DISNEY ANIMATION: MUSIC WILL PLAY THE SHADOWS AWAY

It is a known thing that Walt Disney took the failure of Fantasia badly, and on a rather personal level. The film that was to have been the culmination of his artistic ambitions become a well-reviewed box-office meltdown, and if the studio never again came even close to making such a self-consciously artsy movie again, I think it is because the cuts that the producer received in those fateful days late in 1940 and early in 1941 never really healed.

In the midst of Disney's run of package films in the 1940s, two films were released that were both modeled explicitly after Fantasia, though with modern pop music instead of classic pieces, far less expansive running times, and much simpler animation. I do not know if this was Walt's attempt to prove that his basic idea of a non-narrative program of music and animation was sound, a bitter reproach to the philistines who couldn't appreciate his visionary genius for what it was, or if in face Walt had nothing to do with these films at all, and had locked himself away to brood over the direction his fate had gone over the last few years. At any rate, Make Mine Music, the first of the two "Poor Man's Fantasias" as they are often called, is one of the saddest little orphans in the whole of the Disney animated features canon. It couldn't even turn a profit during its single theatrical release - proving, if nothing else, that the whole "music + animated shorts = feature" probably wasn't something that Disney should keep pursuing, and its lonely place in history was cemented when it became the very last Disney vault title to ever see release on home video (it debuted on VHS and DVD in June, 2000; Saludos Amigos beat it by just about one month).

Though the film hits more than it misses over the course of its ten sequences - and one of the hits is among the best of the many shorts that the studio released in that decade - it's not hard to understand why the film was ignored and then forgotten. It suffers from a general lack of affect that was becoming a significant source of evil at the Disney Studios in the immediate post-war years: constantly scrabbling for money, lost without the guiding hand of Walt, who by all accounts had spent most of his energy devising exciting propaganda films and somewhat lost interest in animation once the money to do the things he wanted had dried up.

In short, this was a period of transition for Disney, and much like the twenty-year interregnum following Walt's death in 1966, the studio was caught in an identity crisis that threatened to destroy it altogether. Financially, the only thing that was keeping the studio afloat were re-issues of older movies: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1944, followed by Pinocchio in 1945 (Fantasia would once again flop when it was re-released in 1946). The war years had seen a second live-action documentary incorporating animated sequences, the propaganda effort Victory Through Air Power, to sit alongside The Reluctant Dragon; the idea that live-action might be a valid future direction for the studio to go was reinforced by the production of Song of the South, a hybrid film refining the technology developed for The Three Caballeros. It was this project that received most of Walt's attention, while Make Mine Music languished in the animation department, and it far out-grossed its little cousin in the 1946 box office charts. Its success spurred the creation of more and more live-action movies, forcing Disney animation deeper into its shell as the decade progressed.

So much for the history lesson. Let us now take a look at this sorry little thing, this Make Mine Music that got put together despite the fact that nobody much cared for it, yet which still found the animators - all of them the same greatly talented craftsmen who'd given so much to the masterpieces of the early years of the '40s - trying in small ways to extend the limits of their art.

Like Fantasia, which included everything from an abstract Baroque piece to instantly familar and comfortable symphonic pieces to nervy modernism, Make Mine Music is deliberately pitched as a survey of many different genres popular at the time: ballads and jazz, opera and pop. And like Fantasia, the conceit is that we're attending a concert of sorts, taking place in a lovely Art Deco skyscraper that's revealed in the opening credits - and it doesn't speak terribly well of the film that some of the most well-drawn material in the film is the credit sequence, but it's too early to bitch about that.

The first of the ten numbers finds The King's Men, a bluegrass group, singing the story of "The Martins and the Coys", a tale of two feuding Appalachian families modeled after the Hatfields and the McCoys. This sequence was snipped from the DVD release of the film, and there is some conflict as two why: there are those who tell you it's because of the gun violence - very nearly the first thing that happens is that both families die in a hail of bullets, though of course we don't actually see the deaths, only their angels rising up cartoon-style - or because it insulting to the rural mountain dwellers of the Appalachians. Frankly, I'd prefer it be the latter, if only because that at least fits in with the bullshit political correctness that still keeps Song of the South from home video, even in a scholarly edition; the caricatures are pretty dumbfounding, though no worse than much of what you can find in the animation of Disney and other studios in that period.

At any rate, the sequence quickly turns into a cutesy romance about the last Martin and the last Coy falling in love, only to have their own domestic squabbles far outstrip any of the rancor between their two families. It's a faintly amusing comic piece, and it's pretty well-animated, all things considered; it opens with an ambitious multiplane camera shot that seems far more complex than the package films' low budgets would ordinarily permit. But it offers little that isn't found in any of the stand-alone Disney comic shorts of the period, and it's a distinctly pokey way to start things off. The song is especially irritating to modern ears, which helps not at all.

Next up, the Ken Darby Singers perform "Blue Bayou", the most curious piece in the whole feature, for it consists of footage first animated for Fantasia, when it was to have been accompanied by Claude Debussy's Suite Bergamasque, or Clair de lune. It was inked and painted a year after Fantasia tanked, meant to be released as a short, but it was shelved, and only now, after being significantly recut, did it find its way to the public eye, yoked to a pleasant but unforgivably drowsy ballad.

It's obvious that "Blue Bayou" was animated when money was much freer than it had become in 1946: it's the most detailed and painterly of all the shorts in Make Mine Music. Just like the label says, it depicts a bayou, and it is blue, in the light of a full moon. It looks not unlike a moving oil painting, and the animation of a heron at one point is a particularly lovely touch, and when all is said and done it cannot be denied that this is the most visually accomplished part of the feature; but there's no getting around that damn song, which is so sleepy that it makes you want to close your eyes and drift far, far away from the movie. Here we see the first occurrence of a problem that virtually overwhelms Make Mine Music: it shifts tones too abruptly to ever develop a reasonable flow, and so it hangs together less successfully than any of the other package films.

Case in point: the very next number is a bouncy jazz number performed by Benny Goodman and his band. Called "All the Cats Join In", it's one of the four unqualified successes of the feature, although it helps to have a high tolerance for '40s jazz-pop. The narrative is simple: a teen boy is alone at the soda shop, and he wants some friends to help him swing, or jive, or whatever verb you used in the '40s to mean "dance to poppy, white-friendly jazz". So he calls up his girl, and picks her up in his car, and they grab a bunch of friends (or "cats" in the teenage vernacular of those days) and get to dancing. The song comments mindlessly on this action: "Down goes my last two bits / Comes up one banana split / And all the cats join in".

What makes this supremely interesting is the animation style, unlike anything else in Disney at the time: full of round, somewhat expressionless and mostly anonymous characters, against a background of the most barbarically simple line drawings. And not just line drawings, but drawings that are drawn right before our eyes, by an animated pencil working hectically to keep up with the high-pitched energy of the song (it fails, at one point, and a boy falls to the ground when his stool doesn't appear in time). It was the second time the Disney animators had used that trick, after the final sequence in Saludos Amigos, beating Chuck Jones's epochal Warner short "Duck Amuck" by still seven years (though, of course, not bettering it).

None of it is a timeless example of graphic art, but as a depiction of what the '40s looked like in the '40s, it's an amusing time capsule that still entertains in its own right, and it gets extra points for indicating, in a roundabout way, that women are naked under their clothes - I don't mean to sound pervy all the time, but when sex accidentally finds its way into a Disney film, it's worth mentioning it, for it is rare. And "All the Cats Join In" thankfully acknowledges that even in its sanitised, Benny Goodman form, jazz is about having sex.

The tone shifts back into the sleepy in "Without You", sung by Andy Russell. This is perhaps the most pointless bit of animation ever created for a Disney production: nothing but dull backgrounds that get some interesting effects animation thrown at them, most of it watery in nature. The song is inordinately soporific, and the best and only justification I can come up with for what is thankfully the shortest piece in Make Mine Music is that it makes a good demo reel for how the Disney animators could replicate the optical effects of looking at still images through moving water.

The next number, bringing us halfway through, is "Casey at the Bat", a recitation of the 1888 poem of the tragedy of losing a baseball game, performed by Bob Hope's sidekick Jerry Colonna. I am at a loss to explain what music is being made mine, or anybody else's; this is a dramatic reading by a man using a comic Irish accent, with a score beneath it, but to call it a "song" bends the definition of that word a bit far beyond. Leaving that aside: one of the three longest sequences in the film, it's also one of the two most famous, though I do not personally consider it one of the very best shorts here, largely because of Colonna's indulgent line readings. But it is certainly a funny enough piece, animated more according to the Warner Bros. style of crazy physics and exaggerated physical performance than what we'd usually expect to see from a routine Disney piece. I suspect that, as in The Three Caballeros, the animators were simply trying on a new style to keep themselves amused. And lo! it is amusing. To describe it too fully is to break the joke, but for the sheer spectacle of Looney Tunes physics and Disney character design being mashed together, it is of more than incidental interest for the dedicated 1940s animation scholar.

The second half begins with "Two Silhouettes", another slow segment. This one is sung by Dinah Shore, one of the most popular singers of her era, and danced by the Russian ballet team of David Lichine and Tatiana Riabouchinska. It is a lovely and delicate thing, though the rotoscoping used to capture the dancers as the silhouettes of the title has not aged as well as some of the other tricks used by the Disney animators throughout the years. As with all of the slow numbers, it bogs down a little, but it is pretty, with nicely expressive use of color to evoke silhouettes in love. Still, you can just tell that the artists weren't stretching with this one, at all.

Next, we have the great masterpiece of Make Mine Music: Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, as narrated by Sterling Holloway, well on his way to becoming one of the indispensable Disney voice artists. The short was good enough to accompany the subsequent theatrical re-release of Fantasia, and despite the bubbly comic tone (and the musical simplicity of the composition), it surely fits with that film better than the poppy feature that it was created for.

The story has been Disneyfied a bit; the characters given names, the duck remains un-eaten. But in the main this is a wholly successful version of Prokofiev's classic children's music. It has a charmingly cartoonish appreciation of Russian culture and language, which I think to be a holdover from the war, Holloway's narration is about as close to perfection as any other English narrator of the piece has ever managed (though I remain enamored of Leonard Bernstein's recording), and the character design is, while quite simple, round and appealing in the way of the best American cartoons (Peter, I mention for no reason, looks a lot like the young hero of "The Flying Gauchito" from The Three Caballeros, with different hair).

The one glowing exception is the wolf itself. A triumph of design and animation wasted on a forgotten feature like this, the wolf is one of the great Disney villains, period. With fiery yellow eyes and a long snout of giant teeth, he's one of the most genuinely scary creations the animators ever put to celluloid, more a hellbeast than an animal, and his movements suggest a weight that his skinny frame doesn't appear to possess, giving him an extra dash of otherworldliness. If there was not a single thing to recommend Make Mine Music but the wolf, I would still not be prepared to throw the whole thing out. That much do I find this character a work of great artistry.

"After You've Gone" is a fun noodling about, but, especially after "Peter and the Wolf", it has all the significance of a glass of water meant to cleanse the palate. Another Benny Goodman song, this one instrumental, the number is basically like Fantasia's "Toccata and Fugue", an attempt to dramatise the act of listening to music, which here means jazz instruments running around and morphing into other things. It is pleasant, forgettable, and boasts some fun, bright colors - that is all.

The Andrews Sisters, a group that I have never been able to stand, follow with "Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnett" (Edith Piaf peformed it in the French dub, lucky damn bastard French). It's a cute love story, about two hats that fall in love in a store window, but when she is sold he spends the next several - months? years? - looking for her. Aside from the fact that I don't like the music, the big problem I have with this sequence is the character design: maybe it is possible to make anthropomorphic hats that aren't a bit disgusting to look at, but that has not been achieved here, particularly with Johnny, whose mouth is formed by the broad area that a man's head goes in. I remember being freaked out when I saw this on one Disney TV show or another (with "Casey" and "Peter", this is the most frequently anthologised segment from Make Mine Music), so maybe this is just a childhood trauma thing speaking. At any rate, I cannot fault the nice development of the story, nor the animation quality. The best part of all are the backgrounds, colored with a technique I cannot readily name, but in some sequences it looks like chalk.

The finale is "The Whale Who Wanted to Sing At the Met", a short "about" music more than it is a musical short. The title explains most of it: Willie, a sperm whale that can sing opera in tenor, baritone and bass voices, wants to get his big break, but the impresario Tetti Tatti assumes that the whale has swallowed a trio of opera singers, and mounts an expedition to get them back out, by killing Willie. In no small part, the piece is a showcase for the skills of Nelson Eddy, once the highest-paid singer in the world, and a huge crossover star between the spheres of high opera and Hollywood musicals. He sings everything in four (or five?) different ranges, as well as acting multiple characters, and though I have little use for the overly flowery style that characterised much of opera singing in the first half of the 20th Century, I must concede that what Eddy did in this film was quite amazing.

By and large, this last sequence is more interesting in the concept than the execution: although Willie himself is a well-animated character, with no qualification, and there is a moment where he plays Méphistophélès in Gounod's Faust that is one of the damn cutest things in any of the package films. All the same, the story just doesn't hold together much at all, and the piece can't support its running time, or its out-of-left-field tragic ending.

In other words, it makes a fairly appropriate conclusion for Make Mine Music: it is so close to good in enough ways that you might as well just call it worthwhile, but it has a tremendous lack of direction, and it wobbles badly in tone. Thus ends one of the most sweetly inept attempts to make a feature film in Disney animated history. Part of me really likes the film; the much greater remainder of me is annoyed and saddened by its bumbling awkwardness. Thankfully, the next stab at a poor man's Fantasia, though still no masterpiece, would turn out far better.

BALLAD OF A CRUEL MAN

The film Bronson, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn who co-wrote the script with Brock Norman Brock, is on paper a biopic of Michael Peterson, a man who has been in prisons and institutions for the criminally insane for the most of the years since his imprisonment in 1974, at age 19, for holding up a post office; but it is not at all the kind of biopic that explains what made its subject into the man he became. It is the kind of biopic that presents its subject as a force unknowable, someone who commands our attention for 92 terrifying minutes and reveals nothing of himself, remaining ungodly pleased with his monstrous opacity. For that matter, I can't say that I'd want to get to know Peterson any more than that: he is a being of savage, animal brutality, and just bearing witness to his actions is a draining, awful experience. Adding in to that mix a close study of the inside of his brain would almost be more intense than it would be possible to bear.

Peterson, who adopted for himself the name "Charles Bronson" in honor of that actor and his iconic turn in Death Wish, is called "Britain's most famous prisoner" in a title card at the end of the movie, and one gets the clear sense from the evidence onscreen that this is as agreeable a fate as he could have possibly chosen for himself; it seems indeed that the only motivation he has in life is to be infamous, whether it is among inmates, prison guards, or the population at large. I don't know if you could call it a framework narrative per se, but the story is structured so that large portions of the film are described from the perspective of Bronson standing on a stage in front of a deeply appreciative audience, recollecting incidents from his life and occasionally acting them out. It seems reasonably safe to assume that most of what we see is spun from the circa-2008 recollections that he has of the previous 34 years, especially because he does not seem to age in all that time, but to always be the 53-year-old version of himself, even in his flashbacks, suggesting maybe that he regards his life as an eternal present, made up of an endless stream of choices made in the now with little regard to where he is coming from or what his choices might mean for the future.

There was no possible way for a protagonist thus conceived to be anything but a cipher - no, that's a word with negative connotations. There is no internal "there" there, but his actions define him far too much to consider him a blank surface. Perhaps what we're seeing is, in fact, characterisation - the perfect, unmarred id let loose to torment and destroy. No matter the case, though, it was surely a devilishly hard role to play, and that makes the work of actor Tom Hardy all the more impressive, one of the best performances of the year, maybe. It is certainly one of the most committed. We see one scene after another of Bronson, naked and covered in body paint and grease, roaring at the police and defying them to administer yet another beatdown in the hopes of maybe, this time, subduing the raging thing that has come into their prison, one does not merely note with admiration his fearless embrace of the physical extremes of the role, one begins to worry for his sanity.

Refn's treatment of the material makes the perhaps necessary choice to put a box around Hardy's howl-from-hell performance, sometimes literally - some of the most arresting images in the movie are of Bronson in a cage hardly big enough to contain him standing. But I am referring more to the film's stylised compositions, giving Bronson a formal rigor that keeps the action at a distance from us, although even this does not always mean that it is a comfortable distance: in moments like the opening shot, with Bronson's face dead center in a field of black, it has rather the opposite effect, trapping us alone in a void with this man. But those moments are exceptional, and always find Bronson in his moments of greatest (relative) tranquility - when he is at his most violent or angriest, that is when Refn and his cinematographer Larry Smith break out the heavily formalist frames-within-frames, and when the soundtrack blares to life, full of pulsating Wagner pieces and angry '80s electronic music.

The combination of horrific violence, soaring music, and chilly stylistic precision that makes the whole thing feel like an experiment can only naturally call to mind A Clockwork Orange, which is in all ways a much better film. That said, Refn's aesthetic owes more to the collective work of Stanley Kubrick than just that one film - and in that connection, it is surely worth pointing out that Larry Smith worked on the sets of Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, if the IMDb does not lie to me - and for any modern filmmaker to earn a comparison to Kubrick, even if that comparison ends with "ay, but he's not nearly as good at is", is an achievement in and of itself, demonstrating a clinical relationship towards his misanthropic subject matter that is not at all in style right now, if indeed it ever was.

Now, while I very much respect what Refn and his crew, and Tom Hardy above all, have achieved here, I am at a loss to answer one question: why bother? The film makes no arguments about Bronson the real-life man, rightly I think, and makes certain that we understand his particularly breed of violence is particular to him and him alone - rather, to the fictionalised movie construct basted upon him. At the end of the movie, it's hard to say what we've experienced beyond a harrowing vision of a truly brutal man, and while it's impossible to argue that it makes no impact, it still seems to me that the impact is primarily a nihilistic one: the movie is distressing to experience, without any explanation of why. By all means, the achievement of getting to that place is undeniable, but it makes Bronson a tremendously difficult film to recommend, even if there's nothing about its aesthetic that I can criticise in any particular way.

8/10

DISNEY ANIMATION: THREE HAPPY CHAPPIES WITH SNAPPY SERAPES

Saludos Amigos was a big enough success that Walt Disney was encouraged to put into production a second Latin American project, again theoretically meant to foster goodwill during the hard days of World War II. This quasi-sequel from 1944, The Three Caballeros (treating upon Brazil once again, along with Mexico in the place of Peru, Chile and Argentina), was a significantly more ambitious production: not just a half-hour longer, it also marked the first time since his silent Alice comedies that Walt oversaw the combination of live action footage with animation, a technology that was only a bit less dodgy than it had been in the '20s. But there's a certain X-factor to it above and beyond such quantifiable thingst; as though, having hacked out what amounted to a quota quickie two years prior, the animators wanted to make something a bit more distinctive and original and, to be frank, absolutely crazed. I would define the different meta-narratives of the two films thusly: the underlying statement of Saludos Amigos is, "Boy, those curious foreigners! Ha ha, they sure do have customs! And they like color! How about that?" while in The Three Caballeros it is more along the lines of, "Peyote buttons? Never heard of 'em, but I guess I'll try a few."

It's the film that Saludos Amigos was supposed to be; it still possesses a rather obnoxiously reductive vision of what Latin American life consists of (exotic animals and sexy women, surrounded by day-glo colors), but on the other hand it's damn entertaining, It also does something that's not altogether unlike its mission statement: showcase the locales and people of Latin America in a manner edifying to people in the U.S. and at the same time promising to the citizenry of the Latin American countries in question that we Yanks would very much like to be their friends. This is largely achieved by having Donald Duck chase after Mexican women constantly for the movie's last 25 minutes, but at least it's not so inane as the preceding movie.

Of all six package movies, The Three Caballeros comes the closest to being a proper narrative, and there are only two shorts that really feel separate from the rest of the work. Here's how it begins: first, are the brightly-colored credits, which I mention largely to notice the odd fact that this is the first Disney feature give credit to its voice cast, although they are not identified by character. Then the film itself begins, on a semi-ominous shot of a large parcel sitting in a featureless void. It would appear that the void is in fact Donald Duck's home, for he soon bounds in, excited to have received such a large bundle, which judging from the tag (which dissolves from Spanish to English before Donald's eyes) is a birthday present from his friends in Latin America (apparently Donald, at least, made good use of the 1941 goodwill tour). The parcel proves to be full of birthday presents, which the duck leaps into with glee; it is a movie projector, and a reel of film titled "Aves Raras" ["Rare Birds"]. It would seem that the film is meant to be a celebration of the wildlife of South America, but the first segment is actually a lengthy tale of Pablo, the cold-blooded penguin, who longed to journey from Antarctica to the Galapagos Islands. Only then comes a brief discussion of some of the birds to be found in the Amazon basin, comically treating on their foibles and physical appearance. Among these many creatures is the strange Aracuan, a bright pink fellow with a baggy shirt and a shock of red hair, who pops right out of the movie to greet Donald.

The film wraps up with the story of a Paraguayan boy who found a flying donkey, and this is effectively the end of the "anthology" portion of The Three Caballeros all that follows will be a more-or-less continuous extension of the framework narrative, divided into episodes of anywhere from a couple minutes to around ten minutes. The flow of these episodes is incredibly surreal - I would not hesitate to call it the most surreal work ever produced by the Disney studios. Donald's next present is a book from Brazil, which opens in a series of pop-up dioramas, one of which has his parrot friend José Carioca puffing away contentedly at a cigar in a café. José is delighted to see Donald, and after their greetings are done, he asks of Donald: "Have you been to Baía?" Donald's negative answer sends José into a reverie, thinking of the unbridled romance of this, the most beautiful city in Brazil (as near as I can tell, they're referring to Salvador, AKA São Salvador da Baía de Todos os Santos, and I can find no reference to it ever being called just plain Baía outside of this movie). His reverie done, he launches into a little samba and clubs Donald with a mallet, shrinking the duck to a size where they can both fit into the train just pulling up into the book. Along their train trip to Baía, the Aracuan pops up to wreak a little havoc, but he doesn't do any lasting harm, and thus do the boys end up in the city at last. There, Donald falls head over heels in love with Aurora Miranda (Carmen's sister), singing a song titled "Os Quindins de Yaya", about selling cookies, which I assume to be a euphemism.

Having failed to make it with Ms. Miranda, Donald and José return to Donald's terrifyingly nihilistic living room, where José shows his friend how to reinflate to normal size and open his last present: a big box from Mexico. Inside is a literal explosion of masks, candy, bits of colorful paper, and pistol-packing rooster named Panchito, who is so hugely thrilled to be with the others that he immediately leads them in song, musically declaring how wonderful it is to be "The Three Caballeros". This done, he presents Donald with a piñata, but before the duck gets a chance to split it open, Panchito describes in short detail one of the Christmas traditions of his country, all of the children of a town going on a mock-pilgrimage in honor of Joseph and the Virgin. Donald doesn't really give a shit, and after some slapsticky business he breaks the piñata, which is full of many delights, but the most delightful is a magical flying sarape that allows Panchito to show Donald and José live-action footage of three Mexican cities. Donald is mostly interested in the live-action girls he spots there, and the other two must bodily restrain him.

There is presumably a scene cut here for content on latter-day video releases, because it seems clear that what happens next is that Donald has too much mescal, and in the skies over Acapulco he begins to hallucinate: a woman sings to him, he sees her face in flowers, José and Panchito keep bursting in and annoying him, cacti dance, and finally, back in his nightmarish, empty home, he pretends that he is a bull and things blow up.

Here's what's craziest about The Three Caballeros: I didn't even mention the most surreal bits in that recap. This is by far the strangest feature-length movie in the history of the Walt Disney Company, with virtually every new minute bringing something more insanely creative than the last to our attention. It doesn't event take the extended framework plot to get there, either. "The Cold-Blooded Penguin" is as peculiar as any short the studio ever produced, with Sterling Holloway narrating in the driest, most ironic tone of voice possible, reminding one of the later work that Edward Everett Horton would do for Jay Ward's "Fractured Fairy Tales"; the short is also an exemplar of the finest in cartoon physics. "The Flying Gauchito", in turn, is an uncharacteristically post-modern stab at storytelling, as the old man recalling his youth keeps stumbling over the details, to the irritation of his younger self.

But the joys of the film are mostly found in the Donald plot, where the animators, apparently chafing to do any damn thing (The Three Caballeros was produced in 1944, a year and a half after Bambi and Saludos Amigos were finished), turned off any desire for realism or sensibility and let themselves go wild. The Three Caballeros is the closest that the Disney Studios ever came to the surrealistic anarchy of the Looney Tunes shorts over at Warner Bros. These we have multiple examples of Donald grabbing a beam of light as though it were a tangible object (the latter in the midst of a brilliant comic number where he attempts to replicate José's black magic skills, getting his limbs all tangled up in the process), scenes of José spontaneously dividing into four replicas and having a conversation amongst himself, to say nothing of the ten-minute cavalcade of head movie images years before anyone at Disney is likely to have even heard of LSD. Clearly, this is a film in which a number of gifted artists, freed from the constraints of telling clear stories on classical themes, indulged their playful sides, and it's quite giddy to watch, even as it drags down in some points.

Nowhere is this feeling of "hell with it, let's just be silly" clearer than in the title number, one of the greatest achievements of animator Ward Kimball (who had already supervised Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket and Dumbo's crows). Kimball was something an animating savant who found "normal" animation a bit too simple for his tastes; his best work ran towards the more stylised, comic, and absurd - his masterwork was the 1953 short "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom", the first animated CinemaScope release, and probably the most stylistically unusual thing in Disney Studios history. For "The Three Caballeros", Kimball had been given a free hand, to do whatever he liked; faced with an essentially non-narrative song, he solved the problem it set him by simply putting everything in the lyrics onscreen for the duration of one line. Just to add some humor, he also made certain to keep Donald one step behind Panchito and José, always messing up the dance moves they executed flawlessly. The result is the most imaginative, fun three minutes of Disney animation during the whole fallow period between 1942 and 1950, and arguably one of the most entertaining musical numbers to watch in the company's canon.

About the madness of the Donald Duck sex farce, I can really think of nothing to say: not because it is a sequence unworthy of consideration, but because it's so wholly bizarre as to beggar language. Sexuality is always a weird thing in a Disney movie, but when it's live action women and the most popular animated star of the 1940s, and he's being really, unabashedly horny... it actually makes you feel a little dirty to watch it, I don't mind saying, and not just because of how objectified the women are. Heck, that probably makes it easier to watch. At any rate, in a film full of surrealist touches, Donald the sex fiend is easily the strangest part, though certainly one of the most memorable. (The fact that the animation looks a bit pasted on top of the live action footage just makes it all the weirder).

It's not all silliness and surrealism in the film, mind you: the "Baía" number is nothing but a camera gliding over lovely impressionistic oil backgrounds, for example. And the Christmas sequence - "Las Posadas" - is a series of wonderfully charming still images of little Mexican children out at night, all designed by the whimisical hand of Mary Blair if I know anything about anything at all. By no means is any of this up to the remarkable level of technical achievement found in the pre-war features, but for a film made on the cheap, it's infinitely more attractive than the slipshod Saludos Amigos.

Not to give away the next few reviews or nothing, but this is my favorite of the package films; a chance to see the Disney animators in a rare moment of blissed-out creativity, and the combination of color and sound and character (this film is, I think, the finest moment in Donald Duck's career; certainly his peak after 1935's "The Band Concert") makes it as energetic as just about anything else in the Disney canon. Oh, it's clearly not an expensive project that a lot of time had been sunk into; but it has such a loopy appeal that it doesn't necessarily need to be. Given that Disney animation couldn't be too ambitious or exciting in the 1940s, I'm glad the animators were still able to to produce something with this kind of vitality.

NOVEMBER 2009 MOVIE PREVIEW

Now we're starting to get us some proper prestige releases! Along with a really odd number of blockbuster-type movies for this time of the year. Of course, the annual tradition of opening all the good movies in New York and Los Angeles before the rest of us get to take a peek continues unabated, and this means that nearly everything super-exciting in November isn't actually coming out until December.

6.11.2009
Every time I see the ads for "Disney's A Christmas Carol", I get insanely peeved at that possessive noun. Not only does Robert Zemeckis not merit a damn, apparently the obscure English novelist Charles Dickens doesn't either. But then I see the eye-shattering mo-cap animation, and I forgive all; for whatever it takes to keep my boy Charlie's name from being associated with something that looks that skin-crawling and awful, I approve.

Some really weird counterprogramming choices: The Fourth Kind, an alien abduction horror picture with a really aggressive "base on a true story" angle, not to mention a title that really does just hang its balls right out there. When I see the trailer, and Milla Jovovich comes out all, "I'm Milla Jovovich, and I'm this movie's appeal to authority," I get the giggles.

Also: The Box, in which Richard Kelly, mindfucker extraordinaire, turns a really elegant little Richard Matheson short story into something not so elegant; and The Men Who Stare at Goats, an Oscar-baity Iraq War comedy that looks absolutely terrible, based on the clips I've seen; but George Clooney is one of our most reliable actors...

NY/LA WATCH! A movie with a whole year's worth of buzz and the single worst title of 2009 finally gets released: Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, and at this point, I cannot tell you how badly I want to despise it, because OH MY GOD stop talking about it every single place on the internet. Expands: 11/13, then 11/20.

That Evening Sun, which has Hal Holbrook in it, and he is apparently good, and if there's more to it, I don't know anything. Expands: 11/20.


13.11.2009
While all y'all in the only cities that matter keep getting some proper films, the rest of us get to bask in the light of Roland Emmerich, whose latest "the world blows up" movie comes out on this weird date for a popcorn movie. 2012 is the film, and though I know it is going to be awful, I have high hopes that it will be awesomely awful and not just bad, and here is why: the trailer has a shot of the USS John F. Kennedy crushing the White House on the back of a huge wave. If that is not some goddamn high-ass concept shit right there, then I don't know what is.

Those who don't like the Emmerich have to settle for Pirate Radio, a film that looks so terrible I don't even want to talk about it.

NY/LA WATCH! Wes Anderson releases his first animated feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and though it looks altogether odd from the trailer, every time I see it I get a little bit more okay with the animation style. Whether or not Anderson will be able to shake the mildew from his work, now there is the question. But I think that at the very least, this story won't give him any chances to be unconsciously racist. Expands: 11/20, then 11/25.

Iraq drama: The Messenger. It is meant to be a good Iraq drama, so that is something, but still. Expands: 11/20


20.11.2009
Pretty scant wide-release offerings: Planet 51, an ugly-looking sci-fi cartoon, and a true-life Inspirational Tale of Inspiration, The Blind Side, featuring the indefatigable Sandra Bullock.

Right, and a certain... sequel... fuck fuck FUCK The Twilight Saga: New Moon, a sequel to a terrible movie, based on a terrible book that is even worse than the terrible first one, and at the time the first one was the worst book I'd ever read all the way through. "Saga", by the way, is a horribly unsupportable word for the combustive lack of occurrence in these books, unless it is short for "So gawddamn bad". The worst thing is - I will be seeing it, maybe even opening night, because I made a suicide pact with a friend, although at the time I don't think we realised that "Let's see all the Twilight films at the same time" was actual going to kill us.

NY/LA WATCH! Werner Herzog's latest, and it is supposed to be damn fine: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Expands: 12/4

John Woo's latest, and it is also supposed to be damn fine: Red Cliff. Expands: 11/25.

¡VIVA ALMODÓVAR! Expands: 12/11


25.11.2009 - Thanksgiving Weekend
Sometimes, the studios actually try to put things out that folk are going to want to see with their families on Thanksgiving Weekend. And sometimes they only release Ninja Assassin (an R-rated bloody action picture), The Road (based on one of the most depressing novels of all time), and Old Dogs (from the fucker who made Wild Hogs. Oh, goddamn it, that means this is supposed to be the family picture, doesn't it?)

NY/LA WATCH! You're kidding me - Disney is actually doing a platform release on The Princess and the Frog? Blow me. Expands: 12/11

Richard Linklater (yay!) works with Zac Efron (ew!) in Me and Orson Welles. Efron is Me, not Welles. Expands: January


27.11.2009
Some poor bastard of a film has to open the day after Thanksgiving, and this year it's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, which is okay, because it sounds pretty damn boring. Woman married to a man man years her senior has an existential crisis. I'm sure you Robin Wright Penn completists are going to have a good time.

DISNEY ANIMATION: A WARM HANDSHAKE OR TWO

In 1942, a terrible fate hit the Disney Studios, from which the company perhaps never entirely recovered. The three "arty" features - Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi - represented a business model that could never, ever be sustained, but Dumbo proved that there was still a market for exquisite little gems without so much of the insane ambition for drama and visual enormity. The problem was, the cost of making the ambitious films tapped out the studio's coffers pretty well, and while the Dumbo profits kept the studio alive, they didn't do much else, particularly in light of the crises of '41 and '42: the animators' stike, and America's induction into the war, which cost the studio much of its talent, not to mention the deleterious effect the war had on the audience for animated fantasies.

The solution to Disney's financial woes has become known to history as the "package film": rather than one full-length story, the studio would assemble a handful of more-or-less related shorts, which could be quickly produced at a much lower quality level than the features demanded, and release the whole thing billed as a feature. The practice kept the studio financially afloat, as all the package films turned at least a small profit, it kept the animators in practice, and on at least a few occasions it allowed them to make a story that almost deserved actual feature treatment, if only the money had been there. Though no-one would argue that the package films represent the apex of the studio's art, it is also the case that no-one would call them outrageously bad, and at least a few of the shorts rank among Disney's best.

I call this a terrible fate for the studio not, then, because of some immediate and terrible reduction of quality brought about by the package films, but because this new cost-saving trick had the effect of arresting the growth of the studio's features. I mentioned that with Bambi, Disney had put out five all but perfect animated features in a row, and I see little reason to assume that the trend wouldn't have continued. But because of the abrupt stop, the development of Disney's feature film aesthetic was dealt a crippling blow, that the studio arguably never recovered from: when they returned to features in 1950, the technique was there but not the grace, which was only one back erratically and without regularity; certainly, there'd never again be a point when five, or even three, Disney films in a row could deserve the unqualified use of the word "masterpiece".

But I ought not let hindsight guide me in what is meant to be a forward-moving retrospective in the Disney canon; where we are now, all we know is that Bambi was costing a hell of a lot of money and taking way too long to finish. In 1941, when U.S. involvement in the war was imminent but not yet a present fact, the State Department approached Walt Disney about the possibility of him and some of his animators making a goodwill tour of several South American countries, along with a movie to be made about how great those countries were, and how much the United States loved them - Mickey and Donald and Goofy being as popular in that continent as in the rest of the world, this was thought to be an exceptionally good chance to win some hearts and minds. All of this was part of President Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, an attempt to treat Latin American with sincerity and good intentions, in the hopes of keeping them free of Nazi influence at a time when Germany was itself making offers of friendship to those countries. Thankfully, the Good Neighbor policy was so effective that no Nazis were ever permitted to find safe harbor in South America at any point during or after the war.

Walt was always a red-blooded American patriot, and he gladly accepted the government's offer to help; one assumes that the State Department's promise to help fund the eventual movie sweetened the deal considerably. And thus he and some of his loyalists left California right during the strike to visit Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru, to take notes and make sketches and otherwise prepare a series of shorts detailing some of the most wonderful elements of those countries' cultures. The result, Saludos Amigos, was released in those countries several months before its U.S. debut early in 1943, and it proved to be a sizable hit on both sides of the equator, despite running all of 42 minutes and only barely surpassing the definition of "feature length", which in those days I believe was still set as four reels long (it is now, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the AFI and BFI, 40 minutes).

Saludos Amigos is not today a well-remembered bit of Disneyana, and I am not prepared to argue against the justice of that fact. Historically, the most interesting parts of the film aren't even the animated sequences, but the live-action documentary interstitials, which show Walt and a handful of animators (including the great concept artist Mary Blair, one of the only women to prominently figure into the oppressively masculine history of Disney animation; her most famous work is the design for the it's a small world ride) touring the countries, taking their notes, and making their drawings. Uncharacteristically, the film gives a slight but tantalising glimpse into process by which a Disney film is created, akin to the peculiar 1941 documentary The Reluctant Dragon, and while this is a very carefully audience-friendly look at how the studio worked, it is of keen interest to the Disney scholar as a precursor to the openness about his company that would became a hallmark of Walt's television series over a decade later.

As for the shorts themselves, they are all fairly simple, unexceptional whimsies, amusing enough but not terribly memorable - it is no accident that unlike some of the later package films, nothing from Saludos Amigos has enjoyed a robust life excerpted as a stand-alone project in any of Disney's many short film collections or TV programs.

The first item is the Peruvian short, titled "Lake Titicaca", and springing from the narrator's observations about the prominence of Incan influence even in the modern - that is, 1941 - life of Peru in its culture and design. But really, it's a Donald Duck short. Some context for those of you who don't have the exemplary Chronological Donald DVDs to hand: Donald had rocketed to prominence in the second half of the 1930s as the most popular of the all the Mickey Mouse series side characters, quickly supplanting the mouse himself as the most popular character in the Disney stable. The best Donald starring vehicles, broadly speaking, were produced in the period from 1937-'41, with one of his very finest solo shorts, "Truant Officer Donald", coming near the end of that period. Afterwards, he was placed largely into a series of generally underwhelming propaganda shorts, but "Lake Titicaca" was born within that golden period, of only by the skin of its teeth. Unfortunately, it's a fairly pedestrian affair, heavy on slapstick and, with one exception, low on the duck's trademark slow burning impatience. The plot involves Donald's vacation to the area around Lake Titicaca, where he finds himself fascinated like a good Ugly American by the weird customs of the locals (the film makes a fair stab at mocking the American tourist mentality), and spends a good half of the short fighting with a placid llama that has little patience for the airhead duck on its back. There's not much too it, although it has some oddly reductive treatment of the Peruvians as Exotic Others for a film theoretically aimed at a South American audience; reaffirming my belief along the way that it can't just be the racism keeping Song of the South off of DVD. Because this film - and several others, and you damn well better believe I'm going to point it out every single time I spot it - has a pretty un-modern view of nonwhite people, being inordinately content to paint them as colorful, silly folk, with their customs and art and things that aren't American.

Case in point: the second short, a tribute to Chile, inspired a native cartoonist named René Rios Boettiger to create a counter-character named Condorito, believing that Disney was slighting the Chilean people as incompetent and childish. Ironically, "Pedro" is the only one of the shorts that I don't personally see as being significantly crypto-racist; though it is probably the dullest of the four, so if that's what bothered Rios, then I can't blame him for a thing. If it has any representational problem, it's that there's some latent chauvinism, but if I want to flog that horse I'll have much better chances later in this retrospective. The film is about a family of anthropomorphic mail planes, Papá, Mamá, and little Pedro, and it raises the question I always have when Disney (or anyone else) made a cartoon about baby anthropomorphic inanimate objects: how are they meant to grow in size? This is a problem I've had since I was around six or seven, incidentally. So yeah, there's one great sight gag, of Pedro drinking from a gas pump like a bottle with a straw, but otherwise this is a straightforward "little guy makes good" story that would later be vastly outdone in another one of the package films. See, Papá plane is sick, and Mamá plane can't handle the high altitudes, so Pedro has to cross the Andes one day, facing the horrific storms around the great mountain Aconcagua, and he makes it back okay. Taa-daa! The best I can come up with is that the film is meant to teach us about the fact that there are mail planes in the Andes, but I don't suppose that the Chileans needed to learn that, and Only Angels Have Wings was a mere three years old. The design is nothing special - it never looks exactly right when the Disney animators give cars or planes faces, if you ask me, and you implicitly are, since you're reading this - and all in all "Pedro" is the weakest of four less-than-outstanding shorts.

Off to Argentina, and the relative strongest sequence: "El Gaucho Goofy", inspired by the work of artist Florencio Molina Campos. This is perhaps the most "othering" short of them all, taking as its explicit theme, "what if we took a normal cowboy, and made him into one of those 'gaucho' cowboys that they have on the Argentine pampas?" But it's also reasonably funny: taking its cue from the then-current "How to" Goofy shorts, in which the hapless fellow is put into some simple situation, especially in those days a professional sport, and beaten up a lot while trying and desperately failing to demonstrate the correct way to go about performing a simple action. If "Lake Titicaca" is a mediocre Donald short, "El Gaucho Goofy" is a pretty average Goofy short, which means its pretty fun, but not an endlessly memorable comic gem. Of all the sequences, it's also the one with the most standard visuals: Goofy is of course a known quantity, but the animals we see in the short are all stock Disney designs, and other than the admittedly lovely backgrounds, this once again looks pretty much like a Disney short: smooth lines, round squashy shapes, solid colors.

The final short makes up for it with some genuine visual creativity. Titled "Aquarela do Brasil" ["Watercolor of Brazil"], it is inspired by a song of that name written in 1939, and mostly ignored until this very movie made it a smash hit in its home country and elsewhere not so, see comments; today in English we know it as "Brazil", and in that guise it provided the title and soundtrack to another film with genuine visual creativity, a bit more in fact that Walt Disney would have ever permitted.

"Aquarela do Brasil" is a semi-abstract evocation of life in Rio de Janeiro, with Donald Duck back, this time given a host in the brand-new character of José Carioca, a samba-loving parrot who speaks Portuguese almost as quickly as Donald's English. After the vaguely painful introduction of the new character taking up solidly half of the piece, the sequence settles into a fairly decent groove, moving through the colors and patterns of Rio in a fairly appealing samba-driven routine that ends in an explosion of color, lines, and music that actually makes Brazilian art seem like more than just a queer thing for Americans to mull over from the comfort of their proper civilisation. It also makes extensive use of a paintbrush interacting with the narrative, anticipating the magnificent Chuck Jones Looney Tunes short "Duck Amuck" by eleven years. The whole thing is also as insubstantial as a puff pastry, however, and despite being the loveliest passage of Saludos Amigos, it's also the easiest to forget.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the second stage of Disney feature animation began: with a mostly forgettable collection of half-way acceptable short cartoons made for unabashedly propagandistic reasons. Saludos Amigos isn't a bad movie, nor is it badly animated; but it hasn't any meat on its bones whatsoever, and in the context of the studio's developing art, it points the way to a rather dismal future as Walt and company struggled mightily to keep ahead of debt, always letting art stay one or three steps behind the immediate needs of commerce.

GOING TO HELL

Antichrist opens with a prologue shot in drop-dead gorgeous black and white by Anthony Dod Mantle, taking place entirely in slow motion as a piece from Handel's opera Rinaldo, and depicting an unnamed couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg having what looks to be pretty fantastic sex (for the most explicit bits they were doubled by Horst Baron and Mandy Starship, respectively) while their toddler son Nic (Storm Acheche Sahlstrom) crawls onto a table, through an open window, and falls to his death in relentlessly beautiful snow. He hits the sidewalk just as the music crescendos and Gainsbourg's character climaxes, wearing a look of mixed pain and joy, and I thought to myself, "Lars von Trier can't really mean for us to take this seriously, can he?"

Later on, Dafoe encounters a dying, bloody fox in the woods. Abruptly it leaps up with a CGI snarl and speaks to him in a guttural voice that sounds like somebody's best parody of The Exorcist, "Chaos reigns!" And I thought to myself, "Lars von Trier absolute doesn't mean for this to be taken seriously".

Even later, Gainsbourg uses a pair of ancient-looking scissors to cut off her clitoris, and I thought to myself, "Fuck you, Lars von Trier, and your fucking little games".

It is likely that I have given away a spoiler by mentioning the clitorectomy, but if I write something here that is the sole reason somebody doesn't bother seeing Antichrist, then I have done a good day's work of criticism indeed. I don't find it loathsome, exactly - though it's easy to see why that would be the case. It is not a film that made me as desperately angry as von Trier's Dogville, for example; just sullen and depressed. What I really had a problem with is the film's resolute lack of a point: it picks up two characters, sets them in a wooded hellscape pointedly named "Eden", and watches them be insane. Maybe there is a point, I should be fair, but it would have required engaging with the film to figure out what that point is, and when I figured out that von Trier is basically playing a massive joke with this movie I lost all interest in doing anything but getting out of the theater (at this time, Antichrist holds the 2009 record for the most times I checked my watch waiting for it to end, at five).

Taken on its own terms, Antichrist is an art horror movie so pretentious that it makes you want to pound carpet tacks into your flesh. But I don't think it really needs to be taken on those terms. What terms it is to be taken on, I haven't quite decided. The plot specifically concerns Gainsbourg's aberrant grief patterns, or some such psychobabbly phrase, and her therapist husband's highly unethical decision to treat her himself, which means a blurring of the lines between doctor and spouse that gets trampled over every single time they have sweat, borderline-pornographic sex, which is quite often. Anyhow, Dafoe finds that she has a morbid fear of their home way out in the Washington state forest (played by the woods of Westphalia, Germany, because of von Trier's famous hatred of trans-Atlantic travel), so he naturally takes her there; all sorts of creepy shit follows, involving Gainsbourg's unfinished thesis about the demonisation of women in history, the Three Beggars, animals signifying grief, pain, and despair, and Dafoe's attempt to unpack what his wife means by the statement "nature is the church of Satan", a line that would make Werner Herzog blush in sympathy for the natural world.

I disagree with those that argue the film is misogynistic, for it certainly has nothing on Dogville or Breaking the Waves in that respect; it's really just flat-out misanthropic. Without doubt, von Trier wants us to think that Antichrist exhibits misogyny, because he is an imp of the perverse, and this movie is a calculated attempt to flip certain people off. To that end, he has made it look pretty damn exploitative, but it's a fake, shallow exploitation, and I think this is my biggest problem with the movie. It's so smugly pleased with how Shocking! it all is, but it's really not anything but distasteful - the kind of movie that crows about how outraged you will be by its outrageous sexual violence, which consists of the aforementioned clitorectomy and a scene of Gainsbourg masturbating on a tree made of corpses. I'm sorry if I really don't see the point, especially since, as far as shocking exploitation goes, it's too gaudy to be anything but silly.

The whole thing just doesn't add up to more than an elaborate punking, and I think what bothers me is that I don't understand who it is that's being punked. The director's detractors? His fans? Charlotte Gainsbourg? I can say with certainty that the movie's philosophy is nearly as facile as its exploitation, which leaves us with something too thin-blooded to be taken seriously on any level, yet at the same time something far too aggressively nasty in every way to laugh at. It's a film to be endured, though what benefit comes to the viewer for having endured it, I cannot even begin to imagine. The cinematography and production design are both hypnotically lovely, and one gets the feeling that if von Trier ever wanted to make an actual horror movie and not a bullshit art-house horror movie with lots of genitalia, he could probably do a pretty decent job of it. But that's not much of a reason to sit through a movie. Like I said before, it really just put me in a bad mood without any other form of catharsis or enlightenment, and the only part of it that really offended me is that this shambling messy shitpile was dedicated to, of all random people, Andrei Tarkovsky, who could have outdone von Trier's freshman-level religious symbolism blindfolded with both of his hands cut off.

4/10

DISNEY ANIMATION: ONE SIMPLE THEME, REPEATING

The first five animated features produced by the Disney Studios between 1937 and 1942 represent a level of sustained artistic achievement virtually unheard of elsewhere in cinema history. Pixar Animation Studios has a good shot at replicating the feat if they keep up their current level for just a couple more years, but outside of that I can think of no director or creative team that made so many stone-cold masterpieces in such a brief span of time, and Disney's achievement is all the more impressive considering what they were facing in those years: crippling budgetary problems, the loss of staff due to the outbreak of World War II, and perhaps most damningly, an increasingly overworked, under-payed animation staff that finally went on strike in the summer of 1941, during the production of Dumbo. In addition to costing Walt Disney some of his finest animators, such as Art Babbitt (whose firing was the trigger for the strike) and Bill Tytla, this event marked the end of the spirit of family and comradeship that had been part of the studio's fabric ever since it inception. Hereafter, it was Boss Walt and his employees, although it is a strange coincidence that rise of what we might call "personality-based" animation at Disney dates to around this same time; I refer to the sequences and characters that can be clearly identified as the work of a specific supervising animator (invariably, one of Walt's favorites, often the ones who'd sided with him during the strike). This trend began with Fantasia, with Walt's uncharacteristically hands-off approach to the animation, and started to become truly prominent with Norm Ferguson's "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence in Dumbo; during the 1940s it would continue to become the case until finally, in the 1950s, we reach the point where even a casual fan can readily identify a character by the identity of the its lead animator.

But none of this internal intrigue can be spotted in Bambi, released in August 1942 as a determined, defiant look back at the nature of Disney animation when money was readily available and the only thing that mattered was that Walt's visionary idea would be captured no matter the time or cost. A project, based upon Felix Salten's much-praised novel, that had been kicking around for years as one of the many possible successors to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but set aside when the storymen couldn't figure out how to soften its grim edges, the film is first and above all an illustration of Walt Disney's well-known fascination with nature and the animal kingdom. It is the most plotless of all the studio's animated features, containing nothing that could be named "drama" according to its classical sense: there is no conflict that is not resolved essentially at the moment that is raised, and except for the repeated threat of hunters in the forest, nothing that could be considered a narrative throughline. It is the story of two years in the life of a deer, beginning with his birth and ending with the birth of his two fawns, and what happens in between is nothing but a series of vignettes, like snapshots of particularly fond or traumatic moments. Of all the other movies in Disney's history, it is closest to the later True Life Adventures, in which the camera is turned towards animals behaving as animals, just for the sake of it.

The guiding principal behind this film was realism above all; Walt desired that it look as much like real animals in real woods as could possibly be achieved, and this provided the greatest challenge that his animators had yet experienced. It was a far cry indeed from the extremely simple Dumbo, the film that defined much of what Disney animation was to look like in the years to follow; this is largely because the production of Bambi was started nearly a year and half earlier - around the same time as animation began on Fantasia, in fact - and only the diabolically complex animation kept Bambi from reaching theatres until well after the studio had effectively abandoned the incredible detail and crazy ambition that defined its visuals. We might even suppose that the difficulties of creating Bambi had as much to do with the studio's abandonment of that ambition as the wild success of Dumbo did.

Whatever the case, the money and time were well spent indeed on Bambi, which remains the most realistic of all the studios' films. The cast is made up entirely of animals, virtually all of which are drawn to look as close to their physical counterparts as possible (the single exception: some of the rabbits, in some of the scenes, move in distinctly anthropomorphic ways). A host of living animals were brought into the studio for this reason, leading some of the animators to complain that it was becoming a bit zoo-like, but the effect is breathtaking: the subtleties of movement and musculature are as close to perfection as imaginable (Disney wouldn't even attempt to create animals this realistic again until The Lion King, more than 50 years later), and the film vies only with Pinocchio as the most technically accomplished work of animation to come from the studio's Golden Age.

To accompany this wonderful animation, the film also boasts absurdly detailed backgrounds: in some scenes, approaching photorealism more than any other animated feature that I have ever seen; in others, suggesting the rich landscape paintings of the 19th Century Hudson River School. No other animated movie has represented living nature to the same wild success as Bambi. Even the transition from unnervingly realistic representations of some locations to the more painterly style of others is achieved so delicately that it hardly registers; the most impressionistic scenes are the ones that are the most emotionally potent, for good or bad (thus the meadow, site of the most infamous death in movie history, is sketched out in looser strokes than the interior of the woods, which is an essentially peaceful and familiar space). This reaches its furthest expression in what is to me the most visually impressive scene in the film, the fight between grown-up Bambi and another buck for the doe Faline, a scene lit like the edgiest and most brutal film noir, reducing the two male deer to nearly abstract shapes clashing against violent red backgrounds.

We've already seen what an excess of artistry did to Pinocchio and Fantasia financially; but Bambi manages to avoid being so arch as they are, even while it is nowhere near so easy and family-friendly as Dumbo. For a start, the character design, while realistic, is also just about as wholly appealing as anything else in the studio's history; Bambi himself is as instantly sympathetic a character as anyone else in animation, equaling the impossibly charming Dumbo. In the by-now standard role as the comic side character who gets to have all the spunk while the protagonist remains heroic, we have the truly outstanding Thumper the rabbit, a character as easily cited as the first in a long, long line of insipid Disney comic figures as he is called one of the studio's great achievements in the 1940s; but I will leave others to make the negative argument. For me, Thumper as a child is one of the great triumphs of the Golden Age; not only the first Disney character with a great vocal performance (that of four-year old Peter Behn), but one of the warmest and best-realised in his design and animation, the first great success of animator Ollie Johnston, one of the most legendary of all Disney artists and the individual who had the most to say about physical contact between characters, and how that could be used to develop story and emotion (in Bambi, that mentality can be best observed in the classic "skating" scene, with Thumper trying to help the wobbly Bambi find his feet on the ice).

Even though there is no "story", even though the film is about a deer, Bambi is also one of the easiest Disney films to appreciate on a personal level. Everything that Bambi experiences is more or less common to all human people: he is born, finds new places and is amazed by them (and it helps immensely that the viewer is also amazed, given the richness of the visuals), makes friends, loses loved ones, falls in love, learns to be responsible. It is not a coming-of-age story, but a going-through-life story, captured in fine detail but without emotional badgering to make sure we get there. Take, for instance, the death of his mother. For all that this is the most well-remembered part of the movie, it is achieved swiftly and without brutal lingering. Gunshot, running, Bambi calls for her, "Your mother can't be with you anymore". From the moment that Man makes his presence felt to the beginning of the next sequence, in which Bambi is all grown up and absolutely free from trauma, takes less than five minutes; not because the sequence doesn't matter, but because the filmmakers don't need to beat us up with it. By presenting the sequence so simply, that one line of dialogue explaining the whole situation, the film lets us remember that feeling, or imagine that feeling (oh, the poor generations and generations of children who imagined Mommy dying for the first time when they heard that sentence!), and read our own feeling into Bambi's confused look and downturned eyes, and the expressionistic snowstorm that follows. We don't need an hour of "what is it like to be loss a mother" claptrap, because it would be redundant to the impact of those few seconds (which didn't keep Disney from exploring that very topic in Bambi II, one of the most pointless of its many pointless direct-to-video sequels, 64 years later). And that is the progression of just about every sequence in the movie: here is a moment, feel it, move on. It's a storytelling mode that a family-oriented studio could never get away with today - I don't really know how they got away with it in 1942, but maybe that's part of the reason it took a 1947 re-release for Bambi to make its money back.

Still, it's impressive how much of life the film packs into a very fleet 70 minutes: innocence, grief, hope, adulthood, sex - yes, sex! Of course, sex is something that is supposed to be totally absent from Disney films, and for the most part it is kept very safely away. Do you think that Snow White and Prince Charming really went off to that castle in the clouds and fucked like bunnies? Of course not. It is virtually unimaginable, and despite the preponderance of Disney character porn (click here to watch your innocence die; incredibly NSFW), the studio did an awfully good job of making sure their characters are totally sexless. When I try to visualise the bedroom activities of Snow White, I see a Barbie and Ken doll getting rubbed together. But in Bambi, the intimations of sexuality are shockingly clear and right on the surface, in the "twitterpated" scene. In a small way: Flower the skunk gets kissed and goes really rigid. In a huge way: Thumber gets kissed and starts vibrating uncontrollably, ramrod straight; when the girl rabbit presses his nose and calms him down, he sprawls out limply on the ground. It's only barely subtext at that point, and while it's coded enough that no child would ever think of it, I'm more than a little surprised that Walt Disney - to say nothing of the Hayes Office- was okay with letting it go out like that. But I'm glad it was there; it adds another degree of fullness to a film that, despite featuring not a single human being onscreen, speaks to everything about the human condition, arguably the last of the Disney features that was meant to speak not just to children, and not, to indulge in Disney-sanctified cliché, the child in an adult's heart, but to actual adults, though by no means is this a film that a kid couldn't love - many generations of kids have. But even though it is much sweeter and funnier than the book, this is still an unexpectedly serious movie (it's not even a musical to speak of; three songs, and all non-diegetic), the last gasp of a maturity and gravity that would immediately disappear from Disney's features, and only reappear in starts and fits over the years to come.

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW THE ONE PERSON THEY DON'T MEET?

And so we come to the death rattle of Universal horror. For some reason that will only ever be known to those involved, the studio suits determined that the best way to retire their classic monsters was to mix traditional horror cinema with the comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The first of these, and by a fairly infinite degree the best, was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 riff on House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula that combined the essential tropes of the late monster pictures - Dracula schemes, the Frankenstein monster knocks things over, Larry Talbot frets about not being able to die - with the lightning-fast comic reflexes of the biggest comedy duo of the 1940s. Abbott and Costello's monster rally films came at a particularly ripe time: the change in the post-war filmgoing audience had rendered the classic monster movies totally obsolete, while the two comedians - the hottest thing in Hollywood in the first half of the decade - had lost a great deal of their luster by the time this film entered production. The sheer novelty value of the result all but guaranteed a robust box office return, and while the the film is representative of the absolute worst of Universal horror (worse than the worst, in some respects), it is one of the very best Abbott and Costello vehicles, at least of the scant half-dozen of the things I've seen (I have to confess that my tastes aren't wholly in line with Bud and Lou's schtick; I've never failed to enjoy one of their movies, but nor have I been inspired to ever seek one out).

The place: La Mirada, Florida. So you know right off that we're not on familiar turf anymore. Our heroes are two baggage handlers, Chick Young (Bud Abbott) and Wilbur Grey (Lou Costello), but their names and jobs don't actual matter, except as a pretext for making the rest of the movie happen. Like most successful comedians, they were all about persona, which for those of you who aren't aware, consists of the following for this particular team: Bud is the impatient straight man, Lou is the one who misunderstands things or otherwise acts like a bumbling moron, making Bud all the more impatient. Moving along now, the hook of the plot is that a chamber of horrors owner, Mr. McDougal (Frank Ferguson) has just acquired a couple of large boxes from Europe, and he wants Bud and Lou to deliver them as soon as possible. Which is exactly what Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) doesn't want, calling La Mirada from London just as the sun is going down to demand that the boys hold onto the boxes until he shows up. When the phone conversation devolves into a lot of barking and snuffling, Lou figures that McDougal let his dog attack the phone and hangs up, and so it is that the boxes, containing "the real bones of Dracula" and "the real Frankenstein monster", get carted over to McDougal's museum of terrors.

Quicker than you can say "well, duh", both the vampire (Bela Lugosi) and monster (Glenn Strange) get woken up, scaring Lou something awful, but always conveniently disappearing whenever Bud is around. McDougal arrives to find two empty boxes and has the boys arrested, while Dracula and the monster show up at the castle-like abode of Dr. Sandra Mornay (Lenore Aubert), mad scientist in waiting and Lou's way-too-hot girlfriend. At the same time, the boys are sprung from prison by Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph), an insurance investigator who pretends to be infatuated with Lou in the hopes that he'll help her get to the bottom of these missing monsters.

I can't really think of any reason to give away any more of the plot than that, because most of what happens isn't really interesting or important. It's all a pretext for Bud and Lou to go out and do what they did; for the most part, they do it very well. Almost all of the jokes in the first half of the film are some variation of, "Lou sees a monster, Bud just barely doesn't see it, he yells at Lou, who then sees a monster," and it would appear that the guiding mentality behind the movie's script was the kind the understands that the first time you crack a joke it's funny, the third time it's not so funny, and the sixth time it's freaking hilarious. One of the best bits in the whole movie concerns a revolving wall with Bud on one side, Dracula and the monster on the other, and Lou shuttling back and forth, over the course of several minutes. I can't describe it in any way that would make it sound funny, but it is exquisitely-timed physical comedy. That's one of the difficulties of explaining how Bud and Lou work compared to someone like Groucho Marx: almost everything is a matter of body language, tone of voice, and Lou's tendency to get very fluttery and to squeal when he gets nervous. That doesn't sound funny at all, and sometimes it isn't: the only Abbott and Costello vehicle I've seen later than this one, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, is completely wretched, despite/because of doing most of the same things in mostly the same way. But nonetheless, it's hysterical. Trust me on this, I'm a film blogger.

For as much as the film works as an Abbott and Costello comedy, which is pretty well, although I personally find much of the last half-hour or so to be a bit too frantic, and redolent of the worst of post-war screwball comedy (a period where screwball comedy had grown indulgent and irritating, save for the work of Preston Sturges), it is a pretty miserable monster movie, and indeed it has become a sick joke among horror fans that the Abbott and Costello "Meet the" films gave all of the major franchises the most classless send-off possible. None of the monsters are treated with any kind of gravity whatsoever, although they're all given more to do than in either House of picture. It's a pity that Lugosi returned for the only time to the role of Dracula for this movie, an act of desperation engendered from a decade making one tawdry Poverty Row B-picture after another, with his handful of stints in middleweight Universal movies far and away the most respectable thing he was doing. All he really gets to do in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is stand about and look charismatically threatening, and to be fair, he does that better than anybody, and so even though it is a pointless, limited role, at least it gives Lugosi one last chance to reserve some dignity to his person before declining at last into Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and the Ed Wood movies.

Dracula is the only monster thus given even a shred of respect by the movie. Chaney was plainly never so miserable to play Larry Talbot as he was here, and unlike Lugosi he allows the silliness around him to compromise his commitment to the character of the wolf man, and thus it is that the once-proud werewolf is mocked and made the butt of jokes, while Dracula and the monster remain vaguely threatening. As for Glenn Strange first turn as the monster where he actually gets any significant time to do anything (he's onscreen in this film more than both his previous turns in the role put together), it is a thrilling demonstration of why we're none too upset that he didn't get to do more in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.

But that's really the thing, this isn't a proper monster movie. It's a comedy with the monsters as an angle, and while we can certainly debate how respectable an approach that is, at least the film works, and rather well at that, on the level it was supposed to. Bud and Lou are in peak form; it is to be regretted that this had to come at the expense of ending the main line of monster movies in the shoddiest possible way, but it doesn't make Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein a lesser comedy, and that is ultimately the only important thing.

Reviews in this series
Dracula (Browning, 1931)
Drácula (Melford, 1931)
Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)
Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
Dracula's Daughter (Hillyer, 1936)
Son of Frankenstein (Lee, 1939)
The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941)
The Ghost of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1942)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill, 1943)
Son of Dracula (Siodmak, 1943)
House of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1944)
House of Dracula (Kenton, 1945)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton, 1948)

DISNEY ANIMATION: REST YOUR HEAD CLOSE TO MY HEART

In 1941, the fate of the Disney Studios rested upon a single film, for the second time in four years. The one-two punch of Pinocchio and Fantasia, both of them costing astronomical sums and both of them crashing and burning at the box office, had left the company teetering right on the edge of bankruptcy. The last-ditch effort to get some money in the studio coffers was to make an extremely cheap little circus movie based upon a story that Walt Disney had to be tricked into liking, by two story men: the great Joe Grant and the less famous but still pretty great Dick Huemer. Lucky for Walt that they managed to change his mind, for Dumbo proved to be a massive hit at a moment when the studio needed a massive hit rather desperately, grossing more than its two immediate predecessors combined on a budget smaller than any other feature-length film in the studio's history.

In the process, Dumbo also redefined what Disney animation was going to be all about. The artistic zenith achieved in Pinocchio and Fantasia would never again be equaled, nor was the attempt really even made, except in small ways in the 1990s. The lesson learned in 1940-'41 was this: ambition bombs, charm and sentiment sell. Exceptions spring to mind, of course, but for the most part, if we can suggest that there is a Dumbo-style Disney feature or a Pinocchio-style Disney feature, the overwhelming majority of them were Dumbo-style. Make no mistake, I flat-out adore Dumbo: it is in my Top 5 Disney features of all time. Much of what I adore about it is indeed the scaling-back, the simplicity of the visuals and story. I'm just observing what seems to me a trend towards warmer, family-friendly narratives and bright visuals, away from the opulent visuals and ultimately chilly tone of the two 1940 features.

Dumbo is the shortest of all Disney features (save one of the "package films"), and even so its narrative is hardly robust enough to fill 64 minutes. A little elephant is delivered by a prim stork to a circus traveling north from Florida; he becomes the subject of ridicule because of his large ears; his mother is imprisoned for trying to protect him; a mouse befriends him when no-one else will, through his increasing humiliations in the circus; one night he gets drunk and wakes up in a tree, and realises he can fly, thanks to the very same ears that have given him so much shame; fame, fortune and the sincere contrition of those who belittled him follow. Even more than the studio's actual fairy-tale adaptations, this has the tang of a fable to it. Not least because of its relative dearth of dialogue (Dumbo himself is the only non-speaking protagonist in any Disney feature) and an editing pattern which serves to divide the already slender film up into three or four-minute chunks; in essence it's a series of pantomimed vignettes, and after a while it no longer feels like a traditional drama, but something like a "stations of the cross" play. Forgive me the idiotic comparison, but I couldn't think of anything else that captured the feeling of what I was looking for - certainly, I'm not arguing that Dumbo is a Christ figure! But the movie has a "scenes from the life" feeling that pulls it out of time - ironic, considering that it was the first Disney feature with a contemporary setting.

For all that, it is undoubtedly one of the most emotionally potent of all animated movies; I might be inclined to say, of all movies, period. Dumbo himself is a horribly appealing character, with his large eyes and soft lines (courtesy of Bill Tytla, looking to get away from the villains that had defined his career to this point), the kind of protagonist that you rather ache for than sympathise with; sympathy doesn't cover the viewer's desire to shield the little elephant from all misery and wrong (which is not to say we take the place of his mother; we rather take the place of Timothy the mouse, demonstrated especially in the heartbreaking "Baby Mine" sequence, one of the sweetly saddest moments in all of cinema, when we adopt his POV watching Dumbo and Mrs. Jumbo). This is an emotionally enervating film to watch in a way that none of the previous Disney films even began to approach (Pinocchio is enervating, but in a wholly different way); yet many, many Disney films would copy it in the future. "Kill the parent" becomes almost a sick joke in Disney history, beginning with the film immediately to follow Dumbo, Bambi, but somehow not a one of those films achieves, in its bloodlust, the same emotional crush that comes from Dumbo be separated from his mother by caprice and the indifference of others, rather than death. The knowledge that a parent has died can be processed. The knowledge that a parent lies just on the other side of some iron bars, and you can't get to her, that is a much crueler thing.

Way back when, I think I suggest that Dumbo was a light movie, which is clearly not what I've just argued. What I was referring to then was both its unabashed sentimentality, complete with triumphant ending, and it's easy, simple visual style. This is second of only three Disney features with watercolor backgrounds, after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the effect is largely the same in both films: the world of the movie is softer and warmer, like a picture book, and it's far more inviting than the richer and more detailed oil and gouache paintings that are found everywhere else in Disney's canon. At the same time, owing I imagine more to cheapness and haste than to an actual choice on the part of Walt Disney or (less likely) supervising director Ben Sharpsteen, who also co-directed Pinocchio, the film is animated with a markedly reduced level of detail not just from the three earlier features, but even from the Silly Symphonies shorts. This could be a desperate flaw in a number of other contexts, but it works very well here: the animals and people sketched out in the smallest number of visual traits necessary (sometimes lacking even a face!) give the film a hazy, dreamy quality unique to itself; not only is like a child's book, it is somewhat like a child's illustration, solid colors and smooth surfaces all 'round. This half-formed art, I think, contributes a great deal to the film's innocence, and the wide-eyed joy it takes in its own slight story.

With one exception, and it's arguably the most famous part of the film. "Pink Elephants on Parade", directed by Norm Ferguson and animated by Hicks Lokey, Howard Swift and Frank Thomas (who would later become prominent as one of the great creators of villainous women characters, and was one of the Nine Old Men), is a nightmarish masterpiece of design and animation and music, a dizzying blast into a drunken stupor that looks nothing like actual intoxication, but when something has this much nightmarish power, it seems awfully silly to complain about something minor like that. The beyond-bold use of neon colors married to jet black backgrounds looks absolutely unlike anything else in mainstream animation in 1941 (it looks pretty un-mainstream in 2009, for that matter), to say nothing of the constant morphing of objects that seem to have no physical permanence whatever - the classic squash and stretch technique in service of a hallucination, rather than goofy physical comedy.

Visually and emotionally, Dumbo is a masterpiece. There's just one sticking point: it is the first Disney movie with really significant race problems, if you will. Fantasia had its infamous Sunflower the Black Centaur, but sanitised history has swallowed her up whole. You can't do anything to cut the crows out of Dumbo, not least because they sing the film's absolute best song, "When I See an Elephant Fly". And they are pure, unmitigated stereotypes, not necessarily the most insulting stereotypes imaginable, mind you, but stereotypes. It is possible, though shallow, to defend the crows by pointing out that they are the only characters who show any affection for Dumbo at all; and I noticed at times that the specific language of the other elephants' rejection of Dumbo takes a distinctly segregationist pitch. So a thoroughly dedicated apologist could make the argument that Dumbo is a coded pro-civil rights statement: the obviously African-American crows giving aid and comfort to the elephant because he is a metaphorical stand-in for oppressed non-white people in America. I am not going to be that apologist, because it's a flimsy argument, and the crows are unabashed stereotypes, and you can't change that. Racist representation is something that just happened in movies in the 1940s, and it's a terrible pity, but if we're to discount any film with racist overtones, we will have to throw out a great many masterpieces, and not all of them made by white American men. Am I bothered by the crows? Absolutely. Do they invalidate Dumbo? Absolutely not. Besides, as racist caricatures in the '40s go, there is a great deal of room for them to have been infinitely worse.

That was a touch heavy and strident, so let me end on a happier note by simply reiterating what I've said already: Dumbo is an extraordinarily charming little movie made from a wholly innocent perspective that was never captured so perfectly by Disney's story men or animators. It is, perhaps, the first Disney "family" film, rather than a "everybody" film - the difference is not incidental - and thus the beginning of the road that led to the complete ghettoizing of animation in Hollywood; but that's not Dumbo's fault, except that it's so good that, like Snow White before it, it couldn't help but spawn armies of imitators.

DISNEY ANIMATION: SIGHT AND SOUND

That Pinocchio was a significant commercial failure is something I can sort of get my head around, but it ultimately seems pretty hard to believe that something so beautiful and heartfelt could be so soundly ignored. I have no such difficulty believe the same thing of the other Disney feature released in 1940, of unquestionably greater personal importance to Walt Disney himself. I'm referring of course to Fantasia, the baldest expression of Walt's desire that animation be taken as seriously as any other art form, and the most technologically accomplished film he ever oversaw, with its cutting-edge stereo sound system, Fantasound; a system so advanced, in fact, that only a baker's dozen theaters ever installed it, for the film's spectacularly money-losing roadshow run in 1940 and '41. Setting aside the unimaginable amount of money that the film cost; only a madman would think that you could sell people a two-hour animated anthology film consisting of what amounts to early music videos set to eight pieces of classical music. But let us never forget that however much money we like to think of the Disney Company generating, Walt Disney was a godawful businessman. He made the movies that he wanted to see, and in this case he wanted to see a movie that is, when all is said and done, a demo reel for some of the most inventive animation in the history of the medium.

The film is meant to suggest that we are attending a concert and so in its original version (as well as the DVD release), it begins with a simple curtain rising, as we watch the members of an orchestra take their places for the impending concert. After a moment or two of this, New York music critic Deems Taylor steps up and briefly explains the concept behind this Fantasia experiment. He will return in between segments throughout the film, and I think the importance of these interstitial moments to the overall success of the whole is typically under-appreciated. Taylor is a bit hectoring at times, but in the main he is a very straightforward man who isn't trying to scare us, but simply wants to make sure we have enough information to go into each new piece. He makes Fantasia an exceedingly friendly peek into the world of classical music, a realm that most 20th and 21st Century Americans would rather avoid at all costs (though I believe that classical music was not vilified as snobby, elitist, and boring in 1940 to quite the same degree that it has been in the intervening years). What could easily have been a lesson instead becomes an exploration, with a particularly well-spoken guide to bring us along. Then the great conductor Leopold Stokowski ascends the podium in the center of the orchestra, and one of the most singular events in movie history begins.

The first segment of the film, set to Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, is by far the boldest, and very nearly the most famous in the whole movie. The Disney Studios' first leap into abstract animation, it is an attempt to express in visual terms the experience of listening to music, being aware of the presence of instruments and the people playing them; and thus, though it is a rather daunting thing to look at for someone expecting a cartoon with pretty music, it is the ideal start to a film like Fantasia.

I am about to voice a heresy: I think this sequence is overrated. Very lovely in many ways, but overrated. Basically, abstraction is not something that came terribly easy to the Disney animators, and they over-thought it a little bit here (In the future, when they were working with a sort of pseudo-abstraction, a highly stylised interpretation of concrete events - there's a brilliant moment of this sort in Bambi - they would have much greater success. Of course, I cannot demonstrate that "they" refers to the same individuals, but that is the damnable thing about discussing institutional evolution). The tactile quality of the animation itself is extremely appealing, mind - I certainly don't want to suggest that the sequence isn't lovely to look at. But there's a wobbliness to it at certain moments: the attempts to animate parts of instruments flying around in the air is just silly, if you ask me. The best part of the sequence is the opening, live-action footage with stark colored lights (shot by James Wong Howe, if the IMDb is to be trusted), putting all our attention on the instruments themselves; it is not abstract as such, but it is dramatic and beautiful.

The next segment, and my personal favorite, is set to a re-ordered version of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite - a far less trite choice in 1940, when the ballet had not yet received its first full U.S. performance. It is a perfect example of what Fantasia does best: following the spirit of a piece while bending its specifics out of recognition. In this case, we have ballet music; and the sequence is undoubtedly balletic, with one dance after another for several minutes. But in the hands of the animators, it becomes a tribute to nature and the gentle change of seasons, with the fairies of the ballet turned into sprites responsible for making flowers blooms, leaves turn color, and frost to form its intricate designs. Meanwhile, the foreign emissaries who present their dances are now plants and animals.

I don't suppose many people would argue if I said that this is the loveliest sequence in the movie. It also might use the widest variety of animation techniques to achieve its look out of anything in the film (Toccata and Fugue would be the other candidate). This is the painterly sequence of Fantasia, the one where the contrast of textures is the most important; particularly in the finale, "Waltz of the Flowers", in which the straightforward cel-animated fairies are set against the drybrushed backgrounds, and whatever technique they used to make the ice and the snowflakes, I have never known. Here is also the film's showiest demonstration of the technical competence of Disney animation, particularly in the Arabian dance, with gossamer fish swimming about with a fluidity and grace rarely matched before or since. And the sequence also boasts my personal favorite minute and change in the whole of animation history, the Chinese dance of the mushrooms, and I just don't give a damn if its racist (which it totally is): an absolutely perfect bit of pantomime, demonstrating exquisitely how well the animators could create personality from silence and movement.

The third sequence is the most important and most famous: Mickey Mouse in Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I say most important, because without this short, there'd have been no Fantasia at all. The story goes that Walt Disney was concerned that Mickey had been upstaged by characters like Donald Duck, Goofy, and even Pluto, and he wanted to give his star character a last moment to shine. It was to be a simple, elegant piece, a silent film save for Dukas's narratively charged music, a reminder of all that Mickey could be at his greatest.

And thanks to Walt's inveterate perfectionism, it got expensive fast.

Roy Disney, the financial brain that always had to rein in his little brother's artistic ambition, quickly realised that The Sorcerer's Apprentice could never make money as a stand-alone film. It had to be coupled with a feature. Naturally enough, the feature ended up costing proportionally as expensive as the short did, and all that Roy's good sense achieved was to piss away virtually all of the money leftover from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

At any rate, that horribly costly Mickey short is a pretty miraculous little thing - almost without question the finest Micky cartoon ever made, not only because of its ambition but because of the incredible degree of care that went into every single drawing. The use of lighting and color in this sequence is hardly subtle, but it is effective nonetheless, and more importantly, it's the first time that a Disney project used lighting and color in an entirely expressionist, non-representational manner. The animation itself is up to the very high standards the studio had set for itself in that period; the water effects in particularly very nearly rival Pinocchio.

Most importantly, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is wildly charming and entertaining. Mickey wasn't one of the biggest movie stars of the 1930s for no reason, and here he was made a roguish scamp again for the first time in a long while. The humorless sorcerer - modeled after Walt Disney himself - is a great character despite his limited screentime, the army of brooms is both formidable and magical, and the narrative itself is scary and funny in equal measure, and at the same moment.

Following a very cute "meeting" between Stokowski and Mickey, Fantasia gets aggressive, with Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a work that had debuted to riots and violent hostility a mere 27 years earlier (the original roadshow version of the film gets a tiny joke in about that very controversy: when Taylor announces the title of the piece, there is a hideous crash as the chimes player knocks over his instrument).

Stravinsky was the only composer living to see his work given the Fantasia treatment, and while he was vocally critical of the significant re-ordering and cutting of his composition, he allegedly conceded that the animators got to the heart of what he "meant", even if they had to absolutely jettison his original concept. The Rite of Spring was a ballet about primitivism; and the Disney team took that notion all the way back, making a 25 minute epic about the creation of the world, the first flowering of single-celled life, and so on up to the dinosaurs.

The sequence is bold, with simple lines and strong colors to match the exceedingly challenging dissonance and clamor of the ballet. Early on, in the cosmological sequences, it has a very impressionistic feeling that becomes more and more violent as the action moves further along into Earth's history. It's perhaps fair to credit this stretch of the film as the most perfect combination of animation and music of them all: the music's stated goals are well met by the intensity of the visuals. There are, that I can name, two flaws only: the first is that it drags on a bit in the beginning. The second is that, frankly, Stravinsky is easy to dislike; I don't even know that I much care for The Rite of Spring myself. And if you conclude that the music is just too clamorous for your tastes, there's a lot of it to get through.

After an intermission, there's a strange little vignette with Taylor interviewing the film's soundtrack - a game attempt to show how motion picture sound looks on film, that doesn't really go much of anyplace. But somehow, it fits into the whole Fantasia fabric such that I couldn't imagine removing it, although I always get fidgety before it ends.

The next sequence is set to what I imagine is the most prominent piece of music in the film: Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the Pastorale. It's also the sequence that has been subjected to the most criticism over the years. I will not address the well-known racial stereotypes that the Walt Disney Company has gone to such lengths to hide; a movie made in 1940 by white filmmakers is likely to have racist overtones here and there, and to get a flustered and panicky about such thing is an insult to film history.

But the plot, which takes Beethoven's vague sketch of a ride in the country interrupted by a thunderstorm, and places it in mythological Greece, is certainly damn peculiar. And for the interminable stretch where it's nothing but cupids trying to get centaurs to hook up, it's also damn boring. So the criticism has a very valid point, and it doesn't help matters that the animation here is at its most cartoonish, with certain moments of jerkiness and awkward design that are quite enough to send the sequence howling into the lowest rank among the film's passages, even without narrative hiccups.

What saves the Pastoral Symphony is, simply, color. Throughout the whole of Fantasia, Walt gave a relatively free hand to the animators to do anything they wanted at all - the only time he'd take such a generous approach to producing. That translated in this sequence to the most elaborate and imaginative color landscape found in any Disney project up to that point. I once attended a lecture given by the late Ward Kimball, one of the famous Nine Old Men of Disney animation, and a supervising animator on this sequence, and he recalled how it became sort of a game to see who could come up with the most playful and unusual use of color. He spoke of a particular background artist who had toast with boysenberry jam in his lunch box, and found that the particular reddish-blue of boysenberry was precisely what he'd been looking for; and there is a tree in this sequence the exact color of that jam. This sort of thing is found throughout the Pastoral Symphony, which isn't an experiment in using color to further plot; it's an indulgence in color for its own sake, and I wouldn't give it up for the world.

But I'll concede it was ill-chosen to follow the Beethoven with Amilcare Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours ballet from the opera La Gioconda, which like Pastoral Symphony is a highly cartoony passage, but is infinitely better at it. The narrative of the ballet is followed quite closely: dancers representing the morning are followed by dancers representing the afternoon, then dancers of the evening, and finally dancers of the night. The big difference is that all of the dancers are African megafauna: ostriches, hippos, elephants, crocodiles.

There isn't much to say about this bit, other than that it's exactly the right time in the program to have something pointlessly, exquisitely silly. Directed by T. Hee, a veteran caricaturist, and Norm Ferguson, a Pluto specialist, Dance of the Hours is a palate cleanser, and a demonstration that even pretentious music snobs don't have to take themselves seriously, and it's about as perfectly-timed as any comic animation sequence from that era.

Fantasia ends with a double shot: Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and Franz Schubert's Ave Maria. Deems Taylor nicely, if unnecessarily, points out that the two pieces are tonally and thematically opposed, but he fails to mention how very different they are visually. Night on Bald Mountain is, simply put, one of the most striking, powerful sequences in Disney's history. A plotless snapshot of a dark god from Slavic mythology holding court among witches, ghosts and demons, it is by far the grimmest thing the studio made until The Black Cauldron in 1985, arguably.

There is much to love about it, from the distortion effect that makes Chernabog's shadow look like black fire, to the blend of styles from painting to cels to what looks for all the world like unretouched pencil sketches, but the piece hinges on the devil god himself, animated by Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, my pick for the most gifted animator Disney had during their golden age: he was also responsible for Grumpy in Snow White, Stromboli in Pinocchio, and the sorcerer of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. But none of those characters hold a candle to Chernabog, perhaps the most thrillingly animated character in Disney history. A great black bulk, so massive he ceases to feel like a cartoon, Chernabog's movements are the result of study of Bela Lugosi and animator Wilfred Jackson, and a fine demonstration he is of the good to which the studio put the test footage of human models; but the heft of him, his catlike movements, and his rough, graceful fluidity, that's all in the animator's craft, pen and paper and raw skill.

The Ave Maria sequence is a strident counterpoint to the mass and intensity and thickness of Night on Bald Mountain; it is a rigorously stylised, simple piece, executed with an idiotic level of difficulty in the most elaborate multiplane set-up in Disney's history - the only really show-offy multiplane shots in Fantasia, in fact. Here's the fascination thing about this sequence: where the mulitplane camera was customarily used to suggest depth, in Ave Maria it instead suggests flatness: as the camera tracks along the length of an endless stretch of forest, the competing planes seem ever flatter, emphasising the lateral-ness of the shot, the degree to which it's not unlike a banner in an illuminated manuscript. Everything about the content of the images reinforce that: especially the people, indistinct, two-dimensional shapes with little circles of light coming out of the darkness. It is, all in all, a very bold-looking sequence, and coupled with the tremendously spiritual music, it becomes a sort of meditation on nature and peace, that breaks into transcendence in the last seconds, when the mulitplane camera finally embraces its true calling to give endless depth to a shot of the sun behind trees.

It cannot be argued other than that this is the most ambitious film of Walt Disney's career; better to ask where it ranks among the most ambitious, or at least the most crazily optimistic, films in history. And naturally for a film of such scope, it took history a long time to catch up to it. In the meantime Fantasia's epic failure left the Disney Studios on the brink of catastrophe. For my part, I think it should have been worth twice the cost: it is ribboned with flaws both impossibly minor and embarrassingly large, but it surely must count as one of the most visually stunning American movies ever made, a veritable catalogue of what makes traditional animation so inconceivably beautiful when it's being done absolutely right.

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: HOUSE OF MIRTH

After the miserable failure of House of Frankenstein, there wasn't much that the next Universal horror movie had to do besides show up to be an improvement. But House of Dracula does more than just show up. Perhaps because the filmmakers realised on some level that this was to be the final hurrah for their iconic characters (at least, in a "serious" horror film), this last gasp of the second wave of Universal monster pictures is pretty damn weird in just about every manner, and while that doesn't imply that it must also be good, at least the weirdness gives it a surprising, fresh edge that might as well pass for good by this point in the cycle.

How weird am I talking? This weird: the film opens with a bat flying onto the grounds of the stately home of Dr. Franz Edlemann (Onslow Stevens), a well-respected doctor known for his treatment of inexplicable conditions. That bat transforms into Count Dracula (John Carradine), who wakes up Dr. Edlemann to request that they have a brief consultation in the basement; and in the basement, Edlemann finds a coffin marked with the Dracula family crest. Dracula confesses that yes, he is the world-famous vampire, and he has come to Edlemann's Visaria clinic to beg that the doctor find a way to cure him of his vampirism.

No, you really just don't find that kind of opening to a horror movie every day. It's already pretty strange that Dracula presents himself like a gentleman caller; the fact that he's looking for a medical treatment for his state is almost easy to miss, given how extremely peculiar the whole scene plays out. I like it, it has a certain "we are not going to give a shit about the rules" quality. Throughout House of Dracula it's somewhat plain that Edward T. Lowe (it's impossible to believe that the same mind perpetrated both of the House of movies) was trying to amuse himself by making things as absurd as he possibly could. In the context of the rest of the film, the mere fact that neither Dracula nor Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr. of course) has any explanation for why they're not as dead as they were in the last film barely registers. It's all part of the "what the hell, if the things are going to end here we might as well end them in the most gaudy way possible" tone that makes House of Dracula so magical.

Speaking of Larry Talbot, he shows up at Edlemann's clinic looking for help, as well, but the doctor must turn him away for the moment. Thus Larry goes into town and acts like a crazy bugger, to get himself thrown in prison, and Inspector Holtz (Lionel Atwill, playing a Mitteleuropean policeman for the last time - he died after completing only two more movies) demands that Edlemann come to the station to help figure out what is wrong with this strange fellow. Neither the doctor nor his pretty secretary Miliza (Martha O'Driscoll) believe Talbot's story of lycanthropy any more than the inspector, although the fact that he changes right in the middle of Edlemann's rant about his tortured mental problems convinces everybody rather quickly.

The doctor quickly agrees to take Larry as a patient, and his conclusion after some testing consists of some fabulous bullshit medical jargon that basically means that Larry's tight skull means that he suffers from psychosomatic lycanthropy. It's amazingly campy, and I really can't imagine that it's an accident, but who can say? Edlemann has a treatment, involving the bone-softening fungus he's been developing to help treat his pretty hunchback assistant Nina (Jane Adams), but there isn't enough to fix the werewolf before tonight's full moon. So Larry tries to kill himself by diving into the sea, but all that happens is that he ends up wolfing around in the caves right at the edge of the sea. When Edlemann finds him the next morning, he also finds the bones of the unfortunate Dr. Niemann, as well as the horribly beat-up but still living body of Dr. Frankenstein's infamous monster (Glenn Strange, given even less to do than he did in House of Frankenstein, if it's possible).

Edlemann is no mad scientist, and he's not at all interested in reviving the monster; but things are about to change a bit. See, to cure Dracula, he's been giving the vampire blood transfusions, but the effect goes both ways; and every night, Edlemann goes a little bit crazy. As soon as he figures out what's happening (and as it becomes clear that Dracula is planning on devouring Miliza), he kills the Count, but the damage is done, and soon Crazy Half-Vampire Edlemann (we could probably just call him Hyde Edlemann if we want to admit that this is basically a heavily costumed rip-off) is off killing people in the countryside, with Larry getting all the blame, even though Jekyll Edlemann has cured him of his lycanthropy. In due course, Hyde Edlemann resurrects the monster, just as the Visarian villagers - get this - storm the hospital with torches and pitchforks, and things end just exactly the way the last several Frankenstein pictures have: the monster goes nuts and knocks things over and they blow up.

Notwithstanding that massively overdone ending, House of Dracula actually does a whole lot to distinguish itself. A lady hunchback heroine! Dracula trying to be a better man! A bipolar mad scientist! Bone-melting fungus! Larry Talbot spending half an hour moping about and bitching that he just can't die like he wants to! Alright, so that last one is certainly firmly in the realm of the cliché itself, but then again this film takes the rather unexpected route of actually curing poor Larry, for once and for all until the final sequel,such as it is... Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein ain't exactly in continuity, even as generous as we have to be with the definition of "continuity" in these films. Where was I? Right, the resolution of the wolf man plot is as clear a sign as anything that House of Dracula was meant to be a summing-up, and a farewell, and like I already said, it seems more than likely to me that all the weird changes to what had become a rather nicely rigid template was all part of Lowe's desire to screw around with the format, to prove that he could do something more interesting than just the usual mad scientist trying to yada yada legacy of Henry Frankenstein.

As I said, this is perhaps more interesting than good, but at the same time it does enough that's better than it strictly has to be ("has to be" defined as "just a little better than Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man", if you were wondering). For starters, Erle C. Kenton finally figured out how to direct a goddamn movie this time, or maybe it's just that George Robinson stopped listening to him and did whatever he wanted to behind the camera to make the film look halfway decent. For House of Dracula does indeed look something a good deal like a proper Universal horror movie, with much bolder shadows than Kenton's earlier films (not enough to supplant Son of Dracula as the best-looking of the later monster cycle films, but it's close). Perhaps related, and perhaps not, but the visual effects are as good here as they had been since the 1930s; Larry Talbot's wolf transformations are far more believable, and the big rubber bat looks as good as any of the big rubber bats in the series. Dracula's eventual disintegration is essentially stolen from House of Frankenstein, but that's the closest I have to a knock against the effects, given that we are talking about a 1945 B-movie.

The cast is also pretty fine: Onslow Stevens is particularly delightful as the de facto protagonist, and by far the most nuanced and compelling mad scientist since Wolf von Frankenstein all the way back in Son of Frankenstein; it shocks me that I have seen only one other film featuring this altogether prolific character actor (Them! from 1954) so I can't say if this performance is a particular stand-out or not. But it's pretty fun, and anchors the movie well. The other really exceptional actor is, believe it or not, John Carradine, who is hardly recognisable as the man who botched his way through the same role in House of Frankenstein by mugging ridiculously every chance he got. His take on Dracula in this film is infinitely subtler and more threatening, and while he hadn't a trace of the charisma that Bela Lugosi exuded without even trying in every frame of the original Dracula, I honestly think that Carradine's is the most technically accomplished performance. But you know, everyone is good, pretty much; Adams and O'Driscoll are far more dynamic than most Universal horror actresses got to be, and Ludwig Stossel and Skelton Knaggs make a fine, loopy pair as the comic relief that is much more surreal than comic. The only two clinkers, unfortunately, are the headliners: Chaney, as before, is clearly done with playing Larry Talbot, and Strange once again makes no impression as the monster, simply because the monster is in the movie for a grand total of... three minutes? Four? And half of the time at least, he's just lying there.

That's actually the best thing I can say for House of Dracula, especially compared to its immediate predecessor. The monsters in this monster rally get virtually nothing to do and are never seen in each others company, but there's enough going on around the edges that I don't care. This is a pretty easy film to watch and enjoy, and while it is nothing but a cheap B-movie that represents the shuddering final breath of a once-proud brand name, it's silly enough, fun enough, and even creative enough that it's better than just a mere diversion; it's a pretty credible attempt to wrap up the increasingly arbitrary and hidebound Universal horror films in a respectful, entertaining manner.

Reviews in this series
Dracula (Browning, 1931)
Drácula (Melford, 1931)
Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)
Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
Dracula's Daughter (Hillyer, 1936)
Son of Frankenstein (Lee, 1939)
The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941)
The Ghost of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1942)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill, 1943)
Son of Dracula (Siodmak, 1943)
House of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1944)
House of Dracula (Kenton, 1945)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton, 1948)

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: HOUSE OF PAIN

I have not been able to determine much information about the box office fortunes of the Universal monster films in the 1940s, so I cannot say if Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Son of Dracula, the studio's two franchise entries from 1943, made any particular sum of money worth mentioning. I suspect they must have, because their last horror film of 1944 - a banner year for monster movies, with two mummy films and an Invisible Man picture - was a hectic mash-up of those two movies. From Frankenstein/Wolf Man, we have the benighted notion of the monster rally, and with Son of Dracula having restored the Dracula name to the front and center of audiences' minds, the vampire count got added to the mix this time around, too. Supposedly the mummy Kharis was even going to make an appearance, in the first conception; thank God that fell through, or the result would doubtlessly be even more fragmentary and disjointed than the hopeless muddle that a mere three monsters produced. I give you, dear reader, House of Frankenstein, 71 incomprehensible minutes of the very worst Universal had to offer.

Incidentally, there's not a single person named Frankenstein anywhere in this film, although there are a couple scenes in the ruins of Ludwig Frankenstein's castle, so I guess that nearly justifies the title. But the mad scientist of importance to this film is what you might call a Frankenstein fanboy, Dr. Gustave Niemann (Boris Karloff) of Visaria. He has been imprisoned for the shocking and obscene crime of trying to marry a human head to a dog body - perhaps it was the other way around, but you get the point. He is currently in year 15 of an apparent life sentence to a castle-like asylum, only having contact with guards and his neighbor, the miserable hunchback Daniel (J. Carrol Naish). Obviously nothing good can come of putting a mad scientist and a hunchback next to each other, and during an especially nasty thunderstorm, the pair is able to make their escape when lightning puts a huge hole in the building.

The first person they meet after their jailbreak is the proprietor of a traveling horror show, Professor Lampini (George Zucco), who needs their help to get out of a spot of trouble. He offers the men a ride in thanks, and on the road shows off some of his finest specimens - including the actual skeleton of Count Dracula, a stake still in its chest. Niemann really doesn't give two shits about a fake vampire prop, and when it becomes obvious that Lampini won't take the doctor to Reigelburg to visit an old "friend", Niemann throttles the showman and takes his place.

Naturally enough, that old friend in Reigelburg is actually an old enemy - one of the three men responsible for Niemann's incarceration - and he has murder on his mind. Luckily for Niemann, Burgomeister Hussman (Sig Ruman) has a pair of young newlyweds visiting - his grandson Karl (Peter Coe) and American granddaughter-in-law Rita (Anne Gwynne) - and they're terribly excited at the thought of seeing wagon-based chamber of horrors, and taking along a fusty old grampa and his fusty old friend Inspector Arnz (the inevitable Lionel Atwill) to have fun with them. Hussman almost recognises Niemann right then and there, but he's too distracted to think about it closely; Niemann is ready to spring on the old man and kill him, and he pulls the stake out of the vampire skeleton to do just that, but then something terrifying happens. The skeleton re-grows veins and nerves and skin, and lo! Count Dracula (John Carradine, this time around) is reborn!

Niemann and Dracula cut a deal whereby the vampire will deal with Hussman and the scientist will protect him from all harm. Thus begins an intrigue, in which Dracula works his way in to the Hussman home, killing the Burgomeister while in bat form, and preparing to steal Rita away to live as his vampire bride. But Arnz and Karl figure out that something is up, and the chase Dracula, Niemann and Daniel across country, and finally Niemann concludes he must cut his losses and leave the count to his fate, which involves evaporating, clothes and all, in the first rays of the morning sun. Rita wakes up from her trance, and embraces her husband, the evil gone forever.

So ends the first part of House of Frankenstein.

I was not at all prepared the first time I saw the movie, and even now, knowing what to expect, I still found it hugely irritating. What it doesn't say on the label is that House of Frankenstein is really two separate short films, united by the framework of "Niemann wants to kill those who've wronged him", and neither one of the shorts is all that good. But first, I should probably sketch out the plot of the second half. You know what happens in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man? Same thing, only this time there's also a homicidally jealous hunchback trying to win a gypsy girl, Ilonka (Elena Verdugo) away from Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), who once again just wants to die, die, DIE! so that he might be free of this terrible curse &c. And once again the key to curing Larry lies in the journals of Dr. Henry Frankenstein, thus renamed from "Heinrich", which was already changed from "Henry", and the cure still involves a bizarre-ass shell game, this time involving brain-swapping instead of life-energy transference.

The most peculiar thing about House of Frankenstein is that it only had to do one thing to succeed at its massively unambitious goals, and it didn't do it. Dracula, the Frankenstein monster (a thankless role played now by Glenn Strange), and the Wolf Man all had to be onscreen together at the same time, and they aren't - even the monster and the werewolf are never really permitted to interact, since the monster is strapped down to a table until three minutes from the end, by which time Larry has "died" already. And of course, Dracula is dust long before Niemann ever stumbles into that damn ice cave where somehow, Larry (in wolf form) and the monster still live in suspended animation, having survived the flood at the end of Frankenstein Meets...

But let's go ahead and spot Curt Siodmak (who wrote the story) and Edward T. Lowe (a B-action picture vet who wrote the screenplay) that for whatever reason, they needed to scrupulously keep the monsters apart. There's still no reason for House of Frankenstein to be anywhere near this bad. The first bit, a pretty straightforward Dracula story that is doubtlessly the most complex thing the filmmakers could fit into the time they had, almost works, but it suffers massively from that needlessly compressed 30 minutes or so. There's a faintly absurd amount of incident that just keeps happening, boom-boom-boom, without any room for the story to breathe and to build up any sort of atmosphere.

It doesn't help that, in both halves of the film, the writing is so hideously clumsy, particularly the massive infodump included to clue in a viewer who might somehow have stumbled across the film without knowing what a vampire is (though I can't bitch so much about the equally clumsy exposition of the end of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man - the Frankenstein series has cherry-picked plot points from one film to another so arbitrarily that this is just about the only way we can be certain about what the situation is at the start of the middle of House of Frankenstein). It's particularly annoying in the monster/wolf man half, when too much of the movie consists, once again, of Larry Talbot swooning about and complaining that he can't die. You know who else is pretty sad to hear you can't die, Larry? Me. I'll bet I wish you'd just fucking die even more than you do.

There is one and only one point at which the screenplay achieves any kind of creative energy at all, and unfortunately it's very much the "so bad it's good" kind of creativity, but hey, any port in a storm. Niemann's plan for revenge involves moving the brains of the monster, Larry, and his last two victims around in a pattern that makes absolutely no sense at all: the film can't seem to make up its mind whether or not personal identity resides in the brain or the body, so that it's a punishment, on the one hand, to have one's own brain put in the monster, but it is also a punishment to have a lycanthropic brain put in one's own body (and the notion that lycanthropy is a brain disorder is just... unintuitive). The whole affair is a giddy mess, but at least it's enough crazy fun to keep you from wondering when the hell the monster is going start groaning and breaking things.

(Unsurprisingly, continuity is a bloody wreck, both on the Dracula side and the Frankenstein/Wolf Man side, but life's too short to worry about continuity between the Universal monster movies).

Nothing good was ever going to come out of that barbaric screenplay, but it doesn't help matters at all the House of Frankenstein was directed by Erle C. Kenton, last seen poking unimaginatively at The Ghost of Frankenstein, where he proved himself the most visually uncreative director in the whole of the Universal horror family. That film still looks better than House of Frankenstein, which makes no effort to disguise the fact that it's all taking place on soundstages, and has less of the murky shadows and gloom that makes classic Universal horror worth bothering about to begin with. The Dracula half is probably a touch better, but marred by some absolutely god-awful rubber bats and unconvincing transitions from said bats to human (the effects in Son of Dracula were so much better, I can't understand what happened). At any rate, the film is impossible dull-looking, much the least-distinguished film in all three series it belongs to.

The acting is not uniformly bad, for Karloff is fairly delightful as a mad scientist who is (by virtue of being Karloff, unnervingly erudite. Outside of him, though, nobody's all that good. The white-bread supporting characters aren't supposed to be, of course, the monsters are all fairly week this time around: Chaney was clearly just as sick of Larry Talbot as I am, Glenn Strange had about 45 seconds to make any kind of impression, and John Carradine is fairly helpless as the Count; he allegedly fought with the studio over what kind of Dracula to play (he wanted something more like the character in the novel, they wanted something more like Bela Lugosi), and in the end all he does is open his eyes really wide and glower at people from his lanky, lanky frame, while speaking in an accent that isn't exactly Carradine's voice, but isn't really European, either.

It's entirely fair to say that I hate this movie. The B-movie charms of the '40s Universal monster pictures was irregular, to say the least, but at least they're usually good from some fast, goofy fun. Whereas House of Frankenstein is just a chore to sit through. Between the sloppy writing, horrible plot construction, flat look, and above all, its relative dearth of monsters, this is pretty much the worst of all worlds: everything that plagued all but the best Universal horror films, and nothing of what made all but the worst at least semi-bearable.

Reviews in this series
Dracula (Browning, 1931)
Drácula (Melford, 1931)
Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)
Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
Dracula's Daughter (Hillyer, 1936)
Son of Frankenstein (Lee, 1939)
The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941)
The Ghost of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1942)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill, 1943)
Son of Dracula (Siodmak, 1943)
House of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1944)
House of Dracula (Kenton, 1945)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton, 1948)

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: IN WHICH NO-ONE IS EVER ACTUALLY REFERRED TO AS THE SON OF ANYBODY

Given how sequel-mad Universal studios was in the wake of 1939's Son of Frankenstein, cranking out two Frankensteins, one of which was also a Wolf Man, a whole carload of mummy pictures, and hell, even a few Invisible Man follow-ups, it seems almost absurd that it took until 1943 to finally produce a second sequel to Dracula, after the 1936 Dracula's Daughter. After all, you'd think that Dracula would be one of the biggest brand names in Universal's stables, and even if Dracula's Daughter was a rather dire money-loser, there was altogether sound logic backing up the continued adventures of everybody's favorite vampire. At any rate, when Son of Dracula (clever title) finally bowed right around Halloween, 1943, the Universal horror cycle had hit a pretty rough patch, with such awkward missteps as The Mummy's Tomb and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man standing in for actual good movies, which means that the film gets the benefit of distinctly lowered expectations; the damn surprising thing is that, while it is quite silly and suffers from one of the worst casting decisions in the 33 year history of the classic Universal horror, Son of Dracula is actually halfway decent, maybe even the best of the Dracula films. It's certainly the best Universal monster movie in the long period between The Wolf Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, not that we could really call that a terribly high bar to clear (unless you're one of them what likes the later mummy films, in which case... de gustibus non est disputandum).

Rather weirdly, the film hops from the indefinite Central Europe setting of the Wolf Man and Frankenstein pictures, or even the English setting of the previous Dracula vehicles, to position its action somewhere in the American Deep South, unidentified other than the presence of a sprawling old plantation on the edge of a big swamp. This is Dark Oaks, the home of the Caldwell family led by old Colonel Caldwell (George Irving), but he's going to be dead pretty soon, so let's instead take a look at his daughters, Katherine (Louise Allbritton) and Claire (Evelyn Ankers). As the movie opens, Katherine - Kay to her friends - is hosting a grand party for the Hungarian Count Alucard, who also manages to be Transylvanian (the region is indefinitely defined, but it's wholly Romanian), but either way, Kay met him on a recent European voyage. Her fiancé Frank Stanley (Robert Paige) and his friend Dr. Brewster (Frank Craven) have agreed to pick Alucard up from the train station, but he's not on the train - just his huge stack of luggage, at least one piece of which is suggestively coffin-sized, and bears his family crest written such that Brewster notices that A-L-U-C-A-R-D happens to be D-R-A-C-U-L-A backwards, which is a strange thing to notice, because the name "Dracula" has no meaning to him at this point, but I guess it was for our benefit, or some such. This happens to be the first time that this remarkably over-used card was played, by the way.

So, we now know that a vampire is waiting in the wings, and just to make sure we really REALLY get the fact that odd things are afoot, we follow Kay as she pays a visit to Madame Zimba (Adeline De Walt Reynolds), or Queen Zimba if you, like Kay, are a lover of all things paranormal and crave her mystic Hungarian insights into the future. That insight consists of the lovely thought that Kay is doomed to marry a corpse, and just as soon as Madame Zimba reveals this fact, a two-foot-wide rubber bat swoops in and kills her, of fright or bad editing, it's hard to say which.

Later that night, the party goes fairly well until Colonel Caldwell dies, setting his room on fire in the process; it's only after this tragedy cuts the evening short that the guest of honor finally presents himself, and now we get to the worst casting decision like I was talking about: Alucard, and let's just go ahead and call him Dracula to save confusion, is played by Lon Chaney, Jr. with a little pencil mustache and the god-damnedest attempt at a suave European accent that you ever did hear. I would absolutely love to hear an attempt to justify or defend this epic failure of film producing, as one sometimes hears in regards to Bela Lugosi's monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, or John Carradine as Dracula on two different occasions; it would be desperately amusing, because Chaney is inappropriate for this role in ways that I still can't get my head around, and that's sheer damn fact speaking, not opinion. But it is kind of cool that as of this film, he became the first and last person to play a werewolf, a mummy, a Frankenstein monster, and a vampire (Christopher Lee comes awfully close; but in Howling II it was his sister that was a werewolf).

Things get awfully complex awfully fast for a simple little B-movie, but in a nutshell, Kay becomes the sole owner of Dark Oaks, while Claire gets all the family fortune - a peculiar arrangement, to say the least, but it means that Kay and her new houseguest can be left totally alone all day. As this is happening, Brewster learns that there is no Hungarian family "Alucard", and in a casual conversation with Professor Lazlo (J. Edward Bromberg) of the Hungarian embassy, the doctor learns that there is an extinct line, the Dracula family, with traditional links to vampirism. But a sensible man, in America no less, isn't going to start believing in vampires at the drop of a hat.

Frank, meanwhile, is growing increasingly obsessed with the count, whatever his name may be, and he discovers that Kay and Dracula have married. His response to this news is to fire at the Hungarian, point blank, only to watch in horror as the bullets pass straight through Dracula, "killing" Kay. Here's where everything becomes totally convoluted: Frank turns himself in for murder, the cops and Brewster rather think he's insane, since Kay seems to still be very much alive, Lazlo comes to see this "Alucard" himself, and the vampire reveals himself to the the two amateur sleuths with great smarmy delight. Smarm that he would no doubt be slower to adopt if he knew that his wife was visiting Frank in prison, and revealing her true plan: she just used Dracula for the immortality, but now she wants to make Frank a vampire, and together they will destroy Dracula and live forever together.

Take away the bits that are so loopy that it's almost impossible to stand it (Dracula gets married?), and this is a rather imaginative script indeed, if also a somewhat deranged one. Most interesting to me is that this is not just a horror film, it's essentially a horror film noir, recasting Dracula as the poor sucker who gets played by the smart, shady brunette with an eye for all the angles. It was made at just exactly the earliest possible moment for me to be comfortable making that connection, but once you've made it, it's hard not to think of it in those terms.

Beyond that, the scenario is one of the oddest in the whole Universal cycle: not only because it has the feverish inspiration to bring Dracula to America, although that's certainly a nice touch. As much as one tries to figure out how this all fits the Standard Vampire Template, it just insists on veering into unexpected directions, like the scene where Dracula appears before Brewster and Lazlo, or the moment where Brewster protects a little boy who was bitten by the vampire by making little iodine crosses on the puncture wounds. Curt Siodmak did not write the script (it was by Eric Taylor, who worked on the Phantom of the Opera remake the same year), but he wrote the story treatment, and it bears all the hallmarks of his best work: take a monster that everybody has seen before, and tell a story that uses that monster in really peculiar ways. And while as much of Son of Dracula proves to be damn weird as it is successful, at least it's not more of the same, or boring, like the Frankenstein films were quickly becoming.

A huge portion of credit also belongs to the film's director, Robert Siodmak - Curt's brother, though this was the only time they ever worked together in America. If it is true that Son of Dracula is not the equal to his best films, it is nevertheless clearly the work of a director who had more ideas than your average studio hack. Working with George Robinson, quickly becoming the monster movie cinematographer of choice, Siodmak crafted a high-contrast world that cannot rightly be called Gothic or Expressionist in the manner of the better-known Universal horror classics; it is, however, quite moody and potent, without necessarily being so atmospheric as e.g. The Wolf Man. A modernist look for a younger continent, maybe. Siodmak also manages to nail the presentation of the film's visual effects, including the nifty transition of a vampire into a wisp of smoke; and hey! it's a Dracula film with actual visual effects! That's a pretty stark change from the resolutely stagey original and the paranormal-averse first sequel, right there.

I absolutely do not want to defend Son of Dracula as a lost masterpiece, or anything: the screenplay misses as often as it hits, and while there are a couple of really fine performances in Craven's Brewster and Bromberg's Lazlo, both of whom get more screentime than Dracula himself, it's hard to explain just how very deleterious Chaney's hugely goofy take on the count is to the film's total effectiveness. It's wonderful that Louise Allbritton makes such a fine undead femme fatale, because she provides the film with at least one decent villain; the gravity and sense of menace that a horror film of this sobriety requires are utterly absent every time Chaney opens his mouth and that nervous big lug voice comes out. If that single change had been made, to cast a truly threatening and seductive actor in Chaney's place, I don't wonder if Son of Dracula would have a much greater reputation as a solid B-horror film.

Reviews in this series
Dracula (Browning, 1931)
Drácula (Melford, 1931)
Dracula's Daughter (Hillyer, 1936)
Son of Dracula (Siodmak, 1943)
House of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1944)
House of Dracula (Kenton, 1945)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton, 1948)

DISNEY ANIMATION: BRING A LITTLE JOY TO EVERY HEART

It seems like just about every prominent fairy tale was at least briefly considered to be the follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, even before it was clear that the Disney Studios would survive that film's anticipated box office failure. Of course, when Snow White instead proved to be one of the great hits of its age, a second Disney animated feature went from being a pipe dream to a dead certain necessity, and as it turned out, their second work would not be adapted from a fairy tale at all, but from an Italian children's novel published in the 1890s, Carlo Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio. It is said that the studio passed on by such tales as The Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty because the story men couldn't figure out what to do with them, which makes no sense given what Collodi's book gave them to work with: it's bizarrely European and incredibly nightmarish. But glad we all are that they figured out how to whip this surreal story of an animate puppet careening through one grotesque scenario after another into something much friendly and more straightforward (and I'm going to assume, as I did with Snow White, that I don't actually have to enlighten you as to the details of that story), for their Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema, and arguably (at least, it's the argument I'd make) the most beautiful animated movie in history.

It's telling, I think, that the two most visually rich Disney features ever made both came out in 1940; it implies to me that however proud Walt was of what he and his animators had achieved with Snow White, he had concerns that the medium wasn't being taken as seriously as other visual art forms. Clearly, I cannot prove such a thing, but it remains the case that every time I watch Pinocchio, I am always struck as though for the first time by how obviously painted it is. Part of this is due to the change made from watercolor backgrounds, used in Snow White, to gouache and oil paintings (this would be the technology used on all subsequent hand-drawn Disney features, save one). The result is less soft and warm, but provides for a greater range of representation, one exploited her to the fullest.

In this film more than any other, the backgrounds contradict themselves between the illusion of depth, augmented by unquestionably the most sophisticated and lovely multiplane camera work in any Disney film, and the reality of flatness. Unlike any of the studio's other films, the backgrounds in Pinocchio reveal the texture of the paper they've been painted on, making the physical fact of the art important in a way that it rarely or never is elsewhere. Even in the character animation, brushstrokes are plainly visible in a way that is usually avoided with great care. It's seen everywhere there are soft feathering effects: most easily noted on the tufts of hair on either side of the cat Figaro's whiskers, but also on the Blue Fairy's wings and hair, and on the feather atop Pinocchio's hat. Unlike any other Disney feature, save perhaps for some of the sequences in the same year's Fantasia or a handful of the Silly Symphonies, Pinocchio feels like a moving painting, and a particularly rich painting at that.

At times, the movie almost feels like it's just showing off what technically perfect animation looks like; particularly in the Monstro chase at the end, when the whale, a collage of hashed lines that almost looks like a pencil drawing, plows through the finest water ever animated, by hand or by computer; eerily realistic movement and splashes, but the appearance of the liquid itself (it's "skin" if you will) is rather more impressionistic. Water like that could only ever exist in animation, and thank God that it does, because it is one of the most beautiful things in cinema.

There is also the character design, none of it especially realistic in the manner of Snow White, Prince Charming, or the Queen (except the Blue Fairy; and she is painted in such an experimental way as to leave realism far behind), but none of it necessarily cartoony at all. What has always impressed me most about the characters in Pinocchio, visually speaking, is their relative mass: Figaro is clearly a little bundle of fluff, Pinocchio himself is obviously much lighter than a human boy of the same size, the magnificently animated villain Stromboli is one of the most fleshy characters in any Disney film. And so forth. A great deal of attention and time went into the design and animation - the occasional stiffness and jerkiness present in Snow White is gone almost completely (there is only one moment in the whole of Pinocchio where I detect a flaw in the animation: it's when Jiminy Cricket falls into the hole in the pool table), replaced by the most fluid, accurate character movement in any hand-drawn animated film I can name.

For all its technical accomplishment and breathtaking beauty, it is nonetheless a fact that Pinocchio lost a great deal of money on its first release, and it took many years for it to achieve the classic stature given to many of Disney's films automatically; and though I don't personally understand why, I have some suspicions. For one thing, the plot of the film is unusually episodic, never a particularly good way to tell a story with any kind of graceful flow. It's also ungodly terrifying, almost capricious in its cruelty: for the sin of being innocent and trusting, Pinocchio is thrown in a cage, threatened with a huge axe, and turned into a donkey - hell, we don't even have to go so far as the plot, just the design of Pleasure Island is terrifying to look at. It's a dark film by Disney's standards, all around, and I imagine that this has done no good to its reputation with audiences.

But the counter-argument to that is Pinocchio's essential sweetness: it's there in the good characters, ranging from Pinocchio himself (one of the most guileless and appealing of all Disney heroes), to the impossible cute Figaro, and especially to Jiminy Cricket, who anchors the film and is, I think, the primary reason that Pinocchio remains much less otherworldly than many of Disney's "storybook" movies, not only because of his modernism, but because he constantly pulls the audience into the storytelling, erasing the "once upon a time" distancing effect - though it takes place in a European never-where, it also feels more immediate than any of the princess stories.

The film also boasts one of the best musical soundtracks in Disney's history: not least among the songs being "When You Wish Upon a Star", which has of course become an anthem of the Walt Disney Company itself in the years since the film's release. For that reason alone, it seems odd that the film had such a chilly reception for a large chunk of its history; many a film was advertised based on the success of its songs, and very often those songs were nowhere near as good as Leigh Harline and Ned Washington's five brilliant little compositions.

But we know better these days, right? Pinocchio has become enshrined at the top of virtually every ranking of great animated films, great films of the 1940s, et cetera, helped out no doubt by Disney's frightening ability to drum up interest for any and all of their products by the judicious application of marketing. But marketing can't conjure up artistry from thin air, and I think that has more to do with the film's eventual rescue than anything: beauty will out, and Pinocchio is as beautiful as any color film has any right to be. The fact that it's a genuinely touching coming-of-age story and playful musical comedy-adventure besides that is really just the cherry on top.

UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: FARO-LA FARO-LI!

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what desperation looks like. By 1943, the steam was mostly out of the second phase of Universal horror movies, even in their new cheaper, B-picture incarnation, and if the cycle was going to keep on going, something bold and splashy had to be done, for then as now movies made their money from a snappy advertising campaign more than because of their inherent quality. The solution, in retrospect, seems inevitable; but who can say how many harried meetings it took until some Universal executive hit upon the idea of putting two of their A-list monster into a movie together. The result was titled, with all due shamelessness, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and that was pretty much the end of Universal's horror line as a home for even the vaguest kind of serious filmmaking until 1954.

The action takes place four years after The Wolf Man, and an indeterminate time after The Ghost of Frankenstein, but by this point we've pretty much abandoned continuity for keeps. Anyway, for about 25 of its 37 minutes FMtWF is pretty strictly a sequel to The Wolf Man only, and while it's still a pretty shoddy sequel, this is the only part of the film that works even on the level of a satisfying B-movie. In Llanwelly, Wales, a couple of hopelessly stupid grave robbers (Cyril Delevanti and Tom Stevenson) break into the Talbot family crypt one moonlit night to steal the cash allegedly hidden in the coffin of the late Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), according to family tradition. When the open it up to take a look, they find Talbot's body in extremely good repair for a four-year-old corpse, surrounded by a small mountain of wolfbane. Even though one of the robbers has the presence of mind to recall the old rhyme about werewolves (the words have changed, to indicated the new wrinkle in the mythology, that it takes a full moon to transform the werewolf, and that is how that piece of ancient lore got invented by a screenwriter in 1943), they're both so focused on their task that they don't notice when the moonlight strike's Talbot's face, waking him up and turning him into a beast, killing them both in the time it takes to draw a breath.

Cut to Cardiff, a long way from Llanwelly, where Larry Talbot wakes to find himself in a hospital, having been treated for his bizarre wounds by the kindly Dr. Frank Mannering (Patrick Knowles), who is of course interested in this mysterious subject's history, but Talbot can't remember anything but his own name. That doesn't sit right with the impossibly aggressive Inspector Owen (Dennis Hoey), theoretically investigating what happened to Talbot but plainly more interested in accusing the victim of something - anything! And when he goes to Llanwelly and finds that Talbot died years ago, he becomes convinced that the man in Mannering's hospital is hiding something terrible. Which he is, of course, and the night that Owen is in Wales happens to have also been a night that Talbot escaped in wolf form and killed someone. Thus the next day he starts raving about lycanthropy and how he must dies before he kills again, and both the doctor and the policeman conclude that he's a raving loony who should be locked up.

Ain't no locking up a werewolf, though, and that very same night Larry escapes, traveling all the way to Germany (which couldn't be named Germany - there was a war on, you know) in the space of a single cut, having apparently spent a whole month looking for Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), the old gypsy woman who was such a help to him four years prior. When he finally finds her, she cannot think of any way to free him from his curse, but there is someone in the nearby town of Visaria who might be able to, a certain Dr. Frankenstein.

Then, like a light-switching getting flipped, Frankenstein/Wolf Man goes dead in a heartbeat. The opening act is hardly perfect; Larry's resurrection is about as contrived as anything in a Friday the 13th picture for a start. But at least it built upon the story present in The Wolf Man in a reasonably logical manner, and Roy William Neill's direction (his only monster film; at this time, he was working on the Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone, mostly) recaptures at least some of the Gothic eeriness of its predecessor, even if it is unmistakably cheaper and the studio lighting not remotely as well-sculpted (the current film's cinematographer, George Robinson, had done a few horror films already and would do more, explaining why the film at least looks much better than The Ghost of Frankenstein).

Once the plot gets to Visaria, however, this goes from being an adequate sequel to The Wolf Man to being a terrible sequel to Ghost of Frankenstein, a film already not good enough to support a terrible sequel. It's not just that continuity is shot in the face and left for dead here - the film just becomes incredibly stupid and lazy, not just in the screenplay, a massive misstep for the usually reliable Curt Siodmak, but in every element of its execution. But let's stick with the screenplay for now. Larry arrives in the ruins of Frankenstein's manor in wolf form, hiding from the local villagers, and the next morning he snoops around and of course he finds the monster (Bela Lugosi). But can you guess where? In a subterranean ice-cave. How that makes sense on any level, let alone in reference to The Ghost of Frankenstein, is completely beyond me. At any rate, he gets the monster out, and asks it to help him find the late doctor's research papers. The only thing he finds there of any use is a photography of Elsa Frankenstein.

Long story short, Larry finagles a meeting with Elsa (Ilona Massey, who is absolutely awful), and begs her for anything he can possibly give her pertaining to her father's creation, because by now he has it firmly in mind that this will help him out; Mannering finds Larry in Visaria, and shortly thereafter finds the monster, who drifts in just long enough to disrupt the local Festival of the New Wine; and before you can say, "this isn't going anywhere at all", Mannering has concluded that he can transfer Larry's wolf life-energy into the monster's body, thus killing the wolf man and fixing the monster - a development that springs from absolutely nothing in Mannering's character besides a close-up where he looks up and whispers, "I can't destroy Dr. Frankenstein's creation". Elsa is decidedly unhappy about this change of plans, but luckily, the locals have a plan that involves blowing up the dam and drowning the whole damn lot of them.

Practically nothing that happens following Larry's transformation into a wolf on the road to Visaria makes even the least degree of sense, but the "life-essence transference" finale probably takes the cake for the stupidest kink in the plot. But even that isn't the really crushing problem with the movie; at least it has a crazy bad-movie energy to it. What wrecks Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man above all else, from a story perspective, is the miserable long slog in the middle where absolutely nothing happens except that Larry mopes about whining about how he wants to die; conveniently forgetting that he did die, and was dead for four years, and only two greedy grave-robbers are responsible for his current state. This is atrociously boring, and the film just keeps wandering for one endless minute after another waiting for the monster to finally come back.

When he does, things don't improve much. Bela Lugosi's performance got savaged when the film was new, though in recent years some people have tried to argue in his favor, pointing out that a great many of his scenes were cut, allegedly because test audiences laughed at the monster speaking with Lugosi's voice. Those cut scenes, we are told, explain how he is blind and otherwise damaged, which therefore explains his stupid, stupid walk, the arms-outstretched stumble that has somehow become linked with the character over the years. But simply knowing that Lugosi's performance was compromised by cutting does not change the fact that what's left of the performance looks absolutely silly. And even with the added footage, there would be no excusing the hammy facial expressions that Lugosi uses in virtually every shot. I'll say this much in his favor; it's easy to forget, that the creature in this movie is not the same creature from in the four previous Frankenstein films. The monster was given Ygor's brain at the end of the last film, recall, and it's actually a bit nifty to thus have the actor who played Ygor playing the Ygor-creature here.

If pressed, though, I'd have to say that the single worst part of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is not the aimless, brainless screenplay; the slack performances; the perfunctory direction that loses all sense of style once the action leaves England; it's the song. During the Festival of the New Wine, we are subjected to the profoundly annoying Song of the New Wine, in which a far-too-enthusiastic singer (Adia Kuznetzoff) leads the whole town in a romping, three-minute sequence with metaphorically suggestive lyrics including "Life is short but death is long, faro-la! faro-li!" Of all the many random musical numbers in the 1940s - and they are far more common than anyone would like or need - I can't think of another that damages the tone of the film this badly, and without even the benefit of being a half-way decent song. At least it's insane enough, in context or out of it, to give the movie some balls-ass crazy momentum when the film is at its most airless. It does not, however, do anything to keep Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man as a whole from easily snagging the title of Most Pointless Universal Monster Movie, at least for the time being.

Reviews in this series
Frankenstein (Whale, 1931)
Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935)
Son of Frankenstein (Lee, 1939)
The Wolf Man (Waggner, 1941)
The Ghost of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1942)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (Neill, 1943)
House of Frankenstein (Kenton, 1944)
House of Dracula (Kenton, 1945)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton, 1948)