"Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" is the only great movie the team ever made.
Every other movie they made is just a series of programmed japes and Joe Miller retreads. They were, in a very real sense, the puppets of gag writers Felix Adler and John Grant.
If this seems harsh, it's because comedy is too important, too precious, to duck constant reevaluation -- even the icons need renewed scrutiny. And Abbott & Costello are certainly comedy icons; in a very mannered and eventually very faded way.
The movie is great by accident more than by intent.
It combines cliches, tropes, and moth-eaten concepts of comedy timing and byplay to produce not a 'send up' of monster films, as most movie critics like to prattle on about, but a superlative cinematic Invictus to the horrors and terrors that mankind faced in the past and continues to face today.
Frank Skinner's opening theme is so heavy handed that it always sinks into the unformed subconscious of every child who has ever seen the film -- those ominous chords still haunt me today, 55 years after first hearing them on our old black & white Magnavox.
The film opens, not with the two star zanies, but with Larry Talbot -- symbol of predestined doom as the wolf man. He introduces the plot, such as it is, and then disappears for the next fifteen minutes of the movie while Bud and Lou begin their slapstick labors. Which are promising and done in an economical and (pardon the pun) no-nonsense manner, as baggage smashers at a Florida train station. Costello gets more comic mileage out of a stack of recalcitrant suitcases than anyone but the Three Stooges.
"Frankly, I don't get it" is the repeated refrain of Bud Abbott during the film; as pudgy Costello is cossetted and cooed over by an assortment of slinky and slimy villians and villianesses. They want his brain for the Frankenstein monster -- thinking it will somehow tame the fearsome proto-zombie into becoming a docile superman who will do their bidding. And that is the first great theme this film harbors and nurtures -- the inexplicable fortunes of each of us. We all believe, more or less, that we are in charge of our own lives -- but there are forces, often malignant, that have mapped out our gruesome destinies, and we seem powerless to discover them or their schemes until it is too late to combat them. Frankly, none of us 'get it." Until it's too late.
Costello's incoherent splutterings as he faces down first Dracula and then the Frankenstein monster are an apt, if obscure, reflection of the world's initial reaction to the Atomic Age at the end of World War Two; faced with such frightful and destructive power, we are all reduced to unnerved burlesque comics.
"I saw what I saw when I saw it!" is another important refrain from the film, as Costello vainly tries to convince others of the monstrosities menacing the community. (BTW: Anyone else notice how much Costello resembles the mature Robert De Niro?) Costello's shrill voice in the wilderness, warbling like a clown Cassandra, should give pause to those who think anything or anyone uncouth and unlicensed can't be telling the truth.
Lyle Talbot is also the wolf man; Dracula poses as a doctor; everyone in the film has a facade, a disguise. A costume party gives the crowd a weird and possibly threatening persona. And so the theme of otherness, of the impossibility of ever really knowing the character of another, becomes prominent as the film spirals towards its climax in a mad scientist's laboratory. And the wolf man's dilemma poses the most disturbing question of all -- can a person even know and command their own self?
The film has no truck with existential posturing; this is not a Jean-Luc Godard film with actors sitting around discussing the meaning of life and death -- this is a mainstream slapstick comedy film in which the protagonists are truly involved in a matter of life and death -- their own. Their peril is both real and supernatural -- and it's that conundrum of the magic and mundane that propels "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" to the heights of an ambiguous Shakespeare or Greek tragedy with raucous comic relief. Things are altogether too grim to flow unceasingly without buffoonish leavening.
The climactic chase, when Dracula, the wolf man, and Frankenstein's monster are all after Abbott & Costello remains one of the most intense slapstick pursuits in cinematic history. All it needs to be complete is Godzilla rising out of the Florida swamp to give a rousing 'yoicks!'
Since it's a traditional comedy, the monsters are defeated and destroyed at the end, and the happy lovers are reunited (oh, did you miss them? No matter -- they were of miniscule importance anyway.)
But slapstick comedies are not romantic comedies; the best ones always have what Mark Twain called a 'snapper' -- a twist that takes the comics out of the frying pan into the fire. And this film ends with a beaut: As Bud and Lou row away from the destroyed monsters they rejoice that all such evil things have at last been wiped off the face of the earth, at which point the Invisible Man, with an insane chortle, lights up a cigarette in their boat. Abbott and Costello naturally jump ship and swim away as the THE END title card appears.
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein is nearly 70 years old, but it succeeds much better at using comedy to explore and explode darkness than, say, Chaplin's 'Great Dictator,' or Harold Lloyd's 'Mad Wednesday.'
The film is an unsettling reminder, a memento mori with pratfalls, that darkness can descend at any time and, but for the grace of God, we all would succumb.
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