The Wolf Man (1941)

George Wagner wanted to make a clean monster movie, but there’s no such thing as a clean monster movie.

Grade: D+

Once, The Wolf Man (1941) was part of my Holy Trinity of Monster Movies (with James Whale’s Frankenstein and the 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi).

These were amongst the first monster movies, and they were my escape hatch from a peculiar contradiction I suffered from when I was a boy: I loved monsters but couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

My dark imagination was rich and feverish with tales gothic and macabre. In primary school, for English class, my teacher would tell us to write short paragraphs for exercises. Mine were all filled with werewolves, vampires and undead goliaths maiming, pulverising and decapitating my teacher. A chainsaw-wielding zombie also made regular appearances.

Yet, I was also a squeamish child and ran from the room at the sight of blood, guts, torn flesh or any other spilled and/or severed innards soaked and dripping in bodily fluids of any colour or consistency. This forbade me to watch modern horror films. By ‘modern’ I mean anything made after 1960. The Hammer horror films were as far as I got.

I wanted monsters without all the mess they made and I found it by fleeing to old monster movies made in the 30s, 40s and 50s. There the censors and the limits of cinema technology kept my friends Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man from being too scary. It was a long time before I had the guts to watch any monster movies in colour, but I eventually did.

And I went farther. I’ve since watched Psycho, John Carpenter’s The Thing and De Palma’s Carrie. I’ve sampled the best horror and I’ve developed a taste for it. Watching The Wolf Man now is like eating meatballs without meat, pasta or a tomato sauce.

I was longing for its leading man Lon Chaney Jr to transform into the Wolf Man. Chaney plays Lawrence “Larry” Talbot who returns from America to his family’s estate in Wales after the death of his brother to help his father Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) run the estate. Larry takes local girl Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) for a walk in the woods under the light of a full moon. A wolf attacks them. It mauls Larry but he beats it to death with his silver-handled cane. A gypsy lady (Maria Ouspenskaya) warns Larry that “Whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf himself.” It sounds horrifying coming from her but a bloodthirsty nocturnal predator would be much more stimulating company than Chaney’s insufferably affable Larry Talbot. “You killed the wolf?” Ouspenskaya asks him. She stands in the centre of her tent wearing a scarf over her white hair and with her back to him and she looks towards the camera, and her eyes and face are as sharp as an eagle’s as she occupies a pose that’s a terrifying blend of the Buddha and the Madonna. Only a fool would try to be funny or casual in her presence. Larry smiles slightly and tries to chuckle and he says “There’s no crime in that is there?” He's the one who should be killed first in a monster movie not the protagonist. Chaney speaks in hammed cliches and when he tries to sound in love, mad or terrified, his voice is so thick that it sounds phony and his eyes look painted over with the gloss of whatever emotion he’s trying to put on. When he transforms, he shows no pain or fear. He just looks down at the wolf hair sprouting on his legs and he drops his fist down into the arm of his chair like an English gentleman who’s just lost a bridge hand. Chaney can’t even make a genuine big deal out of turning into a wolf.

His bad acting only looks worse next to Rains and Ouspenskaya. Rains has a scholarly rigour to his acting in all his roles, including as Sir John. He speaks with such disciplined clarity and holds himself as straight as a classical Greek sculpture that he looks like a man who’s studied his characters as thoroughly as a preacher would study the Bible and who has reached the point where the character just emanates from him and enwraps his whole being. He wears his role as well as his finely pressed suit. Ouspenskaya is the only one in this horror film who can actually be scary. Her heavy voice and the certainty that illuminates her eyes make her stories of men turning into wolves sound like reliable prophecies of doom even if they are objectively batshit crazy. Ouspenskaya’s strength as an actress is that she can make mumbo-jumbo sound as frighteningly certain as thunder following lightning.

Yet Rains and Ouspenskaya aren’t spared from the determination of the film’s director and producer George Wagner to smooth out anything too spiky from the film. Larry asks his father if he believes a man could turn into a wolf. Sir John says: “For some people life is very simple. They decide this is good, that is bad. This is wrong, that’s right…Now others of us find that good, bad, right, wrong are many-sided, complex.” After this lecture in differing philosophical approaches to good and evil, he finally tells Larry that the idea of a man taking on the physical form of a wolf is “fantastic” and no he doesn’t believe it’s possible. He could have just said “No.” I wanted to throttle Curt Siodmak who wrote the screenplay and saddled Rains with that long-winded jibber jabber. It’s fortunately an outlier in Rains’ performance in the film but it’s so out of tune with his otherwise genuinely Stoic manner that when he delivers that dialogue he looks like a news anchor reading lines off a giant hand-held card. Ouspenskaya is spared that indignity but she isn’t used nearly as much as she could have been. She’s wheeled in, sometimes literally, riding her donkey-pulled cart, to give Larry and others the required warnings about the “evil spell” over Larry and then she’s wheeled away. Maybe Wagner wasn’t confident he could make her look ridiculous like Rains.

The only artist in this production who covers themselves exclusively in glory is makeup artist John Pierce. Pierce turned Boris Karloff into Frankenstein’s Monster and in this film he transforms Chaney into the Wolf Man. Chaney’s unrecognisable beneath Pierce’s mask. He’s lost amidst the wilderness of dark and matted fur and the large, beastly nose. Pierce buries the man beneath the monster.

How could a film about such a transformation, a man turning into a beast that prowls the night ripping people’s throats out, be so pleasant? Because Wagner was suffering the same contradiction I once did. Either by choice or under pain of the censors, Wagner wanted to make a clean monster movie, but there’s no such thing as a clean monster movie. Not a good one at least.