Films: 1940s
(1941) The Wolf Man
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The Wolf Man
Director: George Waggner
Release: 1941
"The Wolf Man" survives uneven pacing, clunky scripting and silly makeup for two reasons.
One, Long Cheney, Jr. manages to make the dramatic scenes between Larry Talbot and just about anyone else on screen meaningful and two, designer Russel A. Gausman excels again at atmospherically and artfully decorating a Universal Pictures set.
As Talbot, Cheney plays a gentle man returning to his family estate in Wales. He carries with him a sense of sadness; the cause of his return is the recent death of his brother John. Formerly estranged from his father, Sir John Talbot (a pathos-filled performance by Claude Rains), the younger Talbot is home to mend the relationship and to mend whatever else might break around the castle.
After fixing his father's telescope, Talbot discovers Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) through the lens. Though she is engaged to Sir John's gamekeeper Frank Andrews (Patrick Knowles), Conliffe and Talbot develop a romance.
Talbot, Conliffe and friend Jenny Williams (Fay Helm) visit the gypsy fair that comes to the village and it is there that Talbot's fate is determined. Following a disastrous fortune telling, the gypsy Bela (a too-brief performance into which a good deal of emotional conflict is packed by Bela Lugosi) turns into a werewolf and kills Williams. Talbot confronts the beast, destroys it and is wounded. Talbot is now himself cursed to become a werewolf.
Until this point, "The Wolf Man" is rich in texture and paced well. Once Talbot is cursed, however, director George Waggner can't do much with Curt Siodmak's script. Talbot transforms, wanders, kills a gravedigger, wakes up and loses his grip on sanity. It could be a dynamic journey, but Smiodak delivers too much of Talbot's despair too early and Waggner lets Cheney hit a high whine 20 minutes too soon.
The dance that Andrews and Talbot enter, fueled by town constable Colonel Paul Montford (Ralph Bellamy), could be complex and sexually tense. Instead it's muddled. Sir John's protectiveness plays a single, repetitive note and the film groans under at least one debate too many about what to do with the addled Talbot.
"The Wolf Man" also loses ground on one key feature. The monster looks like a woolly person.
Unlike the awkward grotesqueness of the monster in "Frankenstein," or the sickly mask-like visage of Lugosi in "Dracula," Cheney looks mostly like a fierce schnauzer.
Cheney does the best he can, under the circumstances, but that amounts to some fairly mild lurching about and clutching of Gausman's awesome tree sculptures. Waggner needed to rein Cheney in and choreograph the werewolf into something effective. As it is, he looks a bit lost and floppy.
Of particular note is Maleva. Stanislavski-trained actress Maria Ouspenskaya is dead-on, conserving every unneeded gesture, vowel and consonant but precisely conveying her sympathy, horror and weariness at the caring-for of the people cursed to change into wolves. Its another place Siodmak could have expanded his script to allow more of the brilliant material to shine and less of the Universal Pictures show-me-the-monster aesthetic to dominate.
There's not enough to "The Wolf Man," but there is something worthwhile. Even with the feeling that the last half an hour is sketched out, rather than developed, Waggner pulls together some challenging themes of legacy, self-knowledge and carnal tug-of-war that give Cheney, Andrews and Ankers something material to work with.
It's a step away from the grisly, strange masterpieces of "Frankenstein" and "Dracula," but it earns a place in the Universal canon.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
