Deathmatch: "The Wolf Man" (1941) vs. "Werewolf of London" (1935)

History

Assistant producer Robert Harris had an idea. 4 years after 1931's "Daughter of the Dragon" which he barely got a listed credit for, there had to be a sales pitch he could sell to Universal in order to be hired. There had not been many movies about werewolves except for Universal's attempt at the indigenous legends in the 1913 silent "The Werewolf" which had gone up in flames during the 1924 East Coast Vault fire. Whether Harris may or may not have known about the Henry McRae silent, there was a decent chance that a lot of the popular myths of the Universal monster had been decided on either during his job interview or once screenwriter John Colton started writing the script.

What ended up becoming "Werewolf of London" built its legs on the made-up folklore that lycanthropy can be transmitted by a bite or scratch as well as the fact that a victim can involuntarily be transformed under the full moon. Before, many legends suggested a person could become a werewolf through being cursed or making a pact with the devil. But Colton wrote a solid screenplay and the heavy hitters of horror were immediately considered. But Bela Lugosi was in the middle of shooting "Mark of the Vampire" (1935) and Karloff was already scheduled to shoot "The Bride of Frankenstein" (1935). Thankfully, Harris was able to take from his "Daughter of the Dragon" cast and hired Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan himself. Warner Oland was hired to play the mysterious Dr. Yogami for $12,000 a week. Stage and film veteran Henry Hull would be cast as the Dr. Wilfred Glendon instead of Karloff and was reunited with his "Great Expectations" director Stuart Walker and makeup artist Jack Pierce. Hull ended up being paid $250 more than Karloff, who was making $2500 for the first Universal sequel.

Left: Preliminary Jack Pierce Makeup on Henry Hull
Right: Final Makeup for Hull by Jack Pierce

As a stage actor of the early 1900s, Hull was no stranger to applying his own makeup and had known Jack Pierce's work, considering it a little more outlandish for his tastes. "The makeup Pierce planned resembled his later "Wolf Man" design for Lon Chaney Jr. Henry felt, with such extreme makeup, the audience would not be able to make the connection of the doctor, as the werewolf. Pierce refused to alter his concept for the transformation. Since Henry felt strongly about this "Jekyll & Hyde" style performance, he met with Universal president, Carl Laemmle. A memo from Laemmle to Pierce confirmed the makeup was to be toned down. The "widow's peak" hairline was Hull's idea and gave the creature a more demonic look. Jack Pierce's pride was injured. The makeup artist did not want any photos taken of him making up Henry as the "Werewolf of London." (HENRY HULL AND JOSTEPHINE HuLL IT'S IN THE BLOOD!) Sound mixing also blended Hull's own howl with the sound of an actual timber wolf which was never used in any other werewolf movie since.

"Werewolf of London" premiered May 13th, 1935 at the Rialto Theater a week before it was demolished. Maybe it came out too soon after Rouben Mamoulian's explosive box office hit "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931) and "Werewolf" flopped at the box office. "In the vein of "The Invisible Man,"" wrote Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times, "the picture races along in its presentation of the tragic spectacle [...] Designed solely to amaze and horrify, the film goes about its task with commendable thoroughness, sparing no grisly detail and springing from scene to scene with even greater ease [...] Granting that the central idea has been used before, the picture still rates the attention of action-and-horror enthusiasts."

While Robert Florey was directing "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" (1932), he wrote a treatment entitled "The Wolf-Man." Barely influenced by the 1913 silent, this werewolf tale was about Kristoff who was stolen when he was young and suckled by a she-wolf in the Perollean Alps. When he grows up, Kristoff ends up becoming a werewolf. Florey had hoped Boris Karloff could star in the film, but pre-code Universal was concerned about the scene where Kristoff transforms while in a church confessional worrying that it would upset Catholics. The treatment was completely abandoned until Universal asked Curt Siodmak to write something completely new. According to Siodmak, "I was given the title and a deadline: seven weeks for the screenplay." ("The Wolf Man": Universal's King Beast - Force Fed Pollution)

Siodmak happily researched European werewolf myths that "Werewolf in London" had missed, also taking the opportunity to interjecting the psychological aspects of Freudian theory he was already learning for himself into his script. But his first draft, known as "The Larry Gill Script," was incredibly different than what ended up becoming Lon Chaney Jr.'s vehicle. Instead, the American Larry Gill comes to Wales to install Sir John's new telescope with no connections to the town or the people. This draft was much more psychological in never showing the transformations, but switching to a first person POV through the camera and seeing everything through his eyes.

What was originally titled "Destiny" began shooting on October 27, 1941 and wrapped November 25th of the same year. Jack Pierce was finally able to use his preliminary Hull makeup on the child of horror royalty, Lon Chaney Jr. "The [transformation] scene was shot with three separate cameras that were in a triangle pointed to Chaney. A head rest was placed behind Chaney to stabilize his head. In front of each of the cameras was a piece of frosted glass. For each scene, Pierce would put down makeup and then an artist would draw an outline of Chaney's head. After the cameras took their shot, Chaney would be allowed to move around while the crew adjusted. When they came back, the cameras would line up Chaney's head to match the outlines on the frosted glass, Pierce would make his adjustment, the cameras would take their shot and the outlines would be changed. This would go on until the entire sequence was filmed." But for all the effort in the transformation scenes and the early mornings, the actor and his makeup artist did not like one another that much.

Art director Robert Boyle created the forest scenes with trees and stumps found on Universal's back lot, which were painted black and coated with glycerin. "When they filmed different scenes, the crew would simply move the trees and stumps around and film from a different angle." But the fog was a problem all by itself, being a thick smelly substance that cast and crew found it difficult to breathe around. Evelyn Ankers had completely passed out when out of shot when they filmed the ending scenes.

"The Wolf Man" premiered December 9, 1941 in Los Angeles and opened across the United States three days later. The film critics were ruthless and unforgiving, but the numbers at the box office said differently raking in over a million even in the days following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "The Wolf Man is a compactly-knit tale of its own kind," Variety attempted diplomatically, "with good direction and performances by an above par assemblage of players, but dubious entertainment. [...] Young Chaney gives a competent performance both straight and under makeup for the dual role." T.S. from The New York Times was just as cynical. "Perhaps in deference to a Grade-B budget it has tried to make a little go a long way, and it has concealed most of that little in a deep layer of fog. And out of that fog, from time to time, Lon Chaney Jr. appears vaguely, bays hungrily, and skips back into mufti. Offhand, though we never did get a really good look, we'd say that most of the budget was spent on Mr. Chaney's face, which is rather terrifying, resembling as it does a sort of Mr. Hyde badly in need of a shave."

"Whoever is bitten by a werewolf and lives becomes a werewolf... Instinctively seek [ing] to kill the thing he loves best"

"Werewolf of London" begins in Tibet, where botanist Wilfred Glendon is attacked while on the hunt for the mariphasa plant. Thankfully, he gets his specimen, but he does get scratched during the scuffle. He encounters another botanist Dr. Yogami once back in London who tells Glendon they have met before while in Tibet. Yogami warns him that his scratch has been caused by a werewolf and that Wilfred will end up becoming one too. Thankfully the mariphasa is a temporary antidote, but the English botanist does not believe him until he almost transforms himself, but applies the mariphasa which also seems to bloom only by moonlight. Later that same night, Wilfred fully transitions and assaults his wife's socialite aunt while trying to find his wife, but comes back to his laboratory to discover all of the growing blossoms gone and one not fully blossomed.

The next full moon, Wilfred kills an innocent woman in the zoo. Wracked with guilt and scared of losing his wife to her childhood sweetheart, he rents a room in an inn and locks himself in. Once wolfed out, he escapes and kills while in his laboratory, the third mariphasa blossom finally blooms. Glendon catches Yogami in the act of stealing the blossom and wolfs out again, set on killing the doctor, but the creature is far more focused on "seek [ing] to kill the thing it loves best."

Lawrence Talbot comes back to his home country of Wales to his estranged father after discovering his brother had died. He immediately becomes enamored with a girl (Evelyn Ankers) who works in her father's antique shop and somehow manages to buy a walking stick with a silver wolf on its head although with designs on flirting with her. Larry manages to convince Gwen to come with him to get their fortune told by the Romany who entered the town that day. Gwen invites a friend to come with her instead and who ends up being killed by a Romany werewolf (Bela Lugosi), but Larry tries to intervene but gets scratched before killing Bela the Gypsy. Bela's mother warns Larry that he too will turn into a werewolf while the law enforcement have lesser supernatural suspicions that he simply killed a human.  

Talbot tragically transforms, but doesn't remember anything of the night before. He continues to be wracked with guilt of slowly reemerging memories while everyone around him suspects his sanity. His father, Sir John (Claude Rains) even goes to the lengths of tying him to a chair while the police are looking for who is supposed to be the guilty party, but Larry wolfs out and escapes into the forest. There he finds Gwen and attacks her until his own silver walking stick bludgeons him by the hands of his own father. 

Deathmatch Round

Both movies signify their respective decades perfectly. "Werewolf of London" follows in the vein of earlier Universal films like "Frankenstein" (1931) in the lengths men go in the name of science versus faith and wanting to know more about the scientific world of what makes life, life and death, death. Wilfred Glendon is a victim to this like Henry Frankenstein and even Doctor van Helsing in "Dracula" (1931) and pays for it, making the transformation into a werewolf heartbreaking and yet painfully self aware all at the same time. "Thanks... Thanks for the bullet" Glendon is able to speak as the werewolf melts away from his body, "It was the only way... In a few moments now... I shall know why all this had to be." It's a far more purposeful werewolf story against the fine outlandish Greek tragedy that is 1941's "The Wolf Man" where Larry Talbot just tumbles in on the werewolf legend and simply rides along with it.

"The Wolf Man" is also a product of its time in a far more accidental vein paralleling the sequence of events that brought America into the great mess that was World War 2. It's also very much a "monster movie" versus the first Universal wave that was unconsciously affected by the reacting or coinciding with immigrants both in front and behind the camera. The "monster movie" as a genre only had 2 goals in mind. Seat-filling and box office. It doesn't matter how paper thin the quality which explains Larry Talbot tumbling in onto the situation scene after scene without a lot of character development except for his reacting to inner torment. But Lon Chaney Jr.'s ability to draw the audience in is truly a feat alongside the talents of his costar the great Claude Rains. The script does suffer from splotches of previous drafts, the telescope scene out of the complete blue, it is very much a character-driven movie than a fantastic plot like "Werewolf of London" which never quite gets the suffocating Browning/Freund post-Weimar treatment "Werewolf" truly deserved.

Essentially, it's a toss-up, but Jack Pierce's work on "Werewolf of London" is mountains better and creepier.

Links to Check Out
AND YOU CALL YOURSELF A SCIENTIST! - Werewolf of London (1935)