Shock: The Wolf Man

Well, even though this is one of the A-listers, I watched it for two reasons:  1) because it was on the list, and 2) because I've been watching Lon Chaney Jr movies and I needed to watch this before I commented on any of the future installments.

I love this film.  It's fun.  Set in Wales, where Lawrence Talbot, Chaney, comes back home from California with an American accent.  And gypsies.  With gypsy wagons.

Bela Lugosi plays one of these gypsies, one named Bela.  Yeah.  But he's killed shortly after showing up, giving the always haunting Maria Ouspenskya the voice of exposition.

Except nearly everyone in the village, the one where Talbot grew up in, knows the legend of the were-wolf and the poem about it:

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.

There's so many little quirks and contradictions in the story that it's inadvertently funny- up until the point where Talbot realizes he's cursed, and then Chaney gives this softly heartbreaking performance that's probably in the top four of the Universal horror movies.  It's a good show of a range that start with Lennie in 1939's Of Mice and Men.

BUT

Here's something I've been wrestling with since I started this project:  In other movies, seems to me Chaney is kind of lumpy, and I don't get him.  In Weird Woman, he's got women fighting over him.  In  The Pillow of Death, he's got a younger woman going against the wishes of family to be with him when he leaves his wife.  He's got it going on somehow.  And I'm totally missing it.

As Talbot, he rocks- in this and the subsequent movies in the series.  I'll deal with my thoughts on his portrayals of other characters as they occur. 

His sweetheart, Gwen, is played by Evelyn Ankers, who we last watched in Weird Woman.  Another face we'll come to recognize as project progressed will be Talbot's father, played by Claude Raines.

I think the thing I love most about this movie is how incredibly, amazing tightly the folklore from the movie made it's way into the idea of "real" werewolf folklore, despite the fact that Curtis Siodmak wrote it up. 

As much as I'm not looking forward to the Inner Sanctum movies, I'm eagerly looking forward to the subsequent movies.