The Wolf Man
★★★★1/2
Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns to England to help his father Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) run the family estate after learning about the death of his brother. There he woos Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) by taking her to visit a travelling group of Gypsies one evening, and guess which mythical creature he would come across that very night?
Thus, poor Larry becomes the titular Wolf Man and goes on a killing rampage. Or, was that all just in his head? Curt Siodmak’s screenplay was originally written to be a psychological thriller that was ambiguous about whether the werewolf was actually real or just a figment of Larry’s imagination. Of course, the end product turned out quite differently and literally, but the elements of that original screenplay remained. There are deliberate inconsistencies like the unexplained difference between Talbot’s hybrid form and the wolf form of his predecessor. Because Talbot could not remember the events that transpired during his transformed state, he suspects that he is the werewolf that he killed all those people but could never be sure. I never expected these from what I thought would just be a cheesy, unsophisticated horror movie from the 1940s.
The performances were very good. Apart from Bela Lugosi (doing a cameo as one of the Gypsies) who rightly played his part a little more unhinged, everyone else took the subject matter seriously and gave a grounded, subtle performance. Even Maria Ouspenskaya’s Maleva didn’t take the expected wide-eyed eccentric ethnic character route. Of course it’s still all a little tame compared to how we would do it nowadays, but it was a different time then, with different sensibilities.
The werewolf effects, albeit dated, are still fairly creepy and unnerving. The wolf man has also become a very famous and iconic horror figure, and was recently homaged in Marvel’s special short feature Werewolf By Night. There were some goofy moments with Chaney Jr’s performance as the wolf man that were unintentionally funny. There was one instance where he let out a dog-like bark. But the violence, though not explicit, was surprising brutal, and helped maintained a serious tone throughout the movie.
Overall, I really enjoyed the movie for being more sophisticated than I expected it to be.
Interesting trivia:
A lot of the werewolf lore that we assumed were based on existing myths, like the transference of the curse through bites and the pentagrams being the mark of a werewolf were actually made up by Siodmak for this film, including the “even a man who is pure at heart” Gypsy quote.
Not sure if this is mere observation or directly from Siodmak himself, but the film is said to have parallels to Siodmak’s first-hand experiences of Nazi Germany, with the werewolf being a metaphor of Nazis attacking people who carry the mark of the pentagram.
Both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, who played the original Universal Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster respectively, were considered for the role of Larry Talbot/ The Wolf Man.
This one’s from me, but I may be wrong: this might be the first and last time Lugosi ever played a werewolf.
Lon Chaney Jr’s father, Lon Chaney Sr played the Phantom of the Opera in the 1925 film. His onscreen father, Claude Rains also played the Phantom in the 1943 one.
Apparently, Lon Chaney Jr. was giving his co-star Evelyn Anker a hard time on-set because he was upset that his dressing room was given to Anker as punishment for vandalizing studio property while being drunk. He was calling her names and sneaking up on her with his full wolf man makeup on.