SON OF FRANKENSTEIN

CUT SIGNATURES OF

Dimensions for this item:
19" x 22 1/2" in black metal frame
Double acid free mat, UV non glare glass

BORIS KARLOFF, LIONEL ATWILL,
BASIL RATHBONE AND JOSEPHINE HUTCHINSON

The first Frankenstein talking picture was made by Universal Studios in 1931. Based on a stage play, the script jettisons Mary Shelley's original conception for a more simply horrific tale. The plot, such as it is, is well known. Henry Frankenstein -- a brilliant medical student (not a doctor) -- is obsessed with creating a living man from diverse fragments of dead men. He withdraws from society and sets up a makeshift laboratory in an abandoned stone castle on a mountain top. Assisted by Fritz, a demented and cruel hunchback, Frankenstein there assembles a "man" and animates the creature with the "great ray" that sparked Life on Earth way back when. This "ray" is conducted by (or equivalent to) atmospheric electricity, and Frankenstein's monster is famously brought to life by great bolts of lightning from heaven.


Initially elated by his success, poor Frankenstein soon becomes disillusioned with his creation. Now that he's made a "man," he knows not what to do with it. Also, he is depressed by the revelation that Fritz had blundered while scavenging a brain for the creature, supplying Frankenstein with a "criminal brain" instead of a "normal" one. Henry keeps the creature chained and locked in a dingy dungeon. Fritz visits the unfortunate monster and harasses him with a torch and a bullwhip. One day the harried monster breaks his chains and kills Fritz. Later he escapes from the laboratory and wanders the countryside, accidentally killing a little girl who had befriended him. The girl's father carries her corpse through the streets of the local village, where the villagers are preparing to celebrate Henry's wedding. The wedding is postponed while angry villagers, accompanied by an apologetic Henry, hunt down and trap the monster in a windmill. Henry confronts his creation inside the structure and the monster tosses him from a second floor window. On the way down, Henry's body is deflected by a blade of the windmill, and he survives the fall. Villagers torch the windmill, and the monster is consumed in the blaze.




In the first film, the monster could not speak, but he could grunt and roar like an animal. He is basically a big child, a tabula rasa. He shows little inclination to violence except when he is wickedly treated by Fritz, and then when he's ignominiously disowned by his creator. This makes the "criminal brain" theory of his bad behavior a red herring of sorts, but one that was apparently swallowed uncritically by great numbers of viewers and movie makers alike. In the excellent sequel Bride of Frankenstein there is no discussion of the monster's abnormal brain, but in later sequels the "criminal brain" assumes real significance. It is remarkable that the monster's most horrifying physical aspect -- his posthumous, piecemeal nature -- is pointedly brushed aside and eventually ignored in the Frankenstein sequels. Perhaps Universal regarded the grim details of his origin as a stumbling block in their campaign to promote the monster as a tolerable "friend to children." Nor is the "great ray" ever again mentioned, that the monster may hereafter be treated as a walking battery.


Promotional piece not included in auction

Bride of Frankenstein finds the monster alive and well in a pool of water beneath the ruined windmill. He wanders into the hut of a blind hermit who befriends him and, in a short time, teaches him to speak individual words -- "bread," "friend," "smoke," "fire," "drink," "good" and "no." When confronted with fire, the monster adds "no" to "good" on his own initiative. Later he falls into the hands of a demented philosophy professor, Dr. Pretorius, who adds to his vocabulary and apparently teaches him an elementary grammar. When mad Dr. Pretorius persuades Henry to return to the laboratory and create a female companion for the monster, the elaborately animated lady shrieks at the sight of her betrothed, and the hapless monster pulls "the lever" that blows the lab, Pretorius and himself to pieces. Before he terminates the picture, however, the monster permits Henry to flee, then turns to Pretorius and growls, "You stay -- we belong dead!" At the apex of his intellectual life, the monster here exhibits both self-knowledge and a sense of justice.



This cut signature measures: 3 x 4 1/2" signed in blue ink with under score on paper with some paperclip markings on upper right corner

Moviegoers may sleep better knowing that Frankenstein's monster is destroyed at the end of each new installment, but history teaches that popular, profitable monsters are really imperishable. In 1939's Son of Frankenstein, we learn that the monster did not die in the explosion of Frankenstein's laboratory -- not because he fell through a trap door, or for any reason other than that "he cannot be destroyed." Even Universal Studios, the chief deity in Frankenstein's universe, cannot destroy the monster, but they could and did degrade him over the course of several wartime sequels.



Promotional piece not included in auction

Son of Frankenstein has Henry's son returning to the ancestral manor after living abroad, remarking to his wife that Dad was a great scientist who suffered for Fritz's stupid blunder re: the "criminal brain." He meets Ygor, a crippled shepherd (brilliantly played by Bela Lugosi) who befriended the monster after the catastrophe in the laboratory. Ygor tells Frankenstein that the monster "cannot be destroyed" and will live forever. Presently, however, the monster is in a comatose state, lying in the Frankenstein family crypt annexed to the ruins of the old laboratory. Ygor says the monster was knocked senseless by a stray blast of lightning. Henry's son runs a powerful electric current through the monster, and after a spell the monster becomes conscious, but he can no longer speak, and he tends to wander aimlessly when Ygor and Dr. Frankenstein aren't giving him directions. Later events induce an emotional catharsis, and Frankenstein is forced to knock the revitalized and vengeful monster into a pit of smoking, bubbling sulfur, through which he sinks rapidly and finally enough for this picture.


Josephine Hutchinson has signed on a program with underscore in  felt pen.  This items measures 2 x 4  1/2"

Ygor had been shot and left for dead in the denouement of Son of Frankenstein, but he is such a good character that he's made to survive into the third sequel, The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942). To be fair, old Ygor is a natural survivor. He was hanged and left for dead in the lost period between Bride and Son of Frankenstein, but he survived his execution with a twisted neck and a heart full of hate. Now he finds the monster alive but embedded in a block of dry sulfur; Ygor digs him out and leads him through the forest, where a bolt of lightning strikes the monster without noticeably harming him. But by now the monster's brain is in a terrible state. Minus his formerly minimal but real personality, Frankenstein's monster is just a huge, ugly lug led about by Ygor, showing no trace of the anguish and resentment that motivated him in the first two films (and part of the third). The monster's sorry condition is probably exacerbated by forces outside the story -- namely, by Boris Karloff's refusal to play The Monster in further sequels after Son of Frankenstein, and his replacement by Universal's new "master of horror," Lon Chaney, Jr. Chaney is best known for two good screen performances, as Lenny the brain-damaged manual laborer in Of Mice and Men (1939), and as Lawrence Talbot, the unstable English aristocrat who becomes an American manual laborer and a reluctant werewolf in Universal's 1941 horror classic, The Wolf Man.


Lionel Atwill has signed on pink autograph paper with underscore.  Slight ink smudge
on end of underscore.( PSA-DNA)

Ygor takes his friend, the monster, to a sanitarium run by a second son of Frankenstein, an M.D. whose existence has never been mentioned or even implied prior to this film. From here the plot pits Dr. Frankenstein's desire to correct his father's "mistake," by replacing the bad "criminal brain" with a good one, against Ygor's new hope of "a life forever" inside his friend's preternaturally durable and powerful body. Mid-film the monster shows some of his old awkward sentimentality when he befriends a little girl and then, in a touching and ludicrous scene, mimes his wish that her nice little brain be placed in his own head.


Promotional piece not included in auction

As a result of some intrigue fostered by Ygor, Dr. Frankenstein unwittingly replaces the damaged "criminal brain" with Ygor's sharp criminal mind. The monster awakens and speaks with Bela Lugosi's heavy Hungarian accent, indicating to the horrified Dr. Frankenstein that he's just created a more terrible monster than even his father had. Ygor's dream of glory is dashed by complications arising from the incompatibility of Ygor's and the monster's different blood types. His brain rapidly loses its ability to perceive optical stimuli, and the Ygor-monster blindly stumbles around a burning building, crying "What good is a brain without eyes to see?!?" until he is presumed dead.


Basil Rathbone has signed on white autograph with underscore and measures 2 1/2 x 3"

Universal's series of "serious" Frankenstein films ended in 1943 with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, which actually served as a direct sequel to two films, The Wolf Man and The Ghost of Frankenstein. Not surprisingly, the Wolf Man was killed at the end of his own movie. In F Meets WM both creatures are restored, and attempts are made to improve their respective lots in life. In the Frankenstein monster's case, this involves "connecting the minus to the minus" while pumping him full of electricity. At the climax, the creatures scuffle in the second son of Frankenstein's lately renovated laboratory.* The battle is aborted when, for a change of pace, angry villagers (who as a species grow more vicious and intolerant with each successive Frankenstein film) blow up a nearby dam, thereby inundating the Frankenstein lab and washing away the monsters.


Black and White Photo measure 8" x 10" and is very sharp

F Meets WM is really the Wolf Man's film, and the Frankenstein monster is at his most ridiculous. He's played by Bela Lugosi, and he is supposed to speak and be blind, in accordance with the events concluding The Ghost of Frankenstein. In F Meets WM the audience is never told that the monster is blind, so his staggering about -- "blindly" -- looks like a malicious caricature of the monster's natural clumsiness. Also, Universal brass were rattled by the monster's heavy Hungarian accent, and so all of Lugosi's dialogue and the scenes that required it were edited out of the film.
 

This photo measure  7 x 9 " and is a B & W movie scene.

Later, the Frankenstein monster was trotted out for cameo parts in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula (1944-1945), but by then it had ceased to be a thing of horror. The monster's next major film for Universal was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), a comedy.

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