October 2, 2016/Son of Frankenstein

===Transcript===
Intro
Hi, thanks for being with us on TCM, I’m Ben Mankiewicz. Three times is the charm tonight, at least it is for Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Up next, we got the third film in our Frankenstein triple feature. From Universal Pictures in 1939, it’s Son of Frankenstein. Unlike the first two movies in the Frankenstein series, James Whale does not direct the third film, handing the series off to Rowland V. Lee. Despite his reservations about doing another sequel, Boris Karloff does return as the monster, though this marked his final appearance. Son of Frankenstein takes place many years after the creation of the original Frankenstein monster and the death of its creator. Basil Rathbone plays Wolf von Frankenstein, the son of the original Dr. Frankenstein. Wolf is out to salvage his father’s tarnished reputation, and that’s a pretty daunting task considering the trouble his monster caused for the villagers in town in the first two movies. Among those challenging Frankenstein the younger is the police inspector played by Lionel Atwill. He lost an arm to the monster as a child and it was replaced with an artificial limb, which he now wears in memorable fashion. Reviving the monster proves tricky. It seems the creature only responds to the disturbed, revenge-minded commands of his father’s former associate, Igor, played by Bela Lugosi, making Son of Frankenstein one of the eight movies Karloff and Lugosi made together. As for Rathbone, he was best known at the time for playing the sword-wielding nemesis of Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood, released the year before. And the same year as our movie, 1939, Rathbone began his long run playing Sherlock Holmes. And here he is, also in 1939, as the Son of Frankenstein.
Outro
This was Boris Karloff’s third and final performance as Frankenstein’s monster, but it wasn’t the final appearance of the monster in the Universal series, nor was it Karloff’s last time in the series. Bear with me here. Three years later in 1942, Universal released The Ghost of Frankenstein. In that fourth film, Lon Chaney Jr. played the monster. Chaney had just made a big splash for Universal as the Wolf Man. Bela Lugosi returned as Igor in The Ghost of Frankenstein. And then a year later, it was Lugosi's turn to play the monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. switching back over to Wolf Man. Boris Karloff, he wasn't involved in either of those movies, but he came back for the sixth film in the series House of Frankenstein. Boris Karloff played a mad scientist trying to revive not only Frankenstein’s monster, now played by Glenn Strange, but also the Wolf Man, played again by Lon Chaney Jr., and Dracula, played by John Carradine, not Bela Lugosi. Got it? I know you don't. Up next, Silent Sunday Night takes us to the Land of Oz, with Oliver Hardy playing the Tin Man a couple of years before famously teaming with Stan Laurel.
Category:Movie Capsules