The Wolf Man (1941)

“All astronomers are amateurs. When it comes to the heavens, there's only one professional.”

It’s very obvious that this was made about ten years after the Universal horrors I’ve seen so far- it’s so much slicker and pacier, and of course the cars and the fashions are very different, especially Evelyn Ankers’ very 1940s hairdo. One thing is very odd, though; this story is set in Britain, and appears to be in the present day (1941). So why is there no indication of there being a war on?

The whole thing looks great, with plenty of misty, stylised forest scenes, and it runs along at a decent pace, but I’m not sure about the wolf make-up- it looks a bit generic and half-arsed to me. It certainly doesn’t make Lon Chaney Jr look anything like a wolf, just like a hairy bloke with sharp teeth. I have to admit, though, that the set-piece transformation scene, with its foot fetish, is very well-shot, as is the whole movie. Visually, the whole movie is strong enough to survive a bit of lacklustre make-up.

Chaney is superb as the nice-but-dim Larry Talbot, but to put the focus on a character like that- simple, honest and straightforward- seems a little odd in the context of what the film seems to be about. We’re told, blatantly enough and often enough for the word “subtext” to be thoroughly inappropriate, that lycanthropy here is a metaphor for the “duality” of human nature between good, evil, and the shades of grey that lie in-between. Except that none of this applies to Larry, a simple soul who appears to be carrying no mental baggage and whose only character flaw is to unwittingly flirt with a woman who’s engaged.

Claude Rains is also great as Sir John, a superficially jovial and caring father whose great flaw lies in his snobbery, and his obsession with his family name. Larry, to him, is important not as a beloved son but as someone who will ensure another generation of Talbots. He’s not as nice as he seems, and in the end it’s appropriate that it should be him who kills his son. The fact that Larry calls his father “Sir” should probably tell us that this isn’t really as cosy a father / son relationship as it appears.

And then there are the gypsies. They are presented with all the casual racism that might be expected, with a dig at their allegedly “pagan” religious practices, and generally treated as an exotic “other”. Bela Lugosi gets an arse-clenchingly embarrassing cameo as the imaginatively named “Bela the Gypsy” because, of course, it’s perfectly normal for a British gypsy to have a Hungarian name.

The plot’s a bit par for the course and rather blah blah, but there are a couple of rather interesting scenes early on, after Larry uses the telescope to spy on the villagers and things start to go all Rear Window. Not only does he use the telescope to perv on Gwen through her bedroom window, but he later admits that to her! And I can’t understand how she can not be freaked out by this weird stalker chatting her up in the shop and pretty much forcing her to go on a date with him. I can’t understand how Larry is not immediately arrested for the murder of Bela the Gypsy, either, but I’m beginning to notice that the police not suspecting the hero of an obvious crime is something of a trope when it comes to old horror films.

The film has style, I suppose, and noticeably so when compared to some earlier Universal horrors, but ultimately it’s style over substance.