Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Fourteen Review: The Wolfman

I've been putting off doing a review for the 1941 horror film The Wolfman for a good while now because it seems like every time I sit down to write one, whatever angle I've come up with to act as an intro seems inconsequential within a few sentences. Yes, the titular monster in The Wolfman is one point in the horror movie trinity of the 1930s and 40s -- the other two points belonging to Dracula and Frankenstein's monster -- but while the latter two characters starred in pre-Code films with some serious cinematic clout, Wolfy didn't get his turn in the sun until a full decade later, right smack in the middle of the Code's heyday, thus depriving The Wolfman of its teeth. It's a horror movie, alright, but one set in a bucolic Welsh village where the deaths all occur just off-screen and the main character spends more time flirting with a shop girl than he does roaming the countryside.

Likewise, I could talk about how The Wolfman hearkens back to the days when monsters were just monsters, before they had feelings, before they were objects of love, lust, or sympathy -- before Twilight; before True Blood; before Buffy. The problem is that love and sympathy are just as much a part of The Wolfman as they are any of those modern examples, because love and sympathy are part of the werewolf mythology as a whole: werewolves aren't necessarily "bad," all the time; they simply become something bad during the full moon. If you want to look at monster folklore through the lens of human psychology, and vampires represent our urge to give in to evil without remorse, then werewolves represent our tendency to do bad things and then feel really guilty about it afterward. A werewolf is still human most of the time, remember.

Finally, I could mention that many of Hollywood's golden-age horror movies had rich literary bases, stories that started on the page and then often moved onto the stage before landing on the screen, but again, The Wolfman is the exception here, not the rule: while Dracula and Frankenstein were based on novels by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, respectively, The Wolfman was partly based on European mythology that dated back to the Middle Ages and partly based on innovations of writer Curt Siodmak's own imagination. The film's oft-repeated poem -- Even a man who is pure in heart / and says his prayers by night / may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms / and the autumn moon is bright (changed to "and the moon is full and bright" in later versions) -- did much to popularize our modern perception that werewolves only come out during full moons, but it was as much an invention of Siodmak as the rest of the film.

In the end, I don't have much to say about The Wolfman except that, as far as classic horror films go, it's not the worst Hollywood had to offer, but it's not the best, either. Starring Evelyn Ankers and Lon Chaney, Jr. (not to be confused with his more famous father), it's really a "B" picture dressed up with a few "A" picture frills, most notably the presence of Claude Rains and some legendary (if strange) makeup work by Jack Pierce. Because the film tops out at just 70 minutes, we don't get a lot of time to get to know the doomed character Larry Talbot (Chaney), nor care about his romance with shop girl Gwen (Ankers). Maria Ouspenkaya and Bela Lugosi are great as a pair of eccentric gypsies, but Lugosi is also at the center of the film's biggest plot gaffe: why does his character, as the original werewolf in the film, change completely from a man into a wolf, yet Chaney's character's transformations leave him as the half-man/half-wolf hybrid we recognize as "The Wolfman" today? I mean, I understand why in terms of the story -- the moment when Larry Talbot gets bit hinges on the idea that he believes his friend is being attacked by a regular old wolf, not a monster -- but they don't ever attempt to explain this discrepancy within the story, which is one of those betrayals of the suspension of disbelief I talked about before. I'll buy that a man can change into a wolf, but when you start getting into degrees of wolfiness for no apparent reason, that's when you lose me.

Grade: B-

Side Note: The Florence + The Machine song "Howl" uses the the poem from The Wolfman in its last verse.