143. The Wolf Man (1941)

Directed By George Waggner

Synopsis

Man is attacked by werewolf. Becomes werewolf himself, gets killed at the end. Werewolf? Therewolf!

Review

With the miracle of the internets I am writing this from Portugal, I am in front of an open window at 2.35 in the morning, I can see a full moon over the buildings and I am in the middle of a heatwave, it must be about 40 degrees celsius outside, quite a bit over 100 Farenheit for all you with stupid systems. And it is the middle of the night...

So good night for a werewolf,or for watching a werewolf film, because there is no way I can sleep in this heat. I am sitting crosslegged and my arms keep sliding off my legs while I type because of the sweat... and I'm in my boxers as well.

Back to the film, this is the film that started the other great monster of the classic period of Universal horror films, The Wolf Man, but it is deservedely not as famous as Dracula or Frankenstein. It is simply just not as exciting.

The acting is quite good, with Claude Raines and Ralph Bellamy as the good actors and Lugosi and Maria Ouspenskaya as the obligatory hams, as well as Lon Chaney Jr. as the monster. The fact that the acting is quite good does detract from the film however, as the campiness isn't as present here as it was before. The monster is also never as scary, and altough the makeup is impressive for the time, it just makes Lon Chaney look like a poodle today.

The film is quite obviously extremely influential from the transformation scene to the scene where Lon goes back to being human, this has been repeated countless times in film and TV, as well as the tying up of the Werewolf who then escapes. So this is the original and the template for all other werewolf films, it is just not as fun as it could have been.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

It was The Wolf Man that introduced the concepts of werewolves being vulnerable to silver (in traditional folklore, it is more effective against vampires), the werewolf's forced shapeshifting under a full moon, and being marked with a pentagram (a symbol of the occult and of Satanism). These are considered by many as part of the original folklore of the werewolf, even though they were created for the film. Unlike the werewolves of legend, which resemble true wolves, the Universal Wolf Man was an extension of the previous 1935 Werewolf of London in which both primary characters are a hybrid creature unlike the traditional interpretation. The Wolf Man stood erect like a human, but had the fur, teeth and claws and savage impulses of a wolf. For some unknown reason in-story, (censor boards of that time would NOT permit an actual wolf to be used in-story in "murder scenes" as it was too real), the werewolves, who would bite the primary characters and cause the antagonist to transform, was always depicted as being an actual four legged wolf. Perhaps as a note to show that the primary character was not as savage as the original werewolf who had degraded into little more than a mindless beast. There had been similar depictions of werewolves in several earlier movies but this was by far the most influential, and subsequent movies have built on this image.

The poem recited is used in each of Chaney's subsequent appearances as the Wolf Man, with the exception of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; it is also recited by a character in Van Helsing (2004), which featured modernized reinterpretations of the classic Universal Studios monsters. In Van Helsing, the werewolf transforms by ripping off the human skin, revealing the wolfish form. The transformation also works in reverse; the werewolf fur sheds to reveal the human form. The werewolves in this movie were also controlled by Dracula after their first full moon.

This was the end of a beautiful friendship: