PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
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 fiancée. 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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