New York Times Essential Library: Children's Movies: A Critic's Guide to the Best Films Available on Video and DVD - Softcover

Peter M. Nichols has written about film and video for The New York Times since 1988, and for the column "Taking the Children" since 1994. He has also written and edited articles on the subject for numerous publications. He lives in New York.

New York Times Essential Library: Children's Movies
1. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEINBud Abbott, Lou Costello, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Glenn Strange, Lenore Aubert, Jane RandolphDIRECTED BY CHARLES T. BARTON 1948. 83 minutes. Black and white. No rating 
 
That title needs a little expanding upon. Chick (Bud Abbott) and Wilbur (Lou Costello) meet Frankenstein all right (more accurately, Frankenstein's monster), but their main challenge is Dracula, played to the hilt by that Dracula of movie Draculas, Bela Lugosi. Wolfman, portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr., is also a threat. Frankenstein's creation does put in an appearance, of course. Boris Karloff declined the role in this film (he was sick of it), but there is little falloff with Glenn Strange, a huge man and by all accounts one of the sweetest people ever to disappear under monster makeup.When the film opened in Australia, the three creatures proved so upsetting that they were cut out of it almost entirely--which must have left very little movie. Kids today will love them all, and that includes little kids, once they realize it's all a spoof. Abbott and Costello should please them, too, though some of their patter, honed over years of vaudeville and radio routines, could confuse them. Costello: "I work sixteen hours a day." Abbott: "A union man only works eight hours a day." Costello: "I belong to two unions." You have to be at least seven to follow that.In this scenario both Dracula and Frankenstein have been brought from Europe to the McDougal House of Horrors, run by the obnoxiously curt McDougal (rousingly played by Frank Ferguson, an extremely busy character actor who reportedly appeared in thirteen movies in 1948 alone). One day Wilbur, a McDougal shipping clerk, gets a call from a man named Talbot (Chaney) who warns them thatDracula and the monster are on the way and must be stopped. Talbot would stop them himself, but he turns into Wolfman when the full moon comes out, which in this flick is every night.It seems that Dracula wants the simplest of human brains (Wilbur's) to install in the monster. In true Abbott and Costello fashion, only Wilbur lays eyes on Dracula, the monster, and Wolfman. Chick, the straight man, always arrives seconds too late to see anything. The kids will be amused by the old pivoting dungeon wall trick with Wilbur spinning in and out of perils that Chick just misses.Wild chases ensue through some impressive sets at Universal. Prior to 1946 the studio was churning out a movie a week--Abbott and Costello comedies, Deanna Durbin musicals, Maria Montez exotica, horror movies, serials, shorts, cartoons--but later the studio decided to go highbrow with films like Hamlet, with Laurence Olivier, which won the Oscar in 1948. By then, though, Universal needed money and again turned to Bud and Lou.On the set Costello liked to spray seltzer, start food fights, and set fire to things. The production is said to have laid out $3,800 for pies to throw. In the view of some on the film crew, the real monsters were Abbott and Costello. The movie was directed by Charles T. Barton, a former vaudeville performer himself who made almost every kind of movie imaginable. His recollections of Costello, passed along on the DVD, are of a hotheaded tyrant. Abbott had epilepsy and a drinking problem that often incapacitated him by 4 P.M. Otherwise, they were pros who got the job done.Lugosi was already famous, but he had grave money problems and badly needed the work. On the set, the constant clowning irritated him, but he worked hard, seemed to enjoy himself, and lent good support and tutelage to the rest of a cast not accustomed to working with vampires. Chaney was renowned himself. His father, the silent star Lon Chaney, had played the hunchback of Notre Dame and the deformed creature in Phantom of the Opera, among many roles, but he died before he might have portrayed Dracula in Tod Browning's talkie in 1931. (The role went to Lugosi.)Chaney Jr. played about every name monster, including Frankenstein's and the Mummy, during a career that ran some 150 films. His drinking reportedly far exceeded Abbott's, though he always ralliedon the set. Being Wolfman was an ordeal, requiring staying stock-still during hours of time-lapse photography as the transformation from man to monster progressed. "I didn't relish putting glue all over his face when he was a little high," a makeup woman says on the disc.After the huge success of this movie in 1948, Bud and Lou went on to "meet" about everybody: the Killer (played by Karloff, who didn't object to appearing with the boys as long as it wasn't as Frankenstein), the Invisible Man, Captain Kidd, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Mummy, the Keystone Kops.In 1948 the monster horror tradition of Dracula and the like was about to give way to the atomic age and the giant bugs and aliens of the 1950s. Meet Frankenstein was described as a cross between American folklore and Transylvanian burlesque. Chaney said that good horror involves thought and feeling, and that Abbott and Costello ruined it by making it funny. Perhaps, but horror is no more immune to parody than anything else, and here a good, silly time dresses up in not a bad-looking production. 
Dracula and the rest are hardly threatening to even the very small ones. To make sure, brief them beforehand and while you're at it tell them where all this fits in the monster parade over the decades.Copyright © 2003 by The New York Times Company