Past Misdeeds: Werewolf Of London (1935)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Botanist Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) is on an expedition into Tibet, looking for a mythical plant that only blooms by moonlight said to grow there.

In a valley guarded by strange powers, Glendon finds the plant he seeks, but before he can grab it and return to his native London, the scientist is attacked by a creature part wolf and part man. Glendon manages to fight his attacker off, but is wounded in the process.

The botanist returns to London with his find and begins to work ceaselessly in his laboratory on finding a way to influence the plant through artificial moonlight; he also seems to have invented a monitor and security camera combo you wouldn't expect from a botanist, but no matter. Glendon's increasing obsession with his work begins to put a strain on his marriage to his wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson). This is rather unfortunate in a marriage that never seems to have been based on a very deep understanding of each other's wishes or character.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that Lisa's old beau Paul Ames (Lester Matthews) is beginning to sniff around her again, clearly smelling emotional turmoil he can use to get what he wants, reminding me of nothing so much as of a dog with a receding hairline and no ethical backbone that goes beyond very basic ideas of propriety - in other words, he is the typical romantic lead in a 1930s movie.

Glendon is displeased, but too distracted to do much about Ames, while Lisa is all too happy to have someone close-by who treats her as a person instead of a piece of furniture, even if he’s an ass.

Soon, Glendon is visited by the mysterious Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland). Yogami knows all about Glendon's Tibetan adventures and warns him that the creature who bit the botanist was a werewolf - a creature combining the worst aspects of man and wolf in the language of the film - and that the creature has infected him with its curse, the same curse Yogami does suffer from. Only the blossoms of Glendon's plant will be able to counteract the transformation into a ravening beast out to destroy what it loves the most (something Glendon would seem to be perfectly able to do through negligence instead of violence without being a werewolf). Yogami begs Glendon for one of the blossoms for himself, but Glendon declines in disbelief of the story, and because simple kindness is clearly beyond him.

After his first transformation, the scientist will be much more believing in it as well as in the power of the plant, but at this point, someone will already have stolen all the blossoms he so desperately needs now. From then on, Glendon tries to keep away from his wife as much as possible, driving her even further away but living out his murderous urges on random women (of obviously “loose morals” - one might meet the film's subtext here).

Universal's Werewolf of London is often erroneously called the first werewolf movie. In fact, there have been four to six other films (excluding Jekyll & Hyde versions, which are of course closely related to the werewolf myth as the movies see it) containing werewolves made before it, but - as far as I can tell - all of them seem to have been lost to us.

In any case, Werewolf of London is Universal Studio's first attempt at making a werewolf movie, six years before their much more successful and much better loved The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney Jr.

At times, Werewolf of London feels like a dry run for the later film, but it would be quite unfair to only see it as such. While the basics of the two films - parts of the werewolf mythology, the werewolf as a victim of his own (aggressive and sexual) urges, a creature killing what it loves the most - are identical, Werewolf puts quite a different emphasis on things.

Where Chaney is nearly as much of an innocent victim of his own urges as the people he kills, Hull's Glendon seems to be much more conscious of what he is doing when he is not completely himself anymore. There's a distinct undertone of Glendon living out his true wishes when he is in his wolf form. Being a werewolf in this case seems to be less the case of Glendon being a victim than him becoming what he truly is.

This doesn't mean that the film treats its main protagonist as a pure monster - he is trying to stay away from people after he realizes what is happening to him, he is doing what he can at least not to kill his wife - it does however treat him as someone fighting himself rather than an outside influence. This impression is even deepened by the fact that Glendon-wolf seems to keep his intelligence and even tends to change into different clothes before going on a rampage. In this respect, Werewolf is closer to the Jekyll & Hyde school of werewolfery than the Chaney version.

The Chaney version also isn't a film about a marriage going down the shitter. Werewolf very much is. At times, this part of the subtext becomes so strong the transformation of a man into a raging creature full of hatred for his wife can hardly be called a metaphor for the emotional turmoil inside of a very insecure and violent man at the end of a marriage anymore.

Visually, the film isn't as interesting as it is on its metaphorical level. Director Stuart Walker surely wasn't one of Universal's more interesting worker drones, and much of the rest of the team behind the camera - with the exception of special makeup artist Jack Pierce, of course - wasn't among Universal's best either. The film's set design and cinematography are far from the expressionist backlot Europe heights the studio's best films reached. Mostly, the film is looking professionally bland, but this blandness is from time to time broken up by single moody shots or short moments of inspired shadow play. After all, this was produced in a year when Universal's minor creatives were still more than competent in what they were doing, and more importantly, when they - and the studio itself - were still treating their films and their audience with respect and seriousness - it's 1935, and not 1944.

Pierce's werewolf make-up is of quite a different calibre than competence, though. Less doglike and hairy than the later wolf face for Chaney, the mask enables Hull to bring more of his facial expressions to bear. In fact, he seems to be a much better actor when baring his fangs than he is when talking.

Hull's performance out of his mask is unfortunately often quite weak. He tends to go for the overtly dramatic where subtlety would be better and for the bland where one would hope for something more charismatic. I'd go as far as to say that it is in large parts Hull's fault that the later Chaney film has become Universal's iconic werewolf film instead of this one.

Still, there's much of interest to be found here for anyone even a little interested in the horror movies of the 30s and 40s.

Hollywood Story (1951)

New York Producer Larry O’Brien (Richard Conte) moves to Los Angeles to found and head a new independent movie studio. Buying an old studio building that’s been unused since 1929, he learns of the unsolved murder of former silent star director Franklin Ferrara. Ferrara was shot right in his office on the lot, too, so it’s easy for Larry to become somewhat obsessed with the matter.

Clearly, the combination of oldest school Hollywood glamour and an unsolved murder should make box office gold, so Larry decides to turn this particular true crime story into his first Hollywood film, despite misgivings from friends and very shouty misgivings from his money man Sam Collyer (Fred Clark). And because Larry’s a bit of a method producer, he starts hiring old talent for that project, former silent actors as well as Ferrara’s old script writer Vincent St. Clair (Henry Hull). Also not amused by his project – or is it his deep dive into the matters of the case? – are the daughter of Ferrara’s favourite star (Julie Adams) as well as the actual killer.

Supposedly made as Universal’s answer to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, and directed by William Castle, this mystery doesn’t actually have much in common with the Wilder movie beyond the call-backs to the silent era and some cameos and small part appearances by actual silent era actors whom Universal, staying classy as always, decided to pay the lowest rates possible. It’s also, keeping with being classy, a thinly veiled version of the actual unsolved murder of silent movie director William Desmond Taylor, leading to a film that’s strangely meta in a very different way to Wilder’s film.

But then, Sunset Blvd was all about Hollywood and what it does to (at least some) people, whereas this one’s a zippy murder mystery whose moments of meta and strange resonance seem less based on an explicit artistic program but just come about through a combination of a somewhat exploitative set-up, a director in William Castle insisting on a degree of authenticity when it comes to places and their feeling by using actual silent sound stages as well as a couple of well-known Hollywood spots, and the magic that a film where production and plot can’t help but mirror one another a little simply cannot avoid when made by dedicated professionals. So while there’s no direct attempt at depth or more than a small critique of Hollywood life in the film’s script, there’s a certain resonance to the proceedings, as if this particular film had stumbled into a particularly liminal space by a mix of accident and mercenary commercialism, providing things with an air of the slightly weird throughout.

Thanks to being an actual murder mystery, and its willingness and ability to tell a genre story, Hollywood Story also avoids the horrors of artier movies about filmmaking, a sub-genre much beloved by Ebert-style film critics and certain directors that’s typically comparable to all those Great Novels about middle-aged writers, their writing blocks and their wish to fuck their grand-daughter-aged students. That is to say, this stuff is really of no interest to anyone but the makers and their cliques.

If you’ve first encountered the great William Castle, king of the gimmick movie, with his later, independent productions, and heard and seen all those lovely gimmicks, it’s often easy to forget that the man had had a healthy career as a studio contract director before that. It’s a bit ironic that this film made in his studio phase is also a bit of a gimmick movie with its “ripped from the old headlines” approach, but it’s not Castle’s gimmick, it’s the studio’s.


The gimmicks also can tend to hide Castle’s considerable abilities as a director, like his command of pace – as a rule, a Castle movie is never slow nor full of filler – or the generally short but deft and effective use of expressionist filmmaking stand-bys like chiaroscuro effects, stark shadows, and so on and so forth. Hollywood Story in particular features some clever tracking shots, and well-staged suspense sequences, but its high point is the film’s actual climax that’s about three minutes of a beautiful potted noir chase through a studio lot by night, wonderfully mixing Castle’s talent for the efficiently brief and the expressionist.