Film review: Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Did you know that Airplane! is not primarily a spoof of 70s disaster movies like Airport '77, but was instead an almost shot-for-shot remake (with added jokes of course) of a 50s film called Zero Hour?  It's true.  I bring that up because, prior to watching Son of Frankenstein, I'd thought that Young Frankenstein had invented most of its weirder ideas (like the one-armed inspector who plays darts with the baron and just sticks his darts into his fake arm) and was a general parody of all the Frankenstein movies.  But Son of Frankenstein features a one-armed inspector who sticks his darts into his fake arm!  And the darts-playing is as incongruous and weird as you might expect.  If anything, the sight of an aggrieved Basil Rathbone (who plays the titular scion) hurling darts at a dartboard with venom is even more bizarre in a movie that's not intended to be a comedy.  And now I know this, a little googling reveals that the influence of this film above all is an open secret.  In fact, read this, and it'll save me the trouble of writing a precis.  My comments are these.  First, what a cast!  Rathbone as the Baron, Karloff in his third and final performance as the Monster, and (stealing the movie) Bela Lugosi as Ygor.  We've recently watched (I got the box set of Universal Monster movies as a present a while back) the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (both directed by the great James Whale) and this is generally acknowledges as the best of the remainder after those two all-time classics.  (Whale was apparently dismissed from directing Son after his script was too wild and crazy.)  The differences among them are interesting: as everyone knows, the Monster in mute in the original, but in Bride he can talk.  But now, in Son, he's if anything even more mindless than in the original, and is a puppet of the evil Ygor.  He's also immortal, even though he starts out very sick - bizarrely because of a lightning strike.  The Baron revives him with a third jolt of lightning, so clearly it's odd numbers of lightning strikes that he likes.  He also has a new outfit - instead of the jacket he wears in the other two, he's wearing what looks like a shag carpet as a waistcoat.  Why?  I can't tell you.  Finally, he's actually consigned to a bit part in what should be his movie.  The main characters are the Baron and Ygor, who uses the Monster to bump off the jury that had him hanged ("he got better").  (Talking of Monster: it's become a trope that people mistakenly refer to the Monster as being called Frankenstein - but Rathbone's character complains about this in 1939, so it's hardly a new phenomenon.)  Actually, the Monster is pushed into 4th place by the character of the Inspector, played by Lionel Atwill, who is much more sympathetic than in Young Frankenstein, and in fact, comes off much better than Rathbone's frankly deranged Baron (who mysteriously reforms by the bizarrely-abrupt happy ending).  While it is indeed a step below the preceding classics, this one isn't half bad and certainly the sets are amazing, and the performances very satifyingly over-the-top.  The only thing that grates is the Baron's super-cutesy infant son, who just escapes (chiz chiz) being hurled into a superheated sulfur pit.