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When I was a kid, I would watch The Wolf Man whenever it came on Creature Feature on local television in Nashville. I loved those old Universal monster movies, although I probably shouldn’t have been watching some of them at my age. I always had more sympathy for the Wolf Man and Frankenstein; they didn’t ask for this.
This one scared me. The funny thing is that I was also pulling for the Wolf Man. I felt sorry for him in much the same way I felt sorry for Frankenstein’s monster. Larry Talbot wasn’t an evil man. Something terrible happened to him, and he couldn’t stop it. Even as a kid, that made the movie different to me.
The Wolf Man was released by Universal in 1941 and starred Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot. Chaney had a pretty big shadow hanging over him before he ever put on the makeup. His father was Lon Chaney, the legendary silent-film star known as the Man of a Thousand Faces.
With the Wolf Man, the younger Chaney found the character that would forever be associated with him.
Larry returns to his family home in Wales after the death of his brother and tries to reconnect with his father, Sir John Talbot, played by Claude Rains. He meets Gwen Conliffe, played by Evelyn Ankers, and buys a silver-headed walking stick from her father’s shop. Then things start going badly.
Larry tries to rescue Gwen’s friend Jenny from what appears to be a wolf. He kills the animal with the silver walking stick but is bitten during the attack. The wolf was actually Bela, a werewolf played by Bela Lugosi. Larry has inherited the curse.
That’s what makes the story work for me. Larry doesn’t ask for any of this. He doesn’t want the power that comes with becoming the Wolf Man. He doesn’t enjoy what happens to him. He is frightened by it and spends much of the movie trying to understand what is happening.
There is also a sadness to Lon Chaney’s performance that makes you care about Larry Talbot. You know where the story is going and so does he.
The supporting cast is incredible. Claude Rains had already appeared in The Invisible Man. Bela Lugosi was forever connected with Dracula. Maria Ouspenskaya plays Maleva, the woman who understands exactly what has happened to Larry and tries to help him.
The movie was written by Curt Siodmak and directed by George Waggner. One of Siodmak’s smartest additions was the little werewolf poem repeated throughout the movie. It sounds like something handed down through European folklore, but Siodmak invented it for the film.
Even a man who is pure in heart
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright
Jack Pierce created the Wolf Man makeup. Pierce was already responsible for some of Universal’s most famous monster makeup, including Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster. The Wolf Man became another one of his creations that became part of popular culture.
What amazes me now is how short the movie is. It runs only about 70 minutes. There isn’t much wasted time. Larry comes home, meets Gwen, encounters the werewolf, and his life begins falling apart. The fog, the woods, and the old Universal sets do the rest. Watching it today, you can see that much of what frightened me as a kid was atmosphere.
And maybe that’s why these movies worked so well on television. You didn’t need blood flying everywhere. Give me a dark room, an old black-and-white television, some fog rolling through the woods, and the Wolf Man walking between the trees. My imagination would handle the rest!
The movie was successful enough that Chaney returned as Larry Talbot several more times. He played him in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and finally Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
But this is the one I remember. There were monsters I was simply afraid of when I was a kid. Larry Talbot was different. I was afraid of the Wolf Man. But I felt sorry for the man.
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