Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Directors: Charles Barton and Walter Lantz
Writers: Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo and John Grant
Stars: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange and Lenore Aubert

Index: The First Thirty.

While it took Vincent Price sixteen films to land top billing, achieving it with Shock, and he was very much a supporting actor throughout the rest of his First Thirty, his profile was such that his name made it onto every single poster for every single feature he was in from Service de Luxe to Up in Central Park. That remarkable streak, comprising his first twenty-one films, is ended here, as he’s given less to do in this one than in any other thus far and possibly in his entire career.

That’s because he’s basically just a sight gag in the last minute of the film, delivering a pair of lines and some maniacal laughter to serve as the final punchline to the original Universal comedy horror flick. Let me set the scene.

Abbott and Costello have survived the film, thinking back on what they just went through. While Lou saw everything, his partner didn’t, consistently so for comedic effect, and so he’s adamant to get that across now they’re safe.

“The next time that I tell you that I saw something when I saw it, you believe me that I saw it,” Lou spits out in his infamously thick Brooklyn accent.

Bud is dismissive. “Oh relax. Now that we’ve seen the last of Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Monster, there’s nobody to frighten us any more.”

What he doesn’t realise is that Vincent Price is sitting in the back of their rowboat, not that they can see him because he’s reprising a very specific role from earlier in his career.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” he chimes in in his ever recognisable voice. “I was hoping to get in on the excitement!”

“Who said that?” asks Bud.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” he replies. “I’m the Invisible Man.” And, as he laughs, our leads leap off the boat and the picture ends.

Price is great here, delivering those lines in impeccable fashion, with so much relish that, with over seventy years of hindsight, we hear a string of his more famous horror characters from the sixties and seventies rather than just Geoffrey Radcliffe, who, of course, was notably cured at the end of The Invisible Man Returns.

That sort of thing just doesn’t matter here, because this is the point where two decades of Universal building a vaguely consistent world across dozens of movies, what we might call a monsterverse today, ends and they sit back to let the monsters run free.

That said, the three monsters we see (along with the one at the end that we don’t) appear in recognisable forms, because they’re played by the actors who played them in Universal’s monsterverse. Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney (no Jr. in this credit) reprise the roles of Dracula and the Wolf Man that they originated. While Chaney had also taken over as the Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein, it’s his replacement, Glenn Strange, who plays him here, as he had in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, in which Chaney had returned to the Wolf Man.

Chaney famously disliked this, saying that “Abbott and Costello ruined the horror films: they made buffoons out of the monsters.” He’s arguably right, but it’s fair to say that this was a natural progression, given that the Monster had been consistently relegated in substance to be a robotic boogeyman in the previous pair of films and Dracula’s slave here, spending the entire film recovering spent energy. Lugosi, of course, so powerful in the original Dracula, had already become a caricature of himself.

If we look at this film with far more serious intent than we should, Abbott and Costello are comedians parodying the horror genre; Lugosi and Strange are hamming it up, so appearing comedic without real intent; while Chaney, on his own, plays it straight and clearly aches for us to sympathise with him. It almost becomes embarrassing how much he doesn’t want this to be a comedy and it makes Lawrence Talbot, arguably the hero of the film, far more whiny than he has any right to be.

He’s in London when this begins, gazing out of a window forlornly, partly because the full moon is out but partly because he’s waiting on an international call. Lou Costello answers it in the baggage room for a hotel because he’s a clerk called Wilbur Grey, who works for Chick Young, in the inevitable form of Bud Abbott.

Talbot is keen to get across that two items of baggage there to be delivered to McDougal’s House of Horrors should remain in place until he gets there. Unfortunately, he transforms as he’s on the call and McDougal arrives to shout for his stuff and so Grey and Young ignore him and transport and unbox and the shenanigans begin, because, as you might expect, those two items are a crate and a coffin, which contain the body of the Monster and the remnants of Count Dracula.

Eventually it escalates into a battle between the Wolf Man on the side of good and Dracula and the Monster on the side of bad, and that’s in and around Dracula’s gothic mansion on the lake that Young and Grey row into at the end, with Vincent Price invisibly on board. It takes a while to get there, though, much of which is taken up with slapstick sight gags, that aren’t quite as drawn out as they would become but are overdone and make no sense outside of the comedic framework. How many times does Count Dracula slowly open his creaking coffin? However many it is, it’s too many.

The fun for me was mostly in the story that happens behind that. With the Monster in bad shape, Dracula wants to replace his brain with one that isn’t criminally insane, a stupid one that he can easily control. And that’s why Dr. Mornay, the Count’s minion, is also Costello’s girlfriend, Sandra, to the constant disbelief of Abbott. Lenore Aubert plays this kinda sorta double role wonderfully.

And this only escalates when a second, just as lovely, young lady starts to pursue him too. That’s Jane Randolph as Joan Raymond, who’s an insurance investigator looking into what’s going on at McDougal’s House of Horrors. The clash between the two is silly, of course, but a heck of a lot of fun and it’s great to see Abbott losing out to Costello for a change.

On the horror side, my favourite moments aren’t with the monsters themselves, because none of them feel right. Lugosi overdoes it as Dracula, Strange underdoes it as the Monster and Chaney tries much too hard to not be in a comedy feature. Instead, what made me laugh was Costello’s mimicry of all three of them in an attempt to convince Abbott that they exist.

And the voice of Vincent Price at the end.