Format: DVD from personal collection on various players.
One of the great characters in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein is the local police inspector with the trick arm played by Kenneth Mars. I’d always considered him just a concoction of Brooks’s fevered imagination until today, when I watched Son of Frankenstein, the third movie in the series and the last, I believe to feature Boris Karloff as the Monster. It turns out that just as the peasant played by Gene Hackman was a riff on Bride of Frankenstein rather than the original, the police inspector who had his arm ripped off by the monster is canon as well. They even play darts!
Awesomely-named Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) has inherited the family castle and has moved his wife Elsa (Josephine Hutchinson, the character name being an obvious nod to Elsa Lanchester) and young son Peter (Donnie Dunagan) to start life anew. The townspeople of the village of Frankenstein are none too happy that someone has returned to the family home, especially when that person is the son of the feared and hated Baron who created the Monster. The Frankensteins are given a cold reception by the townspeople, notably the Burgomaster (Lawrence Grant) and the aforementioned Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill).
