October 9, 2016/The Ghost of Frankenstein

===Transcript===
Intro
Hi, everybody, welcome to Turner Classic Movies. I’m Ben Mankiewicz. This is the second night in our Monster of the Month spotlight on Frankenstein movies. Last week, we showed you the first three in the original Universal Frankenstein series. Tonight, we’re bringing you three more in the series. Up next, from 1942, The Ghost of Frankenstein. After the last film in the series, Son of Frankenstein, you might think there’s no way Frankenstein’s monster could return again after being knocked into a sulfur pit. But I think we all know this by now, sequelitis is a condition more powerful than death. The Ghost of Frankenstein begins with the local townspeople in a frenzy, this time convinced that the previous films’ events have left their village cursed that the only way to remove that curse is to destroy Frankenstein’s castle still standing after all these years. Well, needless to say in swarming the castle, the villagers create more problems than they were solving. This was the first of Universal’s Frankenstein movies not to feature Boris Karloff as the monster he helped immortalize. Karloff was busy acting in one of the longest-running Broadway plays of all time, Arsenic and Old Lace. So the monster in Ghost of Frankenstein is played by the son of the man of a thousand faces, Lon Chaney Jr. While Karloff will forever be associated with the monster, Chaney Jr. plays Mary Shelley’s creation effectively. Chaney is backed up by a superb cast including Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Ralph Bellamy, Lionel Atwill and Bela Lugosi as Igor. From 1942, directed by Erle C. Kenton, The Ghost of Frankenstein.
Outro
Like Boris Karloff before him, Lon Chaney Jr. had some trouble getting used to the makeup needed to create Frankenstein’s monster. At one point during production, he suffered a horrible skin reaction, had to take a week off to deal with a nasty rash, but that was not the worst of it. Discussing the grand entrance of the monster emerging from the sulfuric tomb, Chaney said “They stuck a straw in my mouth and covered me up with cement. That took till 12 o’clock to get me sealed in, then everybody went to lunch.” Stay tuned for more in the Frankenstein series, coming up, the first ever big-screen monster team-up.
Category:Movie Capsules