Cloris Leachman's creepy cameo as Frau Blücher, the housekeeper and apparent mistress of the late monster-maker, qualifies as one of the funniest moments on the American screen. Horses rear in terror at the mention of her name. She gazes at her dead lover's grandson with a perverse lust that would grow fungus on a billiard ball. And she was in the film for a reason. "Frau Blücher" was the married name of the renegade Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the erstwhile mistress of the philosopher and sometime Nazi Party member Martin Heidegger.

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