A director’s duty isn’t just limited to his work on the screen. As a director, you serve as the project’s leader, a captain treading into uncharted territories. No matter the actors on set, most of the success of the picture rests on the director’s shoulders, for better or for worse.

By the time Rowland V. Lee began working on Son of Frankenstein in 1939, he had been working as a director for over a decade. Lee was responsible for films like Desire (1923) and The Outsider (1926). In addition to his duties as a director, Lee would occasionally serve as a film’s producer or writer as well.

Of course, Son of Frankenstein received an unprecedented level of success that Lee’s previous films had never seen.

Behind-the-scenes, film actor Donnie Dunagan, who played Peter Von Frankenstein, commended Lee’s professionalism and talent as a director.

“You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to perceive that he was in charge,” Dunagan said, according to Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946, by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas.

“Mr. Lee had a natural, calm, dignified presence that everyone seemed to pick up on, and after a few days on Son of Frankenstein. I thought he owned the whole place! He would move around the sound stages, very casually, checking on people, asking how people were, and I was standing pretty close by - he used to take me along with him...They just thought the world of him.”