Directed by George Waggner
Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles and Bela Lugosi
So it's come to this. The final review in Universal Monstober. Kids, I've done my best to try to tell a story with this series of reviews, no doubt doing just as poor of a job as I do with pretty much everything else. So P.S. apologies. But for my legion of fans out there, let's sum it up.
I chose to review the "Mount Rushmore" of Universal Monsters this October. We've already covered Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy, all of which released in either 1931 or 1932, all of which mammoth hits. The studio kept cranking these things out throughout the '30s, but the short story is this: there were a lot of ups and downs for the Universal horror machine throughout this period. Sometimes, the highs were glorious, like 1935's classic Bride of Frankenstein, a movie that many consider to be the absolute best movie in the entire "Golden Age of Horror" catalogue. But then there were the valleys, some of which being financial disappointments in addition to being forgettable. Trust me, it's the truth, and I'm not going to get into specifics because there's people out there (likely even some people reading this right now) who are way bigger Universal horror connoisseurs than me. But then 1941 arrived, the lord blessed us with Lon Chaney, and horror was BACK, baby.
Confession time: I'd seen the previous three movies that I reviewed this month years before reviewing them here on the blog, but only bits and pieces of The Wolf Man. I'd seen the 2010 remake, and really liked it up until the ridiculous CGI wolf battle ending. So I'm reporting on this film with a fresh perspective, and folks...this movie lives up to every ounce of hype it has.
For starters, it has an amazing cast. Just check out those names that I listed above. Every one of them was also cast perfectly, a cool feat in and of itself, particularly these days when producers just throw whatever names they can on the poster and expect that to desperately sell their crap film before it hits digital 3 months later. Whoa. Bitter much? But this cast really does deserve harping on. Emotion is key. It's the key to everything that movies are about, because people, this is why we watch movies: We watch them to fool ourselves into feeling emotions about things that aren't actually happening to us. There are many ways to accomplish this, but the tried-and-true method is crafting likable characters, putting them in a perilous situation, and building up to a climax. This is The Wolf Man. It's back to basics in every sense of the word, and it's awesome.
The running time on The Wolf Man is 70 minutes. Once again, it's all lean and mean, which leaves absolutely no time for extraneous bullshit, and I love it. Meet Larry Talbot, played by Lon Chaney Jr. in legit one of the five or six best horror movie performances I've seen. He's not as "steal the scene" crazy as Jack Nicholson in The Shining, this guy is all about relatability, so if you're looking for the Jimmy Stewart of horror, this would be it. He's returning to his home in Wales to reconcile with his father, Sir John (Claude Rains, who is fantastic here - and someday I'll get around to reviewing the the Invisible Man flicks, I promise). In screenplay terms, your first 10 pages (equivalent to 10 minutes of screen time) are very important, and the movie does a great job hooking you in here as we're introduced to pretty much every main character. Larry is shown to be a very nice, amicable guy, an everyman in a strange land of decidedly non-Dee Snider proportions, and romantically interested in antique store clerk Gwen Conliffe. She's played by the gorgeous Evelyn Ankers, and she's both interesting and fantastic to look at. And then he buys that damn staff.
See, this staff is his in to talk to the clerk, and it has a wolf's head at the end. From here, there are not just one but TWO crazy fortune-teller type characters, one an actual fortune teller (Maria Ouspenskaya in a landmark performance of weirdness), the other her son Bela (Mr. Lugosi himself). In between that goodness, we get the romantic plot between Larry and Gwen. Believe me, it has anything you've seen in the five thousand Twilight movies and every ripoff that came in its wake beat. But then tragedy strikes as Larry rescues Gwen's friend from an attacking wolf, killing it with his new staff and boasting a brand new bite in the chest from the creature in the process. Cue the ungodly gypsy woman cutting her promo on Larry telling him that strange, strange things are about to happen to him, and this is where the flick turns really sad.
The Wolf Man is not scary. Like, at all. I've probably said this before in this series of reviews, but it bears repeating: you don't watch this movie for jump scares or to be creeped the fuck out afterward. As part of the wave of what made up Ground Zero of horror, you watch a movie like this for a fascinating lesson in what storytelling is all about. As a story, the movie works on pretty much every level.
People grade movies on different scales. I'm a big structure guy, in addition to emotion. And really, this script was just perfect by every criteria from a structure standpoint. It hooks you in with the first 10 minutes on an emotional level, it has a clearly defined three-act structure, and the execution of everything is just amazing. All of the actors give this thing their all, and it really does make me weep when I have to suffer through stuff in theaters nowadays boasting all of these performers who no doubt have every advantage over the performers from this era and still come off as slackerish emo drones. The set design is again top notch, with eerie fog, creepy forests and even the dank city streets making up the landscape. The makeup stuff on the Wolf-ified version of Larry isn't quite the legendary creation that Frankenstein's monster was, but it's still memorable enough. And the ending really hits you in the gut, even if it is terribly abrupt like seemingly all of the other films from this era are. Brief bitching moment: I've noticed that a lot of movies before a certain point seemed to just have their ending and then not have any kind of cathartic resolution. Like, the final thing will happen, and then the credits just roll, and it happens ALL THE TIME. Anybody else agree, or am I just weird? But that's not really a complaint, it's just an annoying nitpick.
Thus concludes the first-ever Lick Ness Universal Monstober Review-a-Thon, and I award this movie **** out of ****. Along with Dracula and Frankenstein, I can't think of a better way to spend your Halloween night. As for me, I'm unfortunately taking the year off from candy duty on the greatest street in the history of streets this year since October 31st falls on a Monday and I have work at midnight. That weekend, however, is going to involve lots of Universal monsters, lots of John Carpenter, and more Snickers bars than I can count. Long live childhood, and happy Halloween.
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