When the Autumn Moon is Bright...

Every time I revisit The Wolf Man (1941, directed by George Waggner), I envision screenwriter Curt Siodmak upon writing the werewolf's rhyme leaning back in his chair and lighting up a big cigar. He was awfully proud of that bit of doggerel (if you'll pardon the pun). So much so that he puts it in the mouth of seemingly every character poor doomed Larry Talbot meets in the first half of the film. You know the one, right? "Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night, may turn into a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright?" You can't miss it. They repeat it for emphasis in the mouths of multiple characters.

The great flowering of horror movies during the early 1930s were seriously curtailed by the ascendance of the production code in 1934. Some of the films from the era went into vaults because they could not comply with the code (Freaks was unseen for 30 years), while others were cut into compliance on re-release, sometimes to the point of defanging them. King Kong survived the cuts well enough. Frankenstein perhaps less successfully (cuts demanded by the Kansas board of censors would have removed over half of the movie). James Whale famously foxed the censors while making The Bride of Frankenstein, complying with the letter of the code but not the spirit. After the Bride, horror movies began to fade, but Universal never forgot the mountain of cash its first wave of horror movies had amassed. And if they had, they were reminded when an LA theater booked a double feature of Dracula and Frankenstein in late 1938 to record crowds. That double feature spread throughout the country and its returns dwarfed the original box office of either film. Suddenly, Universal was back in the monster business. Son of Frankenstein was a success, so the powers that be wanted a new monster to add to the roster, and a new star to play him. They chose Creighton Chaney to be that actor, in part because his father was Lon Chaney, a name with which they could still conjure. They billed Creighton as Lon Chaney, Jr. and improvised a werewolf story around him. The result was The Wolf Man. It wasn't the first werewolf story Universal made--that would be The Werewolf of London six years earlier--but it's the one that assumed a place in the pantheon of the Universal monsters.

The story follows Laurence Talbot, who returns home to his ancestral home in England after living in the United States for most of his life on the occasion of his brother's death. His father, Sir John Talbot, welcomes him home with open arms, glad that his lineage persisted. His father's manor has an observatory where Larry works on the telescope, to his father's amusement. He's got a background in mechanics and optics. While testing his work, he spies a woman at her dresser down in the village. Larry is smitten with her, and goes into town to meet her, on the pretext of buying a cane from her shop. This is Gwen Conliffe, who is the daughter of a shopkeeper and engaged to be married. That doesn't dissuade Larry, though. He buys a cane with a silver handle carved into the head of a wolf and cajoles her into a date. The cane has a story to it, given the odd design of its head. It bears the sign of the pentagram--which Gwen's father informs him is the sign of the werewolf. Gwen tells him the werewolf's rhyme and agrees to meet Larry after work. Gwen has experience dealing with wolves, though, so she contrives to have her best friend, Jenny, accompany them to the Romani fair that camped just outside of town. Jenny has her palm read by Bela the fortune teller who is visibly upset by what he sees there. Meanwhile, Larry maneuver's Gwen to be alone with him so he can continue to woo her. When she emerges from the fortune teller's tent, Jenny wanders into the woods in search of her friends, but instead meets a beast, who murders her. Larry hears her distress but arrives to help too late, but he manages to beat the beast to death with his cane. When Colonel Monford, the law in town, arrives, no beast is evident. There are only the bodies of Jenny and Bela the fortune teller, whose feet are mysteriously bare. Larry, for his part, is taken home with his wounds--he has been bitten by the beast--where during his convalescence he comes under the suspicious eye of Colonel Monford and the kinder eye of Dr. Lloyd. Larry cannot explain how after being so grievously wounded, he has no evident wounds on his body, nor can he explain how Bela came to be beaten to death. Larry swears he saw only a wolf. Perhaps he was mistaken in the fog and the dark? He doesn't know. He haunts Bela's funeral and overhears his wife, Maleva, tell his corpse that "The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own." When he at last meets her for some answers, Maleva tells him that he has now taken on Bela's curse, that he is now a werewolf. She gives him a charm to protect him and to protect others, which he passes on to Gwen. His father and Dr. Lloyd think his head has been filled with nonsense--Dr. Lloyd has Freudian explanations for lycanthropy--while his father thinks he just needs rest. But then another murder happens, and Larry cannot account for his whereabouts. Meanwhile, the Romani break camp and bug out and the men of the town organize a hunt...

I don't remember the first time I saw The Wolf Man. I was young, maybe no more than a toddler. For all I can remember it's a film that's always been there in my cultural experience. The werewolf's rhyme might have been told to me in the nursery given how deeply it sits in my brain. And yet, it's not a favorite film to me. Every time I've watched it as an adult, I've bristled at the way the film aggressively takes the audience by the hand and tells them--sometimes in the text of the film itself--how they should feel about it. The mantra of the rhyme is part of it. So is Maleva's repetition of her farewell to the werewolves. But the most galling example of this is when Gwen's fiance, Frank, tells her "There's something very tragic about that man... and I'm sure that nothing but harm will come to you through him." I sometimes like to think that this is all an accommodation for Chaney's limitations as an actor, but he's fine in the role, fine enough to be the only actor to ever play Larry Talbot during the classic run of monster movies. It's not a part that's outside his capabilities, no matter what I might have thought of his performance in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. He even has a sense of humor about it in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But make no mistake, he's swimming upstream against a cast that is leagues ahead of him.

This is otherwise a handsome film with one of the best assemblies of talent Universal ever lavished on one of their monster movies. Claude Rains was ultimately too big a talent to be confined to the horror genre, as was Ralph Bellamy. Warren Williams was only a few years removed from the a-list--he played Sam Spade in the second version of The Maltese Falcon after all--and was still suave as Dr. Lloyd. And Bela Lugosi hadn't yet teetered over the edge into career oblivion. Even Evelyn Ankers, who never escaped her lot as a contract player, is appealing. Throwing gifted character actors at the camera is a formula that worked in Son of Frankenstein, and it works here too, which is why this is largely the last peak of the Universal horror films during their glory days. The production is beautiful, too. This film has beautiful sets and a convincing mood generated by the tools of the high Gothic. This film takes place in England, but it might as well take place in Horror Movie Land.

It's hard for me to think of The Wolf Man outside of its historical context. This is the last major horror movie from Hollywood before the outbreak of World War II, and the war ultimately put a bullet in the head of the Universal-style monster movie by unleashing real-world horrors that dwarf what the cinema can provide. It stands, too, as the last major horror movie before the innovations of the Val Lewton films would remake the Gothic film a year later. It's the last edifice of a mode of filmmaking that was on the verge of extinction. The weird thing about it is that it seems to be aware of this. The psychosexual elements that make up films like Cat People or The Uninvited are absolutely present in The Wolf Man, and Dr. Lloyd is a precursor to the psychiatrists explaining the Freudian underpinnings of the Lewtons and the post-war Hitchcocks. The figure of the werewolf itself, as a shameful secret self that torments the man who suppresses it is a trope that always works. Watching Larry turn away from, say, the mourners at the funeral or from his own father or (especially) from Gwen Conliffe is a study in the lot of the post-War malaise when the results of human bestiality could be seen either on the grand scale of the Final Solution or the atom bomb or on the smaller scale of political witch hunts and the persistence of white supremacy. Talbot could be a communist or a gay man or a garden-variety murderer and the metaphor would work as well. The notion of an involuntary change--particularly a hairy change--has particular relevance to me as a trans person. The shot of Larry looking at his suddenly hairy leg is a shock to my own self-image. You can attach any number of other readings to that image and werewolf movies have done so for over eighty years at this point. It's a Rorschach test; you see what you bring to it. Whatever the reading, the werewolf is outside the covenant of human society. It's a powerful metaphor machine, one that explains why this film resonates while The Werewolf of London never did.

I should also apologize to this film for some slander I cast its way when I was a kid, speculating on the calendar when confronted with the schedule of Larry Talbot's transformations. There is no mention of the full moon in this film, and Universal foxed everyone by changing the werewolf's rhyme in subsequent films (even unto this film's remake and the werewolf's appearance in Van Helsing). It appears here as "when the autumn moon is bright," but it became "when the moon is full and bright" starting with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Subsequent films can be taken to task for ignoring the calendar, but this one's paws are clean.

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