#165: Wolf Blood (1925)
Where are the werewolves?
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 23, 2019.
Initial release: December 16, 1925
Director: George Chesebro
You know, for a movie that’s billed “the first werewolf movie” (it’s not, it’s just the oldest surviving one) you’d expect there to be a werewolf. But instead, we just get lumber industry corporate warfare and cishet romance drama. Very disappointing.
Let’s get to it: it’s late summer in Nowheresville, Canada, and two lumber companies are competing over the same patch of woods. The bigger one, Consolidated Lumber, has been surreptitiously shooting employees of the other company, Ford Lumber, to injure them and take them off the job site. Pretty typical of labor practices back then, but you know the only thing stopping corps from doing that today is the legal fees.
Furious about the constant injuries, the new foreman for Ford Lumber, Dick Bannister, calls corporate HQ and demands that the company owner travel to the job site along with a surgeon. He didn’t count on the owner being a young heiress — one whom he’s immediately infatuated with — or the surgeon being her fiance. Things escalate between Ford and Consolidated to the point where Bannister is attacked by rival employees and left for dead; the surgeon finds him near death and tries to patch him up, but the only person around to do a blood transfusion is a local woodsman who hates Bannister. Instead of donating blood, he offers the blood of a captured wolf; with no other choice (ethics and medical science be damned) the surgeon takes the offer. Dick later finds out and is horrified; meanwhile Edith, the company owner, is torn between her love for Bannister and her fiance.
As rumors swirl around the logging camp and Bannister’s counterpart at Consolidated winds up dead, Bannister becomes increasingly convinced that he’s somehow part wolf, though George Chesebro (playing Bannister) isn’t nearly as good an actor as, say, Conrad Veidt in The Hands of Orlac. Though Edith expresses her love for him, she too is afraid, and so he runs off to jump off a cliff, only for her to stop him.
And… that’s it. There’s no werewolf in this movie, only a guy who thinks he is one because the writers didn’t pay any attention to the science of blood transfusions. Plus a mawkish cishet romance that’s about as shallow as a puddle.
Nobody will ever mistake this movie for anything inspired by German Expressionist film; that said, most of the film is set in the woods of Canada, and so we get good shots of tall trees casting long shadows. But other than that most of the cinematography is workmanlike and basic, and when you have a purely visual medium like silent film, that’s a huge sin. The script isn’t very good either, relying on sentimentality and badly-written accents; several times the (never-identified) mixed ethnicity of the mildly villainous woodsman who sells cheap hooch to the loggers is referred to with slurs.
All in all, if you’re interested in werewolf cinema history or just are looking for obscure silent films since Nosferatu and Dr. Caligari hog all the glory, Wolf Blood might be an interesting peculiarity in the annals of werewolf cinema, but on its own merits, I can’t really recommend it.
