henry hull ·The Phantom Reviewer

The Wolf Man (1941)

Posted by phantomreviewer on February 3, 2010 | No comments

With this horror film being remade and released on February 12, 2010, I thought why not review the original movie. So this is my first of many Reto-reviews.

Plot Summary for The Wolf Man (1941): Upon the death of his brother, Larry Talbot returns from America to his ancestral home in Wales. He visits a gypsy camp with village girl Jenny Williams, who is attacked by Bela, a gypsy who has turned into a werewolf. Larry kills the werewolf but is bitten during the fight. Bela’s mother tells him that this will cause him to become a werewolf at each full moon. Larry confesses his plight to his unbelieving father, Sir John, who then joins the villagers in a hunt for the wolf. Larry, transformed by the full moon, heads for the forest and a fateful meeting with both Sir John and Gwen. Written by Doug Sederberg.

This movie was destined to become one of Universal Studios’ classic monster movies, though not the first time a movie about a werewolf was made. That distinction belongs to the 1935 movie Werewolf of London starring Henry Hull. This movie served as a template for the movie we are talking about here.

Throughout the film, various villagers recite a poem that all the locals apparently know, whenever the subject of werewolves comes up:

Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the autumn moon is bright.

The poem, contrary to popular belief, was not an ancient legend, but was in fact an invention of screenwriter Siodmak. The poem is repeated in every subsequent film in which Talbot/The Wolf Man appears, with the exception of House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and is also quoted in the later film Van Helsing, although many later films change the last line of the poem to “And the moon is full and bright”.

The original Wolf Man film does not make use of the idea that a werewolf is transformed under a full moon. Gwen’s description and the poem imply that it happens when the wolfbane blooms in autumn. The first sequel, though, made explicit use of the full moon both visually and in the dialog, and also changed the poem to specify when the moon is full and bright. Presumably this is what popularized the full-moon connection in the 20th century. The sequel visually implies that the transformation occurs as a result of direct exposure to light from the full moon. Other fiction has assumed the transformation is an inescapable monthly occurrence and does not examine whether it is caused by light, tidal effects, or some cycle that happens to coincide with the moon’s phases.

The Wolf Man has the distinction of being the only classic Universal monster to be played by the same actor in all his classic 1940s film appearances (save for stunt doubles). Lon Chaney, Jr. was very proud of this, frequently stating in interviews: “He was my baby.” Chaney would go on to play a wolf man (if not the Wolf Man) in very similar makeup in the 1959 Mexican film La Casa del Terror and a famous 1962 episode of TV’s Route 66 titled Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing, which also starred Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster. Nearly a decade later, even though he was seriously ill at the time, Chaney managed to conjure up his original energetic gestures while masked in a quasi-wolfish rubber mask for one scene in his last (and most unfortunate) film, 1971′s Dracula vs. Frankenstein.

The Wolf Man is one of three top-tier Universal Studios monsters without a direct literary source. The others are The Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In the 1970s, novelizations of the original films were issued as paperback originals as part of a series written by “Carl Dreadstone,” a “house name” pseudonym for a several writers, including British horror writer Ramsey Campbell).