I made it over to Charles’ place by 7 with two videotapes I intended to show him, The Werewolf of London and Monster of the Island. Werewolf is an old favorite of mine — originally written for Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, with James Whale set to direct, it finally reached the screen in 1935 (three years after the project, then called The Wolf Man, was first announced), with Henry Hull and Warner Oland, and one Stuart Walker directing. (In honor of Oland’s reputation as Charlie Chan, they made his character Asian but left unchanged his stated occupation as a botany professor at the University of Carpathia — obviously a locale at which Lugosi would have been more convincing.) I’ve always liked this movie better than the more famous Wolf Man of 1941 — even though Universal’s great make-up artist, Jack P. Pierce, lamented that Hull had little of the patience with long make-up jobs that Karloff did, and therefore he had to make Hull’s werewolf face much sketchier than Lon Chaney, Jr.’s six years later. Walker’s direction and the script by John Colton (who had also been one of the writers who turned W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson” into the hit play Rain) left something to be desired, but at least Werewolf was well-staged, had a lot of quirky humor (notably the old Cockney ladies played by Zeffie Tillbury and Ethel Griffies, and a nice bit of business in which Hull, post-werewolf change, nonetheless remembers enough human instinct to put on a jacket, a cap and a scarf around his neck before setting off to claw people to death) and some family resemblances to The Invisible Man (the hero is a self-absorbed scientist who Meddles in the proverbial Things Man Was Meant To Leave Alone, and movingly reverts to his human form at the end, after he’s been shot — in this werewolf movie silver bullets are not necessary; ordinary lead ones will do the trick). — 1/17/99
•••••
With Charles and I already having started a sort of belated
Hallowe’en celebration by listening to the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of The
War of the Worlds, we continued by
screening the 1935 film Werewolf of London (yet another film whose title is usually prefaced by a direct article,
even though there’s no “the” in the credits), one of the last horror films made
while Carl Laemmle, Sr. and Jr., were still owners and operators of Universal.
The Laemmle-era Universal horror films were generally better than the ones that
came later, and while Werewolf of London is nowhere near as highly regarded as the “New Universal” Wolf
Man from 1941, it’s always struck me as a
much better film. Charles and I had planned to watch it on Hallowe’en but the
DVD of it in our copy of the Wolf-Man Legacy boxed set was defective, so I ordered it from
Amazon.com (an edition pairing it with She-Wolf of London, a really
dull film from 1946 that isn’t about a werewolf at all, but about a young woman
being tricked into thinking she’s
a werewolf) and we watched it last night. It’s interesting that Wolf
Man scenarist Curt Siodmak is generally
credited with being the first writer who included the full moon in the werewolf
legend — but John Colton’s script for Werewolf of London also times the man-to-wolf transformations to
coincide with the full moon, and indeed this version is even more moon-soaked
than The Wolf Man. (And Colton is
a much more reputable writer than the ones that usually got to work on horror
films; his most famous credit was adapting W. Somerset Maugham’s short story
“Miss Thompson” into the hit play Rain.)
I remember first seeing this film while I was in high school and
being utterly haunted by it: by the opening scene, supposedly taking place in
the wilds of Tibet (and pretty obviously a mix of studio “exteriors” and some
of the familiar “B”-Western locations, complete with some abrupt transitions
from day to night that would have embarrassed Ed Wood), in which botanists Dr.
Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) and Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland in full Chinese drag
— so a Japanese character is being played by a Swedish actor in Chinese
makeup!) are competing with each other to find specimens of the ultra-rare Mariphasa
lumina lupina, a flower that blooms only by
moonlight rather than sunlight. (Even my high-school science education was
enough to make me realize that was a crock — moonlight is simply reflected
sunlight and the only difference between them is how much less light comes from
the moon than the sun — but that just adds to the film’s quirky appeal.) Yogami
turns into a rather silly-looking werewolf and cuts a V-shaped gash on
Glendon’s arm, which of course eventually turns him into a werewolf. Colton’s script is a good deal more
specific than Siodmak’s for The Wolf Man about how long the
werewolf’s affliction lasts (for these purposes a “full moon” is four days)
and, as Charles noted after we watched, is fantastic but not supernatural: Colton’s werewolves don’t have to be
killed with silver objects (they are vulnerable to any gunshot, blow or the other ways normal humans — or
normal wolves, for that matter — can be killed), they don’t get marked with
pentagrams and the central character is a scientist who’s infected with the
werewolf curse by another scientist, not the son of a Gypsy fortuneteller
spouting Siodmak’s haunting poetry about the condition. Werewolf of
London was originally going to be called The
Wolf Man — it was first developed in 1932
as a project for Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi with James Whale directing (now that would have been a wonderful movie — and a shard of
the original inspiration comes through when Warner Oland introduces himself as
a professor at the University of Carpathia; no doubt had Lugosi played the role
he would have been a native Carpathian, though Lugosi did occasionally play Asians), but the idea was put
aside and revitalized in 1935 as a vehicle for Henry Hull, who had just made an
impression at Universal as Magwich in the 1934 version of Great
Expectations.
The “suits” wanted a suitable
follow-up role and they seized on having Hull play the tortured scientist
Glendon — only Hull had far less patience with hours-long waits in the makeup
chair than Karloff and so Jack P. Pierce had to devise a simpler, more
human-looking werewolf makeup than the one he’d wanted (or the one he got to do
for Lon Chaney, Jr. in The Wolf Man
and its sequelae). That’s an aspect of this film that’s been criticized, but to
me Hull’s werewolf makeup is quite a bit more chilling than Chaney’s precisely because it looks more human. Indeed, this time around the
film’s debt to the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde seemed more obvious than ever — not only in the
striking similarity between Hull’s werewolf drag and Fredric March’s Hyde but
in his targeting lower-class blonde women as murder victims (the first person
the werewolf kills is pretty obviously portrayed as a prostitute — even though,
with the Legion of Decency breathing down Hollywood’s collective neck, that
couldn’t be shown or even hinted at on screen — and the second is a woman who’s
having an adulterous affair with a security guard at the London Zoo). Werewolf
of London has got bad press over the years,
partly because of its director, Stuart Walker — though it’s Colton’s fault, not
his, that so much of the film takes place at boring parties which Walker is
pretty helpless to liven up (though there’s a cool scene in which Glendon is
exhibiting his collection of carnivorous plants and one of his aides feeds a
frog to some giant tentacle-driven thing; according to the American
Film Institute Catalog the original cut
contained a sequence in which a child is nearly eaten by a plant and is rescued
just in time, but that wasn’t in the release version — probably the censors
striking again!); the movie really comes alive in the class clashes between the
upper-class social network that sponsors Glendon’s scientific work and the lumpen people he hangs out with as the werewolf, including
two drunken old women, Mrs. Moncaster (Zeffie Tilbury) and Mrs Whack (Ethel
Griffies), whose banter and function in the plot are worthy of Whale.
There’s
also a compelling love triangle between Glendon, his wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson,
luminous as ever even though the cinematographer, Charles Stumar, didn’t shoot
her anywhere near as lusciously as John Mescall did in The Bride of
Frankenstein) and her ex-boyfriend Paul
Ames (Lester Matthews), who despite having one of those silly “roo” moustaches
ends up with her at the end after Glendon is shot — and goes out with one of
the great horror-film exit lines: addressing the heavens, he says, “Soon I will
know why all this had to be.” The last shot is a stock scene of an airplane
crossing the sky from right to left — representing Ames, an aviator, taking
Lisa back to his home in the U.S. (though Matthews retains his British accent
even though he’s playing someone who’s supposedly lived in America for years —
ironically in The Wolf Man Lon
Chaney, Jr. played a native Brit who’d lived in America for a decade or so,
which theoretically explained his lack of a British accent) — and then the airplane in the Universal logo
flies across the model globe from left to right. Werewolf of London is a really underrated movie, sparing in out-and-out
terror sequences but marvelously atmospheric and a more literate, better acted and
staged film than the much better known The Wolf Man. — 11/17/12
