jriddle73 — 1 year ago(March 06, 2025 02:22 AM)

Released this day–5 March–in 1943, Roy William Neill's FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, Universal's joint 2nd Wolf Man film and 5th Frankenstein flick.
Lon Chaney Jr. returns as Larry Talbot, the tortured wolfman, while Bela Lugosi takes on the part of Frankenstein's monster. The opening sequence, with some grave-robbers breaking into Talbot's tomb and inadvertently resurrecting him, is one of the best in the entire canon of Universal horror of this era.
Studio tinkering harmed the film. In the original version, written by Curt Siodmak, the monster was nearly blind as a consequence of events in the previous film and Lugosi played him that way, somewhat stumbling around with his arms outstretched–the birth of that particular trope regarding the character–but all mention of the blindness is cut from the film, leaving this behavior inexplicable. The film toyed with the idea that the monster was now an amalgam of Lugosi's Ygor, whose brain had been transplanted into its body, and its previous personality. Also deleted. The monster originally spoke with Ygor's voice. Also deleted. The result is a bit of a mess but it was successful, guaranteeing further sequels.
This was the first of what became a cycle of monster mashes that mixed and matched Universal's stable of established horror critters. Among other things, it spawned the entire film career of Paul Naschy, who saw it as a child and grew up to become Spain's top horror star, filling his movies, along the way, with references to this one.
"The Dig"
http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/