The
Wolf Man (1941)
horror
directed
by : George Waggner
featuring
: Lon Chaney Jr - Warren William - Claude Rains - Ralph Bellamy - Evelyn
Ankers
running
time : 1 hour 10 minutes
"Even a man who is
pure at heart/And says his prayers by night/May become a wolf when the
wolf-bane blooms/And the moon is full and bright." Upon first hearing these
words, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney) dismisses them as childish folderol. After
all, this is the 20th Century; how can a human being turn into a werewolf?
Talbot soon learns how when he attempts to rescue Jenny Williams (Fay Helm)
from a nocturnal attack by a wolf. Collapsing, Talbot discovers upon reviving
that Jenny is dead-and, lying by her side, is not the body of a beast,
but of a gypsy named Bela (Bela Lugosi). The son of fortune teller Maleva
(Maria Ouspenskaya), Bela was a lycanthrope, or "wolf man." And now that
he has been bitten by Bela, Talbot is cursed to suffer the torments of
the damned whenever the moon is full. Arguably the best of the "original"
Universal horrors, The Wolf Man boasts one of the most stellar casts ever
to grace a "B" picture: Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Evelyn Ankers, Ralph
Bellamy, Warren William, Patric Knowles, Maria Ouspenskaya and Bela Lugosi.
The man-to-wolf transformation sequences-one of which took a full 24 hours
to film-are thoroughly convincing, thanks to the cosmetic genius of Jack
P. Pierce. Alas, after this powerhouse opening volley, the Wolf Man character
was relegated to a series of cheap sequels, teaming him with other Universal
shock stars: Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, House Of Frankenstein and
House Of Dracula. The final ignominy was Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein,
in which Lawrence Talbot (Chaney again), having been cured of lycanthropy
in House Of Dracula, reverts to his werewolf status-and has to endure the
one-liners of Lou Costello to boot!
The Wolf
Man may no longer have the ability to frighten even the faint of heart
but it remains a literate and quite adult fairy tale of love, lust and
redemption, and with the story of the return of the prodigal son thrown
in for good measure. And while George Waggner may not have been the most
visually exciting of directors, the powers-at-be at Universal made the
good choice of filming nearly the entire story on an eerily fog-bound sound
stage, thus creating a strangely enticing and claustrophobic realm for
their lycanthrope to roam. The sets compliment The Wolf Man's cast of characters,
who may pretend to be British, or foreigners living in Britain, but are
really the same villagers and bureaucrats that earlier occupied the mittel-European
forests and mountains of Dracula and Frankenstein. While Universal far
from overextended themselves with production values, the studio cast no
less than six present or former leading men, an odd situation that goes
a long way in explaining why leading lady Ankers was forced to accept seventh
billing. Chaney, meanwhile, creates his one truly memorable horror character
in Larry Talbot by adding a great dose of his Lennie of Of Mice And Men
to Pierce's standard Universal creature makeup.