THE STORY OF MANKIND (1957)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

One of the great conundrums of art-criticism (in which I include the criticism of film) is that the critic may find mythic content in authors with whom the critic vehemently disagrees.  This is largely because myth, as Susanne Langer has profitably argued, is *presentational* in character: it makes its arguments by force of emotional tonality, not through discursive logic. 

Irwin Allen's portentous philosophy-primer THE STORY OF MANKIND is, on the mythic level, fascinating in that Allen and his scripters tried herein to resolve the conflict between what C.P. Snow memorably described as the "two cultures" that dominated Western society: the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities.  Allen's opus isn't quite as ambitious with respect to the latter as the former.  For science, STORY relates many of the best-known parables of scientific discovery-- Isaac Newton and his apple, Alexander Graham Bell and his Watson, etc.  By contrast, the domain of the "humanities" is largely represented by acceptance of the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition (though in one quick scene the film gives the nod to Islam and Buddhism).  Art is never mentioned outside a Eurocentric context.

The most fascinating myth-component of STORY is only suggested by the initial setup.  Somewhere in outer space, a heavenly council of elders meets to decide the fate of mankind, by which they mean purely the inhabitants of Earth, of course.  What has mankind done to provoke this celestial scrutinization?  Well, they've invented a device called the "super-H-bomb."  However, the council isn't concerned simply because they've invented the thing: they're concerned because humans have invented it far ahead of schedule by some 60 years.  Buried in this odd scenario is not just the notion that human society may be moving too fast for its own good-- a common trope in science fiction-- but also that it can move so fast as to exceed the designs of fate itself.  For the mysterious council surely seems to be able to rule on the fate of mankind, though they don't appear to be Christian angels or any similar beings.  In addition, they exist in a world where the Devil himself comes to court to plead against humanity's survival (played by the always winsome Vincent Price, and usually called by the Devil's folkloric name "Mister Scratch.")

As in the Biblical story of Job, no debate on human fates large or small is complete without a defense attorney.  The film suggests that Adam, the First Man, was supposed to show up and oppose the Devil, which would have made a fun match given Satan's alleged jealousy of mortals from their earlier origins. I assume that an early version of the script possibly did use Adam as mankind's defender, but the completed script calls in a less controversial pinch-hitter, addressed only as "the Spirit of Man" (Ronald Colman, in his last film).  While the Devil argues that mankind has totally blown it and deserves extinction, the Spirit continually argues that Man can turn it around.  (One wonders, given the "super-H-bomb" scenario, if the filmmakers were hoping that mankind would prove worthy of atomic secrets within the next 60 years.  As of this writing things don't look all that optimistic for 2017.)

So the Devil and the Spirit take the elder-council on a Magical History Tour of mankind's highs and lows.  The Devil's first witness for human infamy is the Pharoah Khufu, who supposedly once made a deal with the Devil for immortality-- though despite gaining this immortality he also built his pyramid to keep a more visible form of immortal presence. Khufu, by the way, objects when the Spirit of Man calls him "godless." And before anyone can speak the magic words "Egyptian religion," up jumps the Spirit to declare that something good did come out of Egypt: Moses, leading his people nobly to freedom.  The Plagues of Egypt are not mentioned, though Moses' acquisition of the Ten Commandments is depicted as a real historical event.  Later, the Spirit will aver that sometimes history and mythology become confused, allowing the audience to believe what it will about what is or isn't confused here.

The Greeks get the next mention on the "top 40" parade of historical hits.  The Devil points out that the Greeks did pretty well despite worshipping dozens of gods, although they too were as warlike and avaricious as the rest of humanity and just as deserving of annihilation.  The Spirit of Man conveniently vaults over the issue of polytheism and characterizes the Greeks largely in terms of their contributions to science, thus setting up the C.P.Snow dichotomy noted above. 

Feminists, by the way, would probably not like Irwin Allen's version of history.  Joan of Arc and Elizabeth I are the only examples of positive influential women in Allen's mostly-male history of the world.  Moreover, these two make less of an impression than such Evil Women as Helen of Troy (who laughs as men destroy each other in her name) and Cleopatra, seen in the illo above poisoning her brother to keep him from claiming her throne.  Incidentally, when Cleo links up with Julius Caesar, the script criticizes her for dallying with a man "old enough to be her grandfather."  Unsurprisingly, the script makes no complaints later in the "Peter Minuit" section, where Minuit (played by 67-year-old Groucho Marx) not only swindles the Indians who sell him Manhattan, but also runs away with the chief's 27-year-old daughter.

For American viewers the Devil's most affecting arguments may be those critiquing the high ideals of the American Revolution, for its slaughter of Native Americans and the creation of slavery in the U.S.  I give Allen a point or two for at least mentioning these dubious moments of history, but no sooner does the Devil mention slavery than the Spirit of Man quickly switches topics (and advances several years in history) to start talking about World War II.

It all wraps up when the Spirit of Man calls forth "the Man of Tomorrow"-- actually a child-- to demonstrate the potential positive fate of humankind's continued existence.  But in case this still doesn't grab the elders, the Spirit pulls out his trusty Bible (provoking a comic over-reaction from Price, who argues that the book has no place in court).  The Spirit reads a rather unmemorable preachment from the Bible, which I confess I've already forgotten, and the council decides in the end to postpone its decision a little longer, essentially giving mankind more time to clean up its act.

Allen's "Readers' Digest" version of history is pretty risible, and on occasion, the film more or less admits this in the comedy-relief scenes (Harpo as the aforementioned discoverer of gravity).  The script doesn't come anywhere near bringing about any truly thoughful reconciliation of the two cultures, but it can still be enjoyed on the basic fannish level of "look, there's Peter Lorre playing Nero!"

LECTURE TO AN EMPTY HALL

Just by way of keeping track of some alterations in my terminology...

Up to this point I've been writing labels for each of my ten tropes without specifying whether or not, "amphibians" that they are, a specific use is either "naturalistic" or "uncanny."  Last weekend I decided to correct this.  Now all ten will be labeled with either the letter "n" or "u" to signify their status.

An example can be seen in this double-review of NABONGA and THE SAVAGE GIRL.  Both films show female jungle-castaways palling around with apes, and so both participate in my category, "astounding animals."  However, SAVAGE GIRL never passes beyond the most mundane level of this foundling-myth, as I observed:

...despite her being loosely patterned on other, more extraordinary jungle foundlings, Nameless Girl doesn't measure up as an uncanny heroine despite wearing an "outre outfit," and the natives in her bailiwick lack any exotic tropes, despite the script's hilarious allegation that they practice "voodoo."

By contrast, though Doreen, the heroine of NABONGA, isn't much more exotic than Nameless Girl, she at least seems to have some perternatural bond with the ape Samson, which puts her a little closer to the Tarzan myth.  Samson himself seems a little more unusual too:

...Samson, because he is at once an ape and yet seems like something more as well, does qualify for the trope of "astounding animals," and shifts this otherwise routine film into the realm of the uncanny.

 As I've retrofitted the review now, SAVAGE GIRL has (n) versions of the two tropes "astounding animals" and "outre outfits skills and devices," while NABONGA has (u) versions of the same, in that both Samson and Doreen's outfit carry a valance that I recognize as uncanny, or metaphemenal only in the affective sense.

Before my weekend revisions, the name of the second trope was "outre outfits skills and weapons," for this category was designed principally to account for the affect produced by heroic figures who were not marvelous and yet were more than simply naturalistic, such Tarzan and Zorro.  I recently decided, however, that such heroes may on occasion use "devices" that are not technically "weapons."  For instance, if some James Bond imitator makes use of a remote spy-eye that's a little ahead of the technology of the time, that item would not be a weapon as such.  Yet it could, under the right circumstances, confer a degree of the uncanny upon the spy's adventures, even if that spy never shared Bond's arsenal of exploding cufflinks and so on. 

I also revised the category formerly listed as "enthralling hypnotism and stage magic" to read "enthralling hypnotism and illusionism."  I was specifically thinking of a handful of movies which sometimes invoked "stage magic" as an element of the uncanny, though of course not all movies containting stage magic invoke these elements.  I decided that "illusionism" was a better term, for there are also films in which characters may create illusions through methods allied to the methods of stage magicians, without the former actually being anything like stage magicians.  It seems to me that I've seen a few "ninja films," for example, in which the ninjas are shown to be masters of illusion rather than possessing any genuine magical powers.  Thus a ninja-film that used illusion to stimulate the aura of the uncanny would be an uncanny expression of this trope. 

ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION (1939)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION is one of several serials on which John English and William Witney shared co-director credit.  It's a good solid adventure-romp with a colorful villain: Don Del Oro, seen above facing off against the titular hero.  It never quite scales the heights of great serial-adventure which the duo attained with ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL and THE DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, however.

Like a lot of serials, LEGION has a good setup and a lively finale; it's all the episodes in between which cause the serial to sag in the middle when viewed as a whole.  The best serials are those in which at least some of the "middle" episodes are bracing in their own right, allowing the audience to suspend their knowledge that (a) the hero's not going to die in the middle of the story, and (b) the hero's not likely (if ever) to die at the end either.  Of LEGION'S 12 episodes, only once did I find one of the hero's perils bracing: trapped in a burning room, with snipers outside ready to riddle him if he tries escape through the main door, Zorro manages to use his whip to swing through a high window to safety.

The aforementioned setup is a little more political than in most serials.  In the time of Juarez's Mexico, the fragile country seeks to shore up its reputation for fiscal soundness by shipping gold shipments from the San Mendolito mine to Mexico City.  When Yaqui Indians begin raiding the shipments, Zorro takes a vacation from his home in Old California and investigates.  He and his "legion" (a group of similarly-masked vigilantes) learn that the Indians are being commanded by a mysterious man in golden armor, representing himself as "Don Del Oro," the reborn "gold god" of the Yaquis.  One wonders why a Native American god doesn't have a Native American name, but rather a Spanish one.

Modern viewers, sympathetic to the treatment of Native Americans throughout history, may be tempted to sympathize with the Yaquis' desire to reclaim their ancestral lands from the descendants of Spanish invaders.  Naturally this is an aspect of real-world ethics that LEGION simply can't address.  The most one can project is that in theory the Juarez rule of Mexico, had it lasted, probably would have been better for the Yaquis than the overlordship of Don Del Oro, who is, as the climax unsurprisingly reveals, a white guy.

Reed Hadley makes a fine Zorro, with a number of above-average swordfight-scenes.  An interesting side-note is that female lead Sheila Darcy, though she doesn't get to do much of anything here, would play a version of the famed Dragon Lady in her next serial, TERRY AND THE PIRATES.

ODYSSEUS: VOYAGE TO THE UNDERWORLD (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*


The Sci-Fi Channel has certainly aired many made-for-video/cable flicks that are worse than ODYSSEUS: VOYAGE TO THE UNDERWORLD.  But I suppose this item-- which I caught in a rerun buried in the wee hours-- annoys me because it's so indifferent to being bad, or (even worse) to being boring.

I recognize that this film probably came about not because someone was burning to tell the untold tale of Odysseus meeting Penelope, Queen of the Dead, but because some producer put up the needed money and someone else found that the studio could film something, anything, cheaply at such-and-such a location in Romania.  I have nothing against "desperation film-making," where the filmmakers are essentially throwing everything possible at the audience to keep them in their seats.  What I dislike are filmmakers who throw things in a desultory manner, not even trying to "hit" anyone.

The Italian muscleman films of the 1950s and 1960s were probably made for roughly similar reasons.  Got some togas left over from THE ROBE?  Let's do HERCULES.  Got some 16th Scottish costumes lying around?  Let's put archaic hero Maciste in Scotland to fight witches (Maciste in Hell, 1962).  But though there were some dull *peplums* as well, at least they usually tried to get their basic mythology right.

Quick summation of the VOYAGE: thanks to the song of the sirens, Odysseus and his men (including the ODYSSEY's author Homer) end up stranded on an island filled with marauding harpies.  They meet a strange woman who will help them get off the island if they take her with them.  The only problem is, when no one's looking she turns into a gigantic smoke monster and...

Oops. Sorry; that was the plotline for the last season of LOST.

I assume that the writers may have started out trying to figure out a new story for Odysseus (played gamely here by Arnold Vosloo), and realized that the most logical thing would be to have him encounter yet another dangerous female on an island, in imitation of the original's encounter with Circe and Calypso.  Odysseus and his men are a trifle suspicious of the nameless woman (identified in the caption-crawl as "Persephone" even before her name is given).  But they have nothing to go on until Athena, patron of heroes, sends a vision to Odysseus, informing him that the woman is the Queen of the Dead, exiled to the island because she wanted to take over the rule of the world from Zeus.  The writers don't trouble to explain how she's going to do this, any more than the LOST writers cared to explain what their smoky villain was going to do once he got loose.

Said writers, however, do explain what's keeping Persephone penned up on the island.  It's nothing less than the Golden Fleece, woved together with the coat of the Nemean Lion--

Oops again.  It's actually a doodad called "the Hellfire Cross," which sounds like something the writers pulled out of some 20th-century horror movie they'd written.  But this is what I mean by the filmmakers' inability to play by even the fuzzy rules set by the old peplum.  Homer can claim that this "cross" was constructed by Hephaestus and charged up by Zeus, but the problem remains: why would Greek gods be fiddling around with any sort of cross?  In similar fashion, all through this dialogue varies between portentous archaism and modern-sounding discourse, including, of all things, a paraphrase of Nietzsche's maxim that "what does not kill me makes me stronger."

Anyway, Athena isn't content to tell Odysseus to keep clear of Persephone; she also wants him to stab the goddess with the cross, because for some reason the gods need a mortal to do the dirty deed.  Persephone finds out soon enough that her pawns are getting ideas of their own, and she tries an interesting strategy: masquerading as Odysseus' long-unseen wife Penelope.  Though Odysseus sees through the charade he has sex with her anyway.  Following their intimacy, Persephone, not needing the average pregnancy-test, declares that she now has Odysseus' newest boy-child in her womb, and tries to use the fetus as a bargaining-chip.  This could have been an intersting moral problem even within the context of a fast-paced adventure, but the script drops the ball and concludes the film with the usual predictable face-off.

The most I can say for this film was that it was more fun to dis it than to watch it.

STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 (2004); STARSHIP TROOPERS 3 (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair* (2) *good*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though the Campbellian function remains the same in these two sequels to the 1997 original, the underlying myth-narratives change quite a bit from film to film.

In my review of STARSHIP TROOPERS. I categorized it as an irony because:

In an irony, even if the main characters seem to triumph in the end, there's always a subtle downside to their apparent victory.

TROOPERS was consistent throughout in terms of ironizing the struggle of young hot-looking human beings against squirmy, squishy bugs. TROOPERS 2 keeps the original's writer Ed Neumeier but takes on as director Phil Tippett, who executed visual effects on the first film as well as many other FX-films going back to STAR WARS.  As Tippett and Neumeier comment on the DVD track, TROOPERS 2, being far less well-funded than the original, pursued the course of many low-budget direct-to-video efforts: it follows the narrative of the horror film.

I've commented on my other blog that works in the horror genre most often imitate the Fryean mythos of the drama.  In that mythos, tragedy and defeat are strongly possible-- or at least more possible than they are in most adventure and comedy mythoi-- though not inevitable.  Though the characters of TROOPERS 2 are not much more well-rounded than those of Verhoeven's original, they are a trifle more sympathetic by virtue of the type of horror narrative used here-- which Neumeier calls "the haunted castle."

There's only a hint of the heavy FX-action toward the beginning of the film.  Then the story takes on the aspect of what television shows call a "bottle episode," in which all the action takes place on one principal set.  A detachment of Earth soldiers, cut off from air support on a bug-infested planet, takes refuge in an abandoned outpost.  There they find one man left behind in the brig: Captain Dax (Richard Burgi), arrested for having killed his superior officer.  With Dax's help, the co-ed infantry repulses another bug attack, and then tries to settle in until help can arrive.  However, they take in a few other soldiers that apparently survived encounters with the enemy, only to learn that they aren't what they seem.  Think ALIEN meets "wolf in sheep's clothing."

The assorted conflicts and tensions within the pressure-cooker environment are fairly pedestrian.  By default Dax emerges as the strongest protagonist, as heroine Pvt. Sahara (Colleen Porch) learns that he no longer considers himself a "hero of the federation" (the film's subtitle) because he's realized what a fucked-up mess the ruling Earth-government is.  Dax makes explicit all the anti-fascist criticisms that the 1997 film left implicit, thus dispersing the ironic impact. Neumeier's script still include a few ironic touches, but Dax's superior point-of-view allows for much more dramatic identification-- though to be sure, the captain still gives up his life fighting alien bugs.  His legacy at the film's end is that Sahara is allowed to see the federation's duplicity; a feat impossible for Johnny Rico, viewpoint character for the Verhoeven work.  TROOPERS 2 is watchable but nothing special.

ADDENDUM 3-18-19: For reasons stated in this essay, I've altered some of the determinations made in this review, one being that I've decided that TROOPERS 2 does align with the mythos of irony rather than that of drama.

 

TROOPERS 3, in comparison to the second film in the series, is something of a return to form.  In the DVD commentary for the first sequel, Neumeier references John Ford's 1934 film THE LOST PATROL, which concerned a group of British soldiers lost in the Mesopotamian desert during WWI, menaced by Arab enemies and an "enemy within," a soldier who becomes lost in religious fanaticism.  Neumeier, wearing both writer and director hats this time, again isolates a detachment of soldiers from air support on a bug-world, but this time the heroes spend most of their time in the desert, and the "religious fanatic" is Marshal Anoke (Stephen Hogan), a prominent officer in Earth's Psychic Corps.  Neumeier develops a plotline seen at the end of the first film, in which Earth-forces captured a "brain bug" from the enemy forces.  It turns out that this bug is a plant, who essentially brainwashes Anoke to believe that God is really an even bigger "brain bug" on the very world where Anoke and the others become stranded.  (I really don't think I'm giving anything away here; Anoke's peculiar attitude and actions mark him as some sort of changeling-type early on.)

Though again the plotline is nothing unique, Neumeier returns the franchise to a more ironic stance.  For the first time there's a significant portrait of organized religion on the TROOPERS version of Earth.  But though it's briefly seen as a possible threat to the ruling powers, Neumeier quickly ironizes the social function of faith as much as that of military power, and by film's end the military has co-opted the power of religious imagery for their fascist agenda.  Perhaps the most inspired example of Neumeier's many satirical moments in the film is his deft rewriting of a line from the Verhoeven film, when the slogan "It's a good day to die"  is altered to "It's a good day to BUY."  In this line Neumeier captures the manipulativeness of the Iraq War years, during which President George W. Bush exhorted U.S. citizens to continue buying to stimulate the country's economy, and thus to indirectly support the continued military efforts in Iraq.

Incidentally, Johnny Rico, again essayed by Casper Van Dien, returns to this TROOPERS franchise here, but he's essentially unchanged and is used largely as "the cavalry" that comes to rescue the few humans that survive Anoke's betrayal, including former Vulcan Jolene Blalock.  And though it took three films to do so, the third in this franchise finally does adapt the one aspect of the Heinlein book that fans griped most about missing from the first adaptation-- the powered "mobile suits."  Given the budget of TROOPERS 3, the suits aren't exactly prepossessing, but I liked seeing them anyway.  But the real star of TROOPERS 3 is the return to irony, in which humans and bugs alike are seen as no damn good whatsoever.

STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

In the DVD commentary to the film, director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier agree with the sentiment that Richard Schickle expressed (albeit uncertainly) toward their movie:

"War makes fascists of us all!"

TROOPERS, released six years after the prosecution of the Gulf War, seems less applicable to that conflict-- or to Verhoeven's own childhood experiences during the Nazi occupation of Holland-- than to the Iraq War of 2003. Verhoeven claims that he received criticism for the alleged fascism of ROBOCOP, whereupon he decided to up the game by adapting Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS and giving it the downbeat nature of the literary form known as "the irony." In an irony, even if the main characters seem to triumph in the end, there's always a subtle downside to their apparent victory. Here that downside takes the form of main character Johnny Rico becoming essentially "brainwashed" (Verhoeven's word) by the forces that insist on the utter valorization of military effort in any and all manifestations.

The script is clever. The propaganda-slogans and preposterous false logic that various characters use to support the war effort of Earthmen versus alien "bugs" is meant to constantly de-stabilize the viewers' identification with the heroes' efforts. It may be, though, that at base it's a little too clever for its own good. Because Verhoeven and Neumeier don't really want viewers to empathize with their unconsciously fascist protagonists, the characters are often overly flat, as is often the case with satirical figures. Additionally, though the filmmakers intend to make the audience regret the large-scale loss of young lives to the military machine, only a few of the characters succeed in projecting real feeling. One of the few that does is Dizzy (Dina Meyer), with whom audiences relate because it's established that she bears an unrequited torch for main hero Johnny (Casper Van Dien), who in turn carries a torch for somewhat distant officer-in-training Carmen (Denise Richards). The filmmakers reveal that early viewing audiences told them that they killed off the wrong female lead, as Dizzy perishes and Carmen lives. But though one might see this as somewhat indicative of anti-feminism, as the filmmakers do, it may also be that the audience simply identified with Dizzy's greater spectrum of humanity and hated to lose her.

Some of the lines, emphasizing the willingness of the soldiers to sacrifice their lives for "the species," sound as if they were lifted straightforward from Heinlein's book, which is, though not fascist as such, does present the case for military hostilities as valid without much questioning. However, it might be said that the filmmakers present their case with roughly the same level of one-sidedness.

Perhaps the real lesson here is that art, just as much as war, has the propensity to "make fascists of us all!"

THE WEREWOLF (1956)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*

Fred Sears' THE WEREWOLF appears the same year as his most lauded film, THE EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, and one year before THE GIANT CLAW , which would become his most infamous work.

The long-time workhorse Sears died the same year, with five of his films not yet in release due to his prolificity. He would seem to be one of many "jobbing directors" in Hollywood who drifted into SF-films simply because they were popular at the time, as his only significant metaphenomenal film prior to the late 1950s was 1951's BLACKHAWK serial. But by my lights he does seem to be one of the rare "B" directors who engaged with the material enough to render above-average results.

I commented earlier that CRY OF THE WEREWOLF, despite grounding its were-creature in a mystic curse, was pitifully low in the mythicity department thanks to unimaginative handling. Sears' WEREWOLF grounds its fantasy in a science-fictional concept, yet shows far more myth-complexity in any given sequence that CRY did in its entire running-time.

Despite attempts by works like THE HOWLING to conceputalize whole "brotherhoods of wolves," the definitive symbolism at work with the werewolf is that of man against his fellow men; of one man being as a wolf who disrupts the community of men, the human "sheepfold" if the metaphor is not too strained. THE WEREWOLF is far from equalling the classic film THE WOLF MAN in this respect, but it uses its SF-tropes to forge its own significant identity.

During World War II mad scientists were constantly trying to create monsters, not infrequently with some demented notion of serving the war effort. Over ten years after the end of that war, the mad scientists are again at work, but this time the two responsible for creating a "scientific werewolf" labor under the shadow of impending nuclear holocaust. Doctors Forrest and Chambers come across innocent everyman Duncan Marsh (Steven Ritch), rendered unconscious from an auto crack-up in the wilds of snowbound northern California. They decide to use him as a test subject for their prospective anti-radiation serum, with the idea that when the Bomb falls, they'll have an antidote with which to build a new society.

Out of this fractured desire for a new society springs, of course, the aforementioned anti-societal werewolf. Marsh, rendered amnesiac, escapes the scientists and flees to one of the local towns. Ironically his first victim is not another innocent, but a more mundane sort of "wolf," a common mugger. However, as the lycanthrope flees the scene of the crime, he also claws up one of the local deputies. Sheriff Haines (Don Megowan) and his fiancee Amy, among others, are then at a loss to explain the activities of an assailant who seems at once man and beast. The script, having already revealed the nature of said assailant, nevertheless plays fair by gradually teasing the characters into realization of their opponent's bizarre nature.

The character of Amy (Joyce Holden) is used to downplay the trope of the werewolf's attractions for the fair sex. Amy is almost empathically troubled by Marsh's condition even before she knows what he's become, yet there's no hint of any romantic beguilement on her part: she remains, in contrast to the Gwen Conliffe female lead of THE WOLF MAN, steadfast to her sheriff-fiancee. One palpable reason for this plot-development is that prior to becoming a hunted beast Marsh was just an ordinary man with both a wife and child. Mrs. Marsh and her son later enter the story, trying to find out why their once-respectable paterfamilias has become the target of a major manhunt.

In addition, the mad scientists are not idle. Just as the local posse chases the wolf-man, the scientists pursue him as well, but with the object of killing him to protect their secret. Inevitably, though they get it in the end, nothing can save the werewolf from his usual tragic fate.

In addition to its intelligent (if perhaps a little predictable) script THE WEREWOLF benefits from the bleak snowy landscapes through which the locals must hunt the beast who was once a man.