31 Days of Halloween: Day 8

The Wolf Man (1941) Director: George Waggner

Pretty terrible poster to a great movie.

After Pearl Harbor, Universal was unsure of the box office appeal of monster movies, and the cycle was about to end.  The Wolf Man was a huge success, however, and reignited the genre.  The film stars Lon Chaney Jr., the son of the famous silent film actor, Lon Chaney Sr., who also portrayed monsters in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925).  Chaney was billed as simply "Lon Chaney" to bank off of the reputation of his father, and this film forever cemented him within the monster movie genre.

The story follow Larry Talbot returning from the United States to his home in Wales, where he is the heir to his family's estate after his older brother died in a hunting accident.  Larry tries to become acquainted with the town and falls for a woman next door named Gwen Conliffe.  He tries to woo her, but it turns out she is engaged.  Larry convinces Gwen to go out with him, but she takes a friend along.  The trio go to the gipsies in town to get their fortune told, but on their way back home they are attacked by a wolf.  The secondary girl dies and Larry is bitten in his struggle to kill the wolf.  Turns out it was a werewolf, and Larry begins to transform himself.

Chaney's performance is great, and he does a terrific job of portraying a sympathetic character.  He's extremely likable in the way he plays a sort of dorky playboy at the beginning, and later in the second half as a man who fears that he is going crazy.  Of all the characters in the Universal monster movie canon, Larry Talbot has the most dimension and the one a viewer connects the most with.  Talbot feels guilt for the murders he commits and attempts to find a cure and latter a way to end his life in the sequels to save others from himself.

Claude Rains pays Larry's father, a man who is more concerned with the outward appearance of his family than the inner torment of his own son.  The irony, of course, is that Larry's outward appearance changes into a monster, and his father is unable to recognize that his son is inside.  Sir John Talbot is also assertively scientific in his way of analyzing everything that happens in the film.  He throws out words like schizophrenia and split personalities in order to explain werewolfism.  It's interesting to see how he uses the then modern sciences, such as psychoanalysis, to diagnose his son. 

In this film, Larry doesn't transform into a wolf at the full moon.  Instead it is because the wolfbane is in bloom, so he transforms every night.  The sequels later introduce the fact that he transforms when the moon is full.  The transformation itself is nothing fancy.  There are a series of dissolve shots where makeup was applied between each shot.  In this film we only see Larry's feet when he transforms into the wolf, and we latter see his face when he transforms from the wolf back into a man.  In the later films the transformation is much smoother and impressive.

The Wolf Man was actually not the first werewolf movie, and not the first made by Universal.  That honor goes to The Werewolf of London (1935).  That film certainly has its charm and nice makeup, but it lacks the humanity that makes The Wolf Man so timeless.  Anyone can identify with Larry's struggle to convince people that he is not insane, and it is this struggle that really makes this film great.