Monday, July 20, 2020

THE WOLF MAN (1941)




PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological. metaphysical, psychological, sociological*




This film is one of the three I’ve held off reviewing for the past ten years because it, like the 1933 MUMMY and the 1940 THIEF OF BAGHDAD, prove so rich that it’s hard to sum any of them up in a blogpost. But I’ve finally broken that particular conceptual logjam with THE WOLF MAN.

Many reviews start off by praising the inventiveness of Curt Siodmak’s script, or less frequently, the direction by George Waggner. However, I’ll start off by praising Siodmak’s unheralded collaborators, the “studio heads” at Universal. An early Siodmak script for WOLF MAN posited the idea that the protagonist (Lon Chaney Jr.) would one Larry Gill, an American visitor to a town in Wales who became afflicted by werewolfism. Someone over Siodmak, however, insisted that Larry’s character should be related to Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). By imposing this requirement upon Siodmak, the unknown stidio boss (or bosses) forced the writer to dig deeper than he might have otherwise, crafting THE WOLF MAN into one of the best “family romances” in cinema.

In addition, WOLF MAN is arguably the most “bookish” of the classic Universals, and not just because the film begins with a close-shot on a book-page explaining the concept of lycanthropy. To my knowledge Siodmak never discussed what sort of books he was reading at the time he wrote WOLF MAN, but the script is far more conscious about providing a rationale for lycanthropic disease, whereas Universal’s earlier venture on the subject, WEREWOLF OF LONDON, was content to attribute the affliction to a rare flower. Roughly the first half of WOLF MAN is constructed so as to continually question whether or not Larry Talbot, or anyone, can genuinely transform into a werewolf. Even the transformation of Bela, the gypsy who transmits the affliction to Larry, is depicted in such a way as to create doubt. By the time that the Wolf Man makes an indubitable appearance on-screen, all the rationalistic arguments for dismissing superstition have been mustered in full force, and they continue to guide the lives of most of the characters, particularly Sir John, until he himself sees the validation of pagan superstition at the tragic conclusion.

Though I used the term ‘family romance” above, I disagree with James Twitchell and all other critics who have attempted to impose a Freudian reading on the film. It’s closer to Adler and his concept of compensation, particularly the sort arising from sibling rivalry—and though Siodmak might never have read Adler, the writer apparently experienced in real life some of the same sibling competition that the psychologist did. Siodmak probably was generally aware of the way Freud had applied psychological theory to ancient myth and legend, though, and thus Freud may have influenced the author’s psychologized reworking of werewolf folklore.

Sibling conflict is only dimly suggested in the film’s first scenes. Sir John’s elder son has perished in a hunting-accident, and this apparently obliges the lord of the Welsh village to summon his younger son Larry to Talbot Castle. When they meet, Larry and Sir John circuitously discuss the argument that caused Larry to emigrate to America for many years. (In theory this explains Chaney’s strong American accent, though to be sure a lot of the Welsh residents don’t sound all that British.) There’s a charming attempt at father-son dialogue, though it doesn’t quite conceal the fact that Sir John has mended fences not purely out of paternal love, but because he needs a successor to become the new lord of the estate when John, the old lord, inevitably passes.


Aside from Larry’s conflicted feelings toward his father and his late older brother (his mother is never even alluded to), the audience knows nothing about him except that he became an engineer in America. He’s thus an “innocent abroad,” a blank American doomed to be confounded by the complicated social rituals of Old Europe. His technical expertise leads him to set up a telescope for the study of the heavens, but he uses it for earthly pursuits, accidentally peeping into the window of one of his “subjects” in the village outside the castle. The beauty of Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) leads Larry to go girl-hunting at the antiques shop Gwen runs with her father. Gwen, in the midst of fending off Larry’s wolfish advances, brings up the topic of werewolves in reference to the walking-stick she eventually sells him—though she’s far from the only inhabitant of the town who knows the lore, since Sir John quotes Siodmak’s original “were-verse” in the next scene.

To my knowledge it’s never discussed just why the residents of this Welsh town should be so conversant in werewolf lore, given that there aren’t any wolves around. (When Gwen first hears the howl of Wolf-Bela, she says, “Never heard anything like it before.”) But Siodmak, intentionally or not, provides a rationale for this as well. Just as the first Larry-Gwen scene winds up, as the two of them witness Maleva’s wagon arrive in town. Gwen mentions that the gypsies show up every autumn—just like the “autumn moon”—and so it may fairly hazarded that the gypsies, who know wolves well, have transmitted some of their folktales to this corner of Wales-- though it seems that this is the first time gypsy Bela loses his control of his personal demon, at least in Wales.

The WOLF MAN script implies that the moon has less to do with werewolfism than with the season, which happens to be the one in which “the wolfbane blooms.” When Larry talks Gwen into attending a fortune-telling at the gypsy caravan, Gwen brings along a little reinforcement in the form of local girl-buddy Jenny. Jenny in turn decides to take a cutting of wolfbane into her reading—and, like the rare flower in WEREWOLF OF LONDON, this bloom seems not to repel werewolves, but to encourage them. When Bela sees the wolfbane in his presence, he casts it to the ground, and immediately thereafter sees the fatal pentagram in Jenny’s palm.

Wolf-Bela’s slaying of Jenny prompts Larry to kill the werewolf with his silver-handled cane. In death Bela passes his curse on to Larry-- though considerable time elapses before there’s any transformation, and when it happens, it’s not because of the presence of wolfbane. Rather, Larry’s transformation seems to be triggered by societal rejection. After Larry kills the wolf, the authorities find only the body of a dead gypsy—and even Larry’s bite-wound conveniently disappears, as if to keep the baffled heir from corroborating his experience. The local authorities are happy to write off the gypsy’s death as an unfortunate accident—not unlike the one that took the life of Larry’s brother—in order to please Sir John. But the mother of Jenny is angry with Larry and Gwen for having indirectly caused Jenny’s death, implying that something improper transpired between the two of them.

To be sure, there’s some justice in this verdict, Gwen happens to be engaged to local man Frank, whom she’s known all her life. She does agree to go on a de facto date with Larry, without telling him in advance that she’s affianced. To her, Larry presents the attraction of the forbidden, the wolf that tries to seduce Little Red Riding Hood. What might have been a casual flirtation becomes an amour fou once both Gwen and Larry are accused together-- though of course Larry bears the greater burden, since he’s also accused of committing a murder that he doesn’t remember. Even Frank’s dog apparently reacts to the wrongness in Larry, the same way Bela’s horse reacted to the gypsy’s transformation.

The only one in the village who fully believes Larry is Maleva, Bela’s mother, who mourns her son with stoic resignation to the will of fate. The first full one-on-one encounter between Larry and Maleva takes place at the gypsy camp, after Larry is shown up by Gwen’s fiancĂ©e. The scene remains resonant for many viewers for the way Maleva lays out the lore of lycanthropy for the half-convinced American. But it’s also a great “mirror scene.” Just as Larry’s first encounter with Gwen was framed in terms of monetary exchange, Larry initially rejects Maleva’s approach without really realizing it’s her, assuming she’s just some gypsy trying to sell him some hokum. By the time she’s finished, he’s willing to buy from her the pentagram-shaped charm that supposedly prevents the transformation. For all that we see of the charm’s effects, it might be no more than a subterfuge to ally Larry’s growing distress. Maleva asks only one payment: to see the wound her son left in Larry’s flesh, which has by this time apparently come back, in all its pentagram-shaped glory. (Assuming Doctor Lloyd saw the recrudescent wound, he probably wrote it off as a manifestation of hysteria.)

Then, in yet a third economic exchange, Larry then meets Gwen alone, and gives her the charm on the theory that it can protect her. It’s a gift, but Gwen “ups the ante” by giving Larry a penny in exchange, a tacit invitation for him to kiss her. Just as he does, the gypsies break camp on Maleva’s order—apparently she doesn’t have that much faith in the charm herself—and Gwen flees. Then Larry experiences his first actual transformation, and commits his first murder as the Wolf Man. His guilt is such that he can’t even stand to attend church. He tries to relate his fear of lycanthropy to both his father and his doctor, but both of them take refuge in rationalistic explanations. Doctor Lloyd introduces the idea that “mass hypnosis” might influence a man into thinking he’s become an inhuman thing, and thus both the Welsh villagers and the gypsies might be seen as having thrust their beliefs upon the innocent American outsider. On the next night Larry transforms again, and almost gets exposed for all to see, but Maleva is able to temporarily lift his curse, so that he manages to escape.


This experience is finally enough for Larry to decide he has to leave, but he makes the mistake of returning to the castle. Sir John won’t countenance his son shirking his duty to the family, so he ties Larry to a chair, thinking that Larry will come to his senses when the local hunters finally destroy the murderous animal. This proves to be the ultimate act of bad faith on Sir John’s part-- though Larry, anxious to prevent himself from killing again, insists that his father take the deadly silver cane when he goes out.


This summary can’t begin to cover all the great acting scenes in WOLF MAN, particularly the encounter between Sir John and Maleva, as she upbraids him for failing his son. None of Siodmak’s other American flms, even superior ones like I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, even come close to equaling the verbal poetry of THE WOLF MAN. Waggner’s skillful direction and Hans Salter’s moving score contribute, but Siodmak remains the primary architect of this lycanthropic myth, even if he did need a little help from an unknown studio head to find his muse.


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