The Wolf Man (1941). 70 minutes. Directed by George Waggner. Starring Lon Chaney Jr. (as Lawrence “Larry” Talbot/the Wolf Man), Claude Rains (as Sir John Talbot), Warren William (as Dr. Lloyd), Ralph Bellamy (as Captain Paul Montford), Patric Knowles (as Frank Andrews), Bela Lugosi (as Bela), Maria Ouspenskaya (as Maleva), Evelyn Ankers (as Gwen Conliffe), J. M. Kerrigan (as Charles Conliffe), Fay Helm (as Jenny Williams), Doris Lloyd (as Mrs. Williams), Forrester Harvey (as Twiddle), and Harry Stubbs (as Reverend Norman). Screenplay by Curt Siodmak. Makeup effects by Jack Pierce.
Of all of the monsters that Universal depicted in its golden age, the Wolf Man has to be the least frightening. Although he is part wolf, he is still part man, after all, and he is not undead like other Universal antagonists such as Dracula, the mummy Ardath Bey, or Frankenstein’s monster; nor is he a homicidal maniac who delights in causing human suffering like the Invisible Man. But what The Wolf Man lacks in terms of scares, it makes up for through its expression of deep-rooted and communicable fears and anxieties, which in particular reflect on the role of Americans in the world at a time when the U.S. was poised to enter global martial conflict. The film manages to unsettle us in spite of (or perhaps because of) its protagonist’s unlikability, as well as through the complexity of its special makeup effects, its rich subtexts, and often eerie beauty—the misty woods and skeletal trees that the primary horror action plays out against. Given its latent worries and ample atmosphere, The Wolf Man demonstrates that a movie hardly needs to be scary to be disquieting.
The basic plot of The Wolf Man is probably familiar to most: a man is bitten by a werewolf and so becomes one. That much is common to the majority of werewolf stories, but this werewolf is more than just a common monster. He is Larry Talbot, who comes home to his father (Sir John Talbot) and his ancestral home in Llanwelly, Wales after a protracted stay in the U.S.—one that has been so long that everything about him, including his accent, is solidly American. While residing at Talbot Castle, he aggressively woos Gwen, a village woman, and goes on a date with her to have his fortune read at the nearby Romani camp. There he intervenes when Gwen’s friend Jenny is attacked by a wolf, and he is himself bitten by the beast. Perhaps it would be a minor injury, but this wolf is actually a werewolf, and now Larry is one, too. The remainder of the film follows Larry as he transforms repeatedly into the beast and preys on the locals, and as he ponders in human state what is happening to him. Eventually the villagers descend upon Larry while he is in werewolf form, and Sir John kills him, only to realize after the fact that the creature he has destroyed is Larry, his son and heir to Talbot Castle.
Lon Chaney Jr. frequently played roles in which his face and large body were hidden behind makeup. In these roles, his characters are of value onscreen primarily as physically transformed monsters who do not speak human words once they are changed into beasts. In The Wolf Man, even when Larry is not a hairy animal, his bodily presence on the screen is still a large part of the role. We even hear his father (played by the considerably smaller Claude Rains) discuss Larry’s beefiness in an admiring way. Larry is the portrait of the stereotypically healthy, strapping U.S. male—keen to take charge, jump in, and wrestle a wolf at a moment’s notice.
Sir John may approve of Larry’s build, but in the romantic department, there is less to praise Larry for. Sort of like a too confident, all-American high school class president combined with an arrogant, bulked-up varsity quarterback on the playing field, Larry glides into Gwen Conliffe’s antique shop and proceeds to woo her with considerable aggressive machismo. Forget the fact that she protests that she is engaged—he invites her on a date and says that he won’t take no for an answer, and after she has said “no” numerous times, he shows up at the shop in the evening anyway in order to take her out.
But consider also the way that he first encounters Gwen—by using his father’s telescope to observe her dressing in a private room above the shop. Larry sees the earrings that she is trying on, and later when he speaks with her for the first time as she waits on him in the shop, he asks to see earrings fitting that description. When she says they don’t have any like that for sale, he indicates that he has seen them on her dressing table in her bedroom. She is startled: how could he know that she has some just like that upstairs? How could he know what her bedroom looks like? Larry seems to enjoy this moment of invasiveness as Gwen struggles to make sense of how he has seen her in a most personal space. He is what amounts to a peeping tom, and he is using his peeping to establish his own “meet cute.” But it is not cute. While he strives to be polite and play along with Gwen according to normative boy-girl dating behavior, really there is something of a beast within him from the start of the film.
Given his actions, Larry is not an appealing love interest. But the scenes where he dons the Wolf Man’s special effects makeup are delightful. And this is fitting because Chaney was the son of actor Lon Chaney Sr. (“The Man of a Thousand Faces”), who fascinated audiences through his pioneering special-effects makeup in silent films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Most of this makeup was his own invention, but the senior Chaney’s methods, while innovative, were also frequently painful according to the accounts of his colleagues. By the time The Wolf Man was made, all studios had dedicated makeup departments, and Jack Pierce had been established as a leading special-effects makeup artist in Hollywood, having created the look of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931), among other films; yet Pierce’s ground-breaking makeup, while uncomfortable, did not cause the younger Chaney to suffer pain in the same way that his father had. In spite of changing times, Chaney Sr.’s reputation remained legendary—so much so that Lon Chaney Jr., born Creighton Tull Chaney and the son of Chaney Sr., adopted the name “Lon” and the “Jr.” both as homage to his father and as a way of beneficially connecting his career to that of the famous silent actor.
Chaney Jr. in monster form may look less ghoulish than Chaney Sr. did on screen as Quasimodo or the Phantom, but metamorphosed into the Wolf Man, ironically, the younger Chaney seems more natural than he does as Larry. Chaney is excellent as the hairy creature, hiding in the night shadows in the forest and moving frenetically to chase after prey, or while he is himself chased. As the Wolf Man, he moves his body distinctively—creeping speedily on his front toes along the fog-dampened pathways, curling his body up behind trees, baring his teeth, crouching, lunging, and erupting with animal violence. Frequently all that we can clearly discern of his body are his eyes highlighted in a band of moonlight as he hides in the gloom. The scenes where Chaney portrays the Wolf Man are some of the most interesting in the entire film, which is remarkable as the Wolf Man cannot speak human language and therefore produces only animal sounds (all dubbed) as he runs along outside. Weirdly, Larry is more appealing as the Wolf Man than as himself.
There has been a great deal of commentary over the years on the themes and subtexts of The Wolf Man as they relate to Larry in all of his physical states. For example, critics have pointed out that Larry’s transformation into a werewolf invokes some of the features of puberty, especially male puberty—with hair growing on the body in places where it was not previously, and with newfound animal passions springing forth in the night. This reading is supported by the fact that even though Larry is a grown adult when he comes home to Talbot Castle, he is still put very much in the role of a juvenile son there, even going so far as to refer to John Talbot, his father, as “sir” throughout the movie. Much like a young man, Larry has money to burn and buys a frivolous accessory (a cane with a wolf handle) and later takes his date off to what is essentially a weenie roast (the Romani carnival). Still, for the puberty reading to work, it would help if the werewolf transformation were happening to a younger man, or a man who is less sexually cocky to begin with.
The puberty subtext addresses some of the latent sex drama of The Wolf Man—namely, Larry’s unceasing pursuit of Gwen. But Larry’s fish-out-of-water status touches on another constant in this film, addressed by film historians David J. Skal and Joseph Maddrey: an unspoken, deep-rooted American fear of Europeans. We see some of this expressed in the film’s use of the classic old world/new world dichotomy. Larry left Wales for the States many years ago and became involved in industry and scientific endeavors there. His father stayed behind with Larry’s elder brother in Wales at Talbot Castle (Larry’s brother has died in a hunting accident). Sir John is interested in scientific endeavors himself, and we see him installing a large telescope with Larry’s help. So the elder Talbot, while he is of the old world and firmly rooted in Talbot Castle, nevertheless has something in common with his son and serves as a bridge between the two worlds.
The village of Llanwelly, however, is different from both men. It is full of quaint little shops, people in horse-drawn carriages, antiques, an old church with a graveyard and crypt. It is a vision from another time. And that does not even begin to capture what the woods surrounding Talbot Castle are like at night—covered with a blanket of mist, they seem ancient, full of eerie shadows and trees that arc strangely into the darkened sky. The woods are like a mystic plateau, host to strange forces and cloaked in mystery. Additionally, when Captain Montford leads the charge against the Wolf Man in the final sequence, his colleagues are armed with dogs and burning torches as they hunt the werewolf near the castle grounds—it is the stereotypical, classic, and age-old hunt for the monster in full force. In Llanwelly one even finds a preponderance of wolfsbane, a (toxic) European flower that grows in the woods and is connected with werewolves via a poem that the characters repeat throughout the film:
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.
All of these things are European to the American mind, including the torches; hunting dogs; strange, storied plants; and unattributed, superstitious nursery rhyme. They are tinged with antiquity and the dead. And they possess a power from these attributes that enable them to work dark wonders on the American soul.
And Larry’s soul is preoccupied. From the time Larry is bitten, he is trying to work out what happened to him: what his friends Doctor Lloyd and Captain Montford tell him took place (i.e., that he was simply attacked by a wild wolf) does not make sense, and he feels a strong sense of unfairness, of unjustness. Is it not just random chance that he is there on the night that Bela changes into a wolf and attacks Jenny? What has he done to deserve the confusion and torment he finds himself in? But then again, Larry is in the old world, a place where not only the laws that Captain Montford enforces are different but the laws of fate and destiny are different as well.
Supposedly the elder Talbot brother was accidentally killed during a hunting expedition—the kind of activity that residents of places like Talbot Castle regularly engage in. But, we might wonder, in light of what happens to Larry, how confident can we be that his brother was truly accidentally killed in this way? Could it be that the Talbot family has a secret history of lycanthropy? Perhaps it is not understood by them as such. Perhaps the inhabitants of the castle, like much of their community, are hesitant to accept werewolf lore as fact, preferring to allow tales of monster attacks to linger in the shadows. In any case, Larry will be hunted, too—recreating in the process the context of his brother’s death, as if this killing force were a necessary and inescapable component of his family’s old-world identity. Larry can successfully troubleshoot as many telescopes as he likes, The Wolf Man seems to say, but he is powerless to stop the secret energies of this other realm.
The significance of this perspective in light of world events cannot be overstated. The Wolf Man debuted just days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that caused the United States to enter the Second World War. In the period before the attack when The Wolf Man was made, at a time when the U.S. appeared to be hurtling towards conflict with not just Japan but also Germany, discomfort with European culture would not have been out of the ordinary. But anti-European sentiment would have been especially widespread following The Wolf Man’s release, which occurred on December 9, 1941, only two days before the U.S. declared war on the European front. Of course, The Wolf Man takes place in Wales, and the United Kingdom was a U.S. ally, but the film mines the location for all of the European qualities it can. Consider, for example, the presence of Romani travelers in the Welsh town of Llanwelly, the most prominent of which (Bela and Maleva) speak in heavy Hungarian and Russian accents. It is as if Llanwelly were somewhere in the middle of the continent where Eastern Europeans might be more readily encountered.
The Roma are important to consider in this context, because they offer something of an alternative to the mainstream European encounters that Larry has in the village and at the castle. True, Bela is a werewolf and, through his powerful bite, changes Larry into one. But Bela is clearly tortured by his identity, and he both begs and compels Jenny to flee his tent when he senses that he will mutate and hunt her down. Bela, in other words, is as much a victim of lycanthropy as Larry is. Maleva provides sympathy and guidance to Larry, even offering him an amulet to protect him from the curse. Her words are powerful: when she recites a sort of free-verse spell over Larry’s body in the movie’s finale, he transforms from wolf back to human for the last time. As such, Bela and Maleva exist outside of the European mainstream that they travel through and around, in a liminal state that the European locals observe with bemusement and frequently label as superstitious. The Roma themselves, however, have access to truths about both humans and beasts.
And that is fitting because fundamentally The Wolf Man is not merely about the wolf but also about the man, and the adjacency of both identities to each other. Larry Talbot is attacked by a werewolf and becomes a monster, but what is the reason that the rest of us turn into our own monsters? At least Larry has the excuse of having been bitten physically; we are bitten in other ways. The world is a dangerous place, The Wolf Man and so many of the Universal horror films seem to say—but its monsters are born men and walk around as men during the day. With the war raging around the globe, it would become sufficiently apparent that humans inflict their own horror on each other, and the Europe that the The Wolf Man fears would soon bear ample evidence that monstrous acts are hardly confined to the night, the full moon, or the blooming of wolfsbane.
