#248: The Wolf Man
Not quite the howling good time its reputation promises
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 20, 2020.
Initial release: December 9, 1941
Director: George Waggner
Universal Studios once built a media empire on monsters. Some, like Dracula or Frankenstein, are built on classic stories; others are new creations, like the Mummy. The werewolf is an ancient legend, but it, too, got the Universal treatment, sealing the studio’s success (after a rocky financial period in the 1930s) with 1941’s The Wolf Man.
The film opens with Larry Talbot returning to the old family home somewhere in a small Welsh village to take his seat as master of the Talbot estate following the death of his brother. He’s been in America for the last 18 years, and has a lot to adjust to. (As is often the case with Universal’s early monster movies, the time period is implied to be contemporary, so Dracula for example is moved up a few decades to the early 1930s. but despite taking place in early 1940s England, you’d never know there was a war on in The Wolf Man.) After testing out his father’s new telescope on the village down the hill, he spies a beautiful woman standing by her bedroom window, and decides to pay her a visit. After flirting with her in her father’s antiques store, he buys a cane with a wolf-shaped head made out of silver. Despite her protestations, he later shows up for a date she never agreed to, but agrees to bring along her friend; the three of them go to visit the local Romani fortunetellers. Larry and his date, who turns out to be named Gwen, decide to go for a walk while waiting for her friend to hear her fortune.
Not long after, Gwen is chased off by the male fortuneteller, Bela, (played by Bela Lugosi!) but as she’s running through the woods she’s attacked by a wolf. Larry manages to kill it with his silver-headed cane, but is bitten in the process. When the police investigate, they find no trace of a wolf, but they do find the body of Bela, his head done in by blunt force trauma, evidently caused by the silver-headed cane found nearby. Larry can provide no explanation for what happened, and insists he killed a wolf.
Soon it becomes clear that whatever happened to Bela is now happening to Larry, and soon he finds himself changing, transforming, becoming a hairy, feral-minded, murderous wolf man at night; during the day he’s viewed with suspicion by the locals, if not outright disgust. In the end it turns out tragically, as stories like this all-too-often do. But one has to consider the very good possibility that all of this was in Larry’s head; the film features discussion of clinical lycantropy and schizophrenia, and Larry begins to believe he’s going insane. This “maybe it’s all in his head” interpretation is part of what makes this film one of the better Universal Horror classics; while of course there’s always the more standard supernatural explanation, Universal films usually haven’t left much room for interpretation like this.
I say “better” relatively — Lon Chaney Jr.’s acting is, in a word, subpar by Universal’s standards. He’s also a tad too old, tending to look older than his on-screen father, a well-aged Claude Rains, who was only 17 years Chaney’s senior. But the make-up effects are absolutely top-shelf for 1941; Universal typically did fantastic makeup work as can be seen in the Frankenstein and Mummy movies, but it’s the werewolf makeup that takes the cake, giving Chaney a pained, human expression under all that fur. Like vampires, werewolf legends appear worldwide and in a wide variety; unlike vampires, there was never really a single unifying popular tale like Dracula. Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris might make the claim, but who actually read that other than me?
So instead the common understanding of werewolves is almost wholly a creature of cinema, complete with such traits as a weakness to silver or turning into a wolf under the light of the full moon, much of which did not exist in legends until the advent of werewolf film. So in a sense, the closest thing werewolves have to a Dracula is this film (and its sequels), helping set some of the standard werewolf tropes that we take for granted today, and if for no other reason, we must give it credit for that.
I might dunk on this movie a bit — I rarely am satisfied by werewolf movies — but it’s still a solidly crafted, somewhat imaginative horror romp that makes up for its shortcomings by being long on atmosphere and a surprisingly good script. Now if only Lon Chaney Jr. had transformed into a better actor like his dad was.
