Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night;
May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.
The Wolf Man is a 1941 American horror film written by Curt Siodmak and produced and directed by George Waggner. The film stars Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role. Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles, Bela Lugosi, Evelyn Ankers, and Maria Ouspenskaya star in supporting roles. The film is the second Universal Pictures werewolf film, preceded six years earlier by the less commercially successful Werewolf of London (1935).
Upon the death of his brother, Larry Talbot returns from America to his ancestral home in Wales. He visits a gypsy camp with village girl Jenny Williams, who is attacked by Bela, a gypsy who has turned into a werewolf. Larry kills the werewolf but is bitten during the fight. Bela's mother tells him that this will cause him to become a werewolf at each full moon. Larry confesses his plight to his unbelieving father, Sir John, who then joins the villagers in a hunt for the wolf. Transformed by the full moon, Larry heads for the forest and a fateful meeting with both Sir John and Gwen Conliffe.
Fairly recently, i told my DND group i wasn't going to be around for the whole campaign. the first response i got was one of disappointment, when a friend of mine said "Ah man... But you play the everyman so perfectly!" to be honest i found it a tinge insulting at first, but this movie changed my mind.
Lon Chaney Jr. plays the perfect everyman, and its how he does it so effortlessly that makes him as iconic as he became. Even if he is a bit of a voyeur its damn near impossible not to find him charming. As charming as he is and as iconic and influential as this movie was, it feels a lot slower than any of the other UNIVERSAL monster movies from the first phase of films in the 30s. way to many beautifully directed scenes of people talking about spooky shit instead of actual spooky shit, a painfully uninteresting love story for our leading man, and perhaps its biggest crime is the fact that there really are no stakes or drama here.
the most interesting idea in this movie is the idea that Larry actually killed a man, but was crazy enough to think it was a wolf. Monsters are metaphors after all, and i would love to see a werewolf movie sometime that isn't about werewolves at all. Much like the Salem Witch Trials, it would be far more intriguing to look into somebody who thinks they are a witch as apposed to there being anything supernatural at all.
well i guess we have to make due with what we got, and about the only other topic worth mentioning is this movies approach to the werewolf rules. this movie never uses of the idea that a werewolf is transformed under a full moon, and Gwen's description implies that it happens when the wolfbane blooms in autumn. The first sequel, though, made explicit use of the full moon both visually and in the dialog, and also changed the poem to specify when the moon is full and bright. Presumably this is what popularized the full-moon connection in the 20th century. The sequel visually implies that the transformation occurs as a result of direct exposure to light from the full moon. Other fiction has assumed the transformation is an inescapable monthly occurrence and does not examine whether it is caused by light, tidal effects, or some cycle that happens to coincide with the moon's phases.
so yeah... this movie is... yeah...
5/10
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