of a Blofeld than a rampaging beast monster, and one who commanded mad and beautiful scientists to do his bidding and solve his problems. There's never a beautiful mad scientist around when you need one in real life.
This film does fall partly into one trap, though not as badly as 'Who Done It', my least favourite so far, which is that of trying to make profoundly grim ideas funny. In 'Who Done It', it was almost impossible to be consistently amused as our titular duo pretended to be police detectives, investigated a murder and were frequently endangered by the murderer himself. In this case, as one of the original squeamish ninnies, it's a bit hard to be amused at the notion of Lou Costello's brain being transplanted to make a newer and more docile monster of Frankenstein for Dracula to control. Monsters are just too inherently sad to be funny, at least to the overly thoughtful. 'Pardon My Sarong' was far better in this respect, and it also had an underwater bus sequence as well as the lie detecting tree! On the flip side of the coin, the sequence with Lou and the Wolfman in his hotel room is pretty cute.
'Meet Frankenstein' doesn't have an underwater bus sequence, but it does have Budd and Lou, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney jr, a spooky castle, animated special effects, electric sparks, a row boat, some fire, and a wobbly bat flying around on strings. Yes, that's right, the wobbly Dracula bat is back!
O.
No comments:
Post a Comment