Finally, Ol' Furface. People love this movie. People think it has more soul and pathos and heartache than any other. It certainly belongs with the other Universal classics:

We begin at Castle Matteschott, the ancestral home of Lyle Talbot, galoot:

He's sort of a tortured guy. Well-meaning, decent, and often underlit.

But he gets bit by Bela Lugosi, who's a werewolf, and this leads to a montage sequence:

And then he's on the prowl. By the way, we don't see the famous facial-hair time-lapse photography in this one; the only thing that changes is his feet. They turn into extremely hairy paws.

He dies and that's that. If I seem somewhat underwhelmed, I was. It’s all there - Claude Rains is good, of course. Lon Chaney Jr. is tortured and sad and scared, and it’s his best performance, all the better because some sort of natural, unforced dorkiness comes through in his performance.

But that wasn’t the end, of course. It’s never the end for these guys. And so a few years later . . .

Oh crap, I'm still alive:

And here he thought he as dead. He was in a coffin and everything. Then some guys dug him up during a full moon, and hey presto he's fleshy as ever. In fact he seems to have put on a chin or two while dead.

But maybe he got better while he was dead?

Alas, no. He escapes from the hospital, finds the gypsy lady whose son bit him in the first picture, and they set off to find the one man who knows the secret of life and death! He'll help Lyle Talbot. And by "help" I mean "kill him." Talbot just wants to DIE ALREADY, and you're thinking: that can be arranged. I mean, you can take poison, then have someone feed you to the pigs, or chop you up and throw the parts here and there, or something that makes it unlikely you'll be reconstituted.

The man who has the secret? Dr. Frankenstein. But he's dead! Oh no. He was killed in the fire along with his Monster. But he has a daughter around somewhere, and she might know the secret of Life and Death, right? If she could just find his papers. But since the movie's more than half over, we need to get the Monster back in the picture, so Wolfman turns into a Wolfman, runs around, gets chased, falls into a pit, and discovers, as usual, the frozen body of you-know-who, conveniently lit. It's like he's in a fridge:

Never fails: the Monster is always defeated by fire, ends up frozen, and is none the worse for wear. Reanimated dead meet held together with catgut, and nothing does him the slightest harm.

He's awakened, and goes into full Herman Munster mode - and not only can he walk after being imprisoned in ice for God knows how long, he understands the Wolfman's request for Dr. Frankenstein's PAPERS, and starts to search.

But they can't find it. Nevermind; time for a musical sequence. It's the Festival of the New Wine! (Song starts 1:15 in.)

The blonde is Ilona Massey, who's lovely and adult in a way you don't see much these days:

Born in Budapest, she was a staunch anti-communist, and picketed the appearance of Khrushchev when he appeared at the UN in 1956. Her husband was a Major General in the USAF Reserve. But back to the movie:

Bela Lugosi plays the Monster. Lots of horrible guttural screaming. He had some rudimentary dialogue, but it was cut, and his voice dubbed. Eventually we get around to an experiment that will do something bad to the Wolfman, and of course Dr. F's old equipment works perfectly fine, including the Thing That Goes Around and Around.

It also has the power to transform Baroness F into a Valkyrie, apparently:

As usual, it all ends in tears; there' s a fight, and everything falls apart. Hey, we still got that bed-thing back in storage? Bring it out, they need it again for a movie:

To tell you the truth, I liked it better than the original Wolfman. It's not as careful or thoughtful; it was hacked up by the studio; Lugosi isn't a particularly terrifying Monster. (He was pushing 60 at the time.) But it felt like a classic fun Universal monster movie, and it had electricity AND villagers running around in panic AND Lionel Atwill. So there. So here: