Jeepers! The creepers are after Bud and Lou!
After their film partnership was well under way—sometimes, perhaps, not so “well”—Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were frequently “meeting” people. In the late 1940s and ’50s, it was the killer Boris Karloff, Captain Kidd, the Keystone Kops, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and, in 1951, the Mummy, one of their best films.
Even better—the best, by far, of these “getting acquainted” movies—is the comic pair’s encounter with the Frankenstein monster—not only the good doctor’s misassembled creature (here played by Glenn Strange rather than Karloff, who had refused another go at the part), the personification of Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and that wandering moonlighter, the Wolfman in the person of Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.).
The film works because, against the shenanigans of A&C at their best, the monsters play it straight.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which premiered after an extended slump in the team’s box office receipts, was an enormous hit, and is easily the best of all their features. For those not A&C fans—they are an acquired taste much like the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges—they just might be able to tolerate this entry, even laugh a few times.
Instead of “Lou” and “Bud” as was the usual practice on screen, the actors address one another by their character’s names, which causes occasional flubs. So now they become Wilbur Grey (Costello) and Chick Young (Abbott), a pair of railway baggage clerks who unload two crates containing the remains of Count Dracula and the Frankenstein monster.
In a phone call, Larry Talbot attempts to warn Wilbur of the danger in the shipment intended for McDougal’s House of Horrors, but, as luck would have it, at that particular moment he is caught under the influence of a rising full moon. Transformed into a werewolf, he proceeds to destroy his hotel room and Wilbur, thinking it’s a prank call, hangs up.
The writers had apparently forgotten that Dr. Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) had cured Larry of his lycanthropy four years earlier in House of Dracula. No matter: the Frankenstein monster, the Count, the Wolfman, the Mummy—all those wild and vicious creatures—might be irrefutably killed at the end of one movie, but emerge unscathed and ready to go in a subsequent outing.
The Count and the monster waste no time in wreaking havoc. There are abductions, a revolving door, chases, hidden passages, brief jail time for Chick and Wilbur, disguises, more chases and a ball. In all the confusion, Wilbur and Chick find a pier and a lake behind the castle.
Dracula plans to revitalize the monster with a new brain, assisted by the lovely but vividly evil Dr. Sandra Mornay (Lenore Aubert). The two abduct Wilbur for his cranial contents.
The monster is prepared for the operation and Sandra is about to cut into Wilbur’s forehead with a scalpel when Chick and Larry pull him to safety. Later, when Dracula transforms himself into a bat in an attempt to escape, Larry grabs him and the two fall to their deaths on the rocks below.
In the climax, Chick and Wilbur escape from a fire and climb into a rowboat as the monster staggers across the flaming pier and is consumed—a continuity error since his intense fear of fire was clearly established in Frankenstein (1931).
After Chick assures Wilbur that all the bad creatures are dead, a ghostly voice intones, “Oh, that’s too bad. I was hoping to get in on the excitement. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m the Invisible Man!”—an uncredited Vincent Price, who had made The Invisible Man Returns in 1940. Chick and Wilbur jump into the water and swim away amid the laughter of the Invisible Man.
For Bela Lugosi, whose extra make-up hid well his advancing age, this was his last appearance in a movie by a major studio—and his last decent role. Lon Chaney, Jr., by contrast, would never be out of work, even if many of the films were low-budget and humdrum. Although he made the occasional horror movie, he also appeared in a few substantial non-horror films,including High Noon (1952) and The Defiant Ones (1958), and numerous TV movies and series.
While it’s hard to take the eyes off of A&C, the most outstanding performance might well be by Lenore Aubert, something of a Hedy Lamarr look-alike, also born in Austria-Hungary. In 1949, she would make another A&C movie, that meeting with the Killer, Boris Karloff, and end her twenty-picture career in 1952.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG4izxo3pwQ[/embedyt]