-Devdutt Trivedi
The Horror genre film was an important genre alongside the Film Noir produced by the Hollywood studios in the Golden Era of Hollywood between 1925 and 1959. These films were usually shot on larger sets constructed for their big budget productions which consisted of the best in the business, be it actors or technicians. The ‘B-list picture’ as they are referred to Hollywood jargon, often consisted of technicians and set designers which were the second choice for studios. They were usually employed by the studios and worked on several projects at the same time and not for a specific project or director.
The two most important genres of the B-Film were the Film Noir, about middle-class crimes and the Freudian Horror genre. Perhaps the most important ‘B Horror picture’ both in terms of its box office returns and influence on forthcoming horror adventures of the following decades was Curtis Siodmak’s story The Wolfman which was directed by George Wagner and completed in 1941.
The film was made in the tradition of the novels of Bram Stoker, who in his classic Dracula combined the theories of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin with Freud’s research in psychoanalysis and the nature of the subconscious.
The first version of The Wolf Man would already have been completed by Robert Florey, an important French expatriate director, after his Murders in the Rue Morgan (1932), with Boris Karloff, that famous B-film actor, playing the character of The Wolf Man. However the film was not made as Universal was afraid that it would strike a bad note with the Church authorities. Eventually the first werewolf film to be completed, six years before Siodmak’s adaptation, was Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London(1935). The film had Henry Hull playing Dr. Wilfred Glendon who transforms into the werewolf and uses minimal make up.
In spite of its B-film status, Universal announces its arrogance at being able to assemble an important star cast for the film, in the rather matter-of-fact opening titles. The opening titles in the film were very much like those of the better B-films, with important actors shown in clips in the film which are still to follow with their names as well as the names of the character they were to play. The impressive star cast in the film starts with none other than Claude Rains, amongst Hollywood’s most important veteran actors of the time who would win the Academy Award for his performance in Casablanca the next year, followed by an impressive line up consisting of Ralph Bellamy, Bela Lugosi, Patric Knowles, Maria Ouspendskaya and most importantly, Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot who becomes The Wolf Man.
In Curt Siodmak’s script, the character of The Wolf Man was played by the character of the mechanic Larry Guild, who visits the Talbot castle to repair Sir John Talbot’s telescope. In the original script, The Wolf Man is shown as a Freudian device to reflect
the victim’s state of mind. The werewolf in the script was never to be shown, as the sequences would be shot through the point of view of the character who was possessed. This reference to the myth of the werewolf would be a variation of the Jekyll and Hyde characters, based on Stevenson’s classic that Hollywood was experimenting with otherwise in the horror pictures.
The Wolf Man costume then would only be flaunted through reflections of water bodies, a monster movie without a monster, not allowing horror film buffs to gorge on The Wolf Man sequences. This was changed only a couple of weeks before shooting began. The character of Larry Talbot, returning to his own house only the death of his older brother who would have gone to receive the Talbot name and property, would reflect the anonymity of his own settings, the tension within his home town, and reflect this tension by transforming into a four legged wolf man.
Chaney Jr. was the son of the silent film star Lon Chaney also known as Lon Chaney Sr. Although his father wanted his son, originally named Creighton Tull Chaney to enter business instead of joining the movies, Chaney Jr. became an actor after the death of his father, making an impressive debut in Lewis Milestone’s Steinbeck adaptation Of Mice and Men (1939). He played the same character in remarkably entertaining B-horror films after his 1941 debut of the Wolf Man in The Ghost of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1944), House of Frankenstein(1944),House of Dracula (1945) and finally in Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein (1948).
The exterior shots of the film were taken around a set built at the Universal soundstage designed by Robert Boyle, who painted the trees black and the coated them with glycerin to make them reflect light. The fog was produced by fog machines. The makeup was done by Pierce who used spirit gum and Yak hair to create The Wolf Man costume. The process of makeup would take 4 hours and Chaney Jr. mentioned that he took up a ‘Yoga attitude’ to keep up with the tediousness of the make up process. Pierce and Chaney had quite a poor relationship on the set partially due to the qualifications of Chaney Sr. which were not reflected in the skills of the son.
The most interesting sequences were the ones that showed Larry Talbot transform into The Wolf Man. These sequences were done, according to Tom Weaver with two portrait cameras and one film camera. The portrait camera would use a 8x10 outline with a frosted glass piece into which Chaney Jr. would fit in every time, while the film camera would serve as a backup to the static process.
Perhaps the two most interesting support characters are those of Sir John Talbot played by Claude Rains and the character of the gypsy woman played by Maria Ouspendskaya. Ouspendskaya was born in Russian in 1866, and was a practitioner of the Method school of acting under Stanislavski in Moscow. She taught acting at Stanislavski’s institute and later shifted to America where she continued to teach. She acted in a number of other important films such as Dodsworth and Love Affair. According to Greg Mank, it was Ouspendskaya who added the most to the film providing it with a ‘sense of Greek tragedy.’
The film was shot by Joseph Valentine, who went on to shoot Hitchcock’s Saboteur immediately after wrapping up with the production of The Wolfman. Valentine would continue to work with Hitchcock on amongst his two most remarkable works Shadow of a Doubt two years later in 1943 followed by Hitchcock’s single take gimmick, Rope (1948).
Along with the music, the outstanding element in the film is the music scored by Charles Previn, the uncle of the great composer Andre Previn, Hans J. Salter and Frank Skinner. According to film historian Tom Weaver although 90 percent of the music was original, about 10 percent was a continuation of music from other films.
Although Chaney played the Wolf Man in 5 other films, he would be most creatively proud of his 1941 rendition written by Siodmak and directed by Wagner. He would mention it as the most creatively satisfying project and call it ‘My baby.’
Van Lewton of RKO who rejected the horror B-films as being composed of ‘childish material’ would produce, perhaps the most important horror B-picture, Jacques Tournier’s Cat People (1942) that would influence the development of the Film Noir genre, which was heavily influenced by The Wolf Man,.
The ending of the film highlights this Greek tragedy like quality to the film. The fact that Larry Talbot transformed into The Wolfman is murdered by his father gives the film an inevitable quality as if death was bound to befall Talbot, either through his mental complexes or through his actual transformation into The Wolfman. The film can be seen as being part of a continuation of Hollywood’s experimentation with portraying the disturbed subconscious which had begun with German Expressionism in the ‘20s and found its end in the B-horror pictures of the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Courtesy:
Tom Weaver, Universal Pictures
Monster in the Moonlight, a documentary on the making of The Wolfman, produced by Universal