1941 horror, dir. George Waggner, Lon Chaney Jr, Claude Rains:
IMDb /
allmovie. Even a man who is
pure in heart…
This wasn't the first full-length werewolf film; that was
probably Stuart Walker's 1935 Werewolf of London. But it was the one
that was enough of a success that "werewolf film" became a category
with its own conventions; indeed, Curt Siodmak (yet another of the
Jewish filmmakers who made a golden age in Hollywood after having been
forced out of Germany) invented a great deal of the "ancient" werewolf
lore for this film, most obviously the poem and the vulnerability to
silver weapons.
But first we meet Lon Chaney Jr as Larry Talbot, and perhaps it's just
that I've seen similar faces, but he comes over to me as thuggish, in
the manner of a Kray twin. And his behaviour hardly persuades me that
he's much better; the first thing he does, having returned to his
ancestral home, is to use a telescope to spy on a young lady, and then
use the knowledge he's gained to try to get her to step out with him,
becoming increasingly insistent until she gives in.
What I can't tell is whether this is deliberate. Goodness knows there
are plenty of badly-behaved men in films of this general era, and my
usual impression is that the filmmakers think that's perfectly
reasonable or even compatible with being heroic. So while one can
certainly make an argument that Larry to some extent brings matters on
himself by behaving badly, and certainly this would be the case if he
behaved thus in a modern film, I think it's very hard to be sure.
Indeed, I think that part of the horror here, as exemplified by the
rhyme, is that anyone can catch the curse just by being in the wrong
place at the wrong time. (And the Old Gypsy Woman specifically says
"through no fault of your own".)
Meanwhile Claude Rains looks completely different again, compared
with his Prince John in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood or
Renault in 1942's Casablanca. His character, Larry's father, is
essentially useless throughout the business, and honestly he doesn't
impress me here the way he did in those other parts;
Meanwhile, on the Mysterious Exotic Gypsy side, we get Maria
Ouspenskaya, taking one of the rare film parts that largely funded her
acting school; and Bela Lugosi in a sad haze of morphine, methadone
and alcohol.
Anyway, Larry takes his target and her friend out toe the Gypsy
encampment to get their fortunes told; friend is killed in a werewolf
attack, and Larry would be too, but "fights him off" and picks up the
curse. (Yes, if Larry hadn't insisted they go, none of this would have
happened.) The surviving Gypsy knows exactly what's going on, and does
her best to advise Larry, which he ignores, just as he ignores the
Concerned Ladies of the Town who don't like him trifling with Jenny,
eve if he is the heir apparent to the Lord of the Manor.
We get the Famous Transformation Sequence, with time-lapse application
of fur, though not a full-face transformation as later films would
employ. And I found myself thinking about how all the bone ratios are
different between human and wolf; the joint between femur and
tibia/fibia is much higher on the leg, and the "backward-pointing
knee" is where the tib/fib joins the anatomical foot. So a canine form
walking erect should have a completely different gait from a human.
Ah well.
The practicalities start to fall apart during the big hunt at the end:
the entire village goes out into the woods, armed and willing to shoot
at anything that moves, and not as a single party but as individual
groups? Never mind the werewolf, the local magistrate will have his
diary full for a month simply from all the accidental shootings.
But in any case, we may have stock characters and actors, but I think
Siodmak's genius is to write the roles in a way that doesn't demand
they be more than they can manage, and he keeps things moving to paper
over the shortcomings.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.