Werewolf Of London

Mariphasas Set To Stun

Werewolf Of London
USA 1935 Directed by Stuart Walker
Universal  Blu Ray Zone B

Continuing my re-watch of classic Universal Monster movies for my blog, I finally catch up to another of my favourites, Werewolf Of London.

Six years before they hit on a werewolf franchise that was a success for them, with the Lon Chaney Jr picture The Wolfman (which I reviewed along with its remake here), Universal attempted to jump start a werewolf franchise with this wonderful gem, Werewolf Of London. Alas, it was nowhere near as successful as their previous five monster movies... Dracula (reviewed here), Frankenstein (reviewed here), The Mummy (reviewed here), The Invisible Man (reviewed here) and Bride Of Frankenstein (reviewed here). It is one of the ones which is well worth a watch, though... and there are a number of reasons for this.

Number one being that this, like The Wolfman which came after it, pretty much reinvented the modern concept of legends surrounding the werewolf and influenced all that follow in much the same way that Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead helped refashion the zombie movie years later. So things like the titular creature changing at moonlight, which is essential to the plot in this one as the main protagonist/antagonist, Dr. Wilfred Glendon as played by Henry Hull, is involved in experiments with creating artificial moonlight which, in turn, brings him into contact with the other lycanthrope, Dr. Yogami, at the opening of the movie.

Another thing this film sorts out for future generations is the idea that werewolvery can be passed through a bite, such as an infection may pass from person to person. Both these elements were, of course, retained for The Wolfman in 1941 although, curiously, there is no shot of the moon in The Wolfman at all. Also, presumably due to a mixture of limitations of the makeup and perhaps the end result not looking scary enough, this might well have been (according to the IMDB, so take this one with a pinch of salt) the first werewolf tale to depict a man/wolf hybrid creature rather than a straight transformation into a wolf (such as Dracula might utilise).

Six years later and The Wolfman would add elements such as the now cinematically forgotten, it seems, idea of a werewolf seeing a pentagram on the palm of the hand of the next person to be his or her victim. It also added the idea that silver in the form of a weapon such as bullets or, in The Wolfman, the silver head of a cane, can be used to kill a werewolf. This last is an element definitely not set in place by Universal here yet as the titular character has as much to fear from the common lead bullet as any other projectile or weapon in the film.

What Werewolf Of London does have in its freshly created set of rules, which certainly didn’t travel to later productions, was the idea that a rare flower that grows only in Tibet and which only blooms in the moonlight can, when an infected human pricks himself with a fresh thorn, fend off the transformation for one night when the moon is full.

This flower is called the Mariphasa Lupina Lumina and it’s the very reason why Dr. Glendon finds himself in Tibet in the first place... so he can get a sample to bring home with him and prove to himself (and the scientific community at some point in the future) that his new invention is working. And it’s in Tibet that the movie starts.

That is to say... it’s in Tibet where the opening of the movie is supposed to take place. Anybody who loves the old, classic Star Trek show or even the Bill And Ted movies will tell you, of course, that the Tibet depicted here looks remarkably like the Vasquez rocks, famed for their appearance in the Star Trek episode Arena. There’s a wonderful dialogue moment near the start when Glendon is warned by a Tibetan wise man thusly... “You are foolish... but without fools there would be no wisdom”. It almost sounds like something Charlie Chan might say, talking of which...

It’s here in ‘Tibet’ that Dr. Yogami, played by Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu luminary Warner Oland, bites Glendon and curses him with the same affliction as himself. Not speaking in aphorisms... werewolvery. An affliction which causes Yogami to follow Glendon back to London and steal his samples of the Mariphasa Lupina Lumina to stunt his own, hairy murder sprees. Now it’s down to Glendon to try and resist the pull of the moon and stop himself from murdering the one he loves most, which in this case takes the form of his very young wife played by Bride Of Frankenstein’s Valeria Hobson.

In the case of Hull, this was one of the world famous and much in demand stage actor’s big attempts to break into movies... alas, he never did get much of a hold with cinema audiences and, when this was shot, he was 45 years old. Valerie Hobson was only 19 years still and was already playing the wife of 35 year old Colin Clive the same year in Bride Of Frankenstein. In these days of Twitter that’s seen as a big age gap but in those days, when love conquered all, well... what’s a few years between lovers?

A couple of other things worth watching this for... besides the fact that it’s completely entertaining... would be the transition scenes, one of which is both an eye opener and a disappointment at the same time.

There’s a wonderful moment at the end of the Tibetan sequence, where Henry Hull has been fighting the Dr. Yogami incarnation of a werewolf and he’s beaten it off but he’s been bitten on the arm and, for a 1930s movie, there’s quite a lot of visible blood (when you’d expect to see none). As we see a close up of his bloodied arm reaching out for the flower he came for, we transition to the same arm, scarred but not bloody, reaching out for the same flower in his laboratory in London... which is nice stuff.

Now the other transition which I was primarily thinking of is the first time we see Hull transform into a wolfman. These sequences are not nearly done as well as the later ones in The Wolfman even but the first of these is interesting because it’s using what I can only refer to as a travelling matte. Remember, this is 1935 and it may be my own ignorance but I didn’t think they were as adept in those days as we are now at this kind of thing. This involves Hull walking along in mid shot from left to right with the camera moving along with him. However, he passes three columns in the foreground of the shot and, of course, each time he reappears from the right hand side of a column, he has fuller werewolf transformation makeup on his face, courtesy of Jack Pierce. Okay, so it’s clumsy in concept but the moving camera and everything else must surely have made it a stand out shot of it’s era, I suspect.

The other big pull for me in this movie, asides from the wonderful comic relief of the two old landladies in the local pub, Mrs. Moncaster (Zeffie Tilbury) and Mrs. Whack (Ethel Griffies), who each punch the other into unconsciousness when the mood takes them... is the soundtrack by Karl Hajos. It’s never been released commercially, more's the pity, but the whole score was pretty much recycled for the first of the three big budget Universal Flash Gordon serials the following year (with the second and third serials using a lot of the Bride Of Frankenstein score in their musical DNA). And it’s grand hearing anything with this music playing alongside the on screen action... this is just brilliant stuff.

And there you have it. A werewolf movie with a, it has to be said, fairly emotionless actor in the title role but which has a monster who actually welcomes death, wears a flat cap and apologises at the end. It’s not for everyone but Werewolf Of London is certainly my all time favourite werewolf movie and it’s always something I’d recommend to fellow cinema enthusiasts. An essential piece of classic monster cinema, despite the lack of extras on even the latest Blu Ray release.

Bride Of Frankenstein

Harbinger Of Groom

Bride Of Frankenstein
USA 1935 Directed by James Whale
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Time to revisit one of the great classics finally on Blu Ray.

You know, whenever I watch Bride Of Frankenstein (also known as The Bride Of Frankenstein on most posters but without the 'definite article' on the actual title card of the movie), I always think that this is my favourite of the Universal Frankenstein movies. Then, whenever I watch the next sequel, Son Of Frankenstein, I always think that is. It’s a thin line because they both have a very different atmosphere to them but, for now, I’lll say just on the strength of the blindingly cool score, I’ll have to go with Bride Of Frankenstein as the best of these Universal Monster Classics. Well... until I get around to rewatching and reviewing the next one in the sequence, at any rate.

After a cast list which bills, like the end credits, the titular character of The Bride as being played by ‘?’ (much like Karloff in the original, to preserve the mystery) we get a camera moving in to an establishing shot via a model building where we get a quite wonderful (and heavily pre-cut due to sexual implications of both a verbal and visual nature), prologue featuring Lord Byron, Percy Shelley
and, of course, the character of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote the original novel Frankenstein and who is played here by the ‘button cute’ Elsa Lanchester. It is for this role, relatively near the top of the cast list, that Lanchester is credited for, as opposed to her iconic dual role as the Bride Of Frankenstein. Also, since her first character is only on screen for five minutes at the start and her classic monster character only for about five minutes (without bandages) at the end, I think many audience members probably don’t put two and two together in regards to this fact the first time they see it... especially since the make-up is quite different.

Towards the end of the prologue is a montage of scenes from the first film (where Franz Waxman’s amazing score really drives the edits together as a unified whole and which, if memory serves, might even include alternate or unused snippets from Whale’s previous Frankenstein movie too) and then Mary is coaxed into telling Byron and Shelley the rest of the ‘continuing story’ (despite the fact that a tombstone in the film has a death date many decades after Mary died in real life).

And the rest of the film is half some unused parts from the original Frankenstein novel dressed up in new clothes (the book does, indeed, deal with the creation of a ‘bride’ too), along with the usual Hollywood nonsense, some successful and some not so, which can be completely credited to director James Whale who, at this time in his career at least, had complete control of the film.

It’s an interesting film and uses some great lighting effects too (if you watch the films of Ridley Scott, there’s a certain kind of lighting he uses in a lot of his movies... the name of which escapes me... and certain scenes like the interiors of Baron Frankenstein’s home use the same effect) and there’s also the odd hint of German Expressionism again which grows organically from the sets... not as much as it would become a dominating factor as it does in Son Of Frankenstein, perhaps but... it’s definitely in here.

There’s some wonderful acting in this one. Much to Boris Karloff’s dismay, the monster learns to talk this time around, due to his investigation of the siren call of the violin played by an old, blind hermit (played by O.P. Heggie) who befriends him and teaches him rudimentary speaking skills... as well as teaching him how to smoke (can never quite work out how that’s ‘a thing’ to teach anyone but what do I know?). Karloff is absolutely electric in these scenes though, never once going into comedy mode although, you can tell that certain elements of Fred Gwynne's Herman Munster must have come from studying his performance in this film.

Then there’s the somewhat campy Ernest Thesiger playing the equally campy Doctor Pretorious, helping to push the less than hidden ‘gay subtext’ of the movie, which would quite possibly have gone over many of its audiences’ heads at the time. Alas, he also dominates in the one scene which seems completely out of place in the film, where he shows Frankenstein the collection of miniature people he’s grown in bottles. This is the one scene in the movie I almost can’t bear to look at because it’s so off kilter with the rest of the film (but at least Waxman’s music is appropriate... it’s also out of place with the rest of the score in this scene). In fact, going to skip quickly over the memory of this sequence now, thanks.

One of Whale’s favourite ‘doom laden comedy hystrionics’ actresses, Una O' Connor, who had provided similar laughs in the director’s The Invisible Man (reviewed here) also has lots of screaming to do, along with such dialogue nuggets as, when talking about the probable burning of the Frankenstein monster under the mill (wrecked at the climax of the last film)... “Insides is always the last to be consumed”. She also gets the first of the ‘He’s alive!’ lines when talking about the ‘presumed dead’ character of Henry Frankenstein, who has been removed to his and his fiance’s home, in relation to when he first moves his arm and indicates he’s alive. Of course, this completely contradicts the happy ending added on to the film at the end of the last one against Whale’s wishes but, I guess he was happy to ignore it here. Frankenstein is once again played by Colin Clive (two years before his alcoholism fuelled death at the age of 37) but his fiance is played by the then 17 year old Valerie Hobson, who really gives her all in the role.

And, though he had already been killed by Karloff in the last one, we have wonderful character actor Dwight Frye returning as a very similar character called Glutz. It’s always good to see Frye in any Universal movie, to be honest. Even a young John Carradine turns up briefly as a woodsman, foreshadowing his involvement, perhaps, with The Mummy films and also his turns as Dracula for the studio in two of the Frankenstein sequels.

The film was quite heavily trimmed before general release for scenes of religious inappropriateness and sexuality (such as cutting out various sequences which included close ups of Mary Shelley’s cleavage in the prologue and, originally, in an epilogue which also didn’t make it into the final cut) and... I just wish the footage had survived today. Even now, where the script had been censored, you can see where Whale ‘got away with it’ in certain scenes. There’s a great line by Dr. Pretorius where he tells Henry...

“Leave the charnel house and follow the lead of nature... or of God, if you like your bible stories”.

This second part of the line is said with great sarcasm and it’s pretty apparent what Whale’s stance on religion is. What I’d forgotten until rewatching the documentary which has been ported over from some of the DVD releases onto the new Blu Ray, is that the original line before the censors got a hold of it finished... “... or of God, if you like your fairy tales.” It doesn’t really matter though because Thesgiger’s line reading leaves you in absolutely no doubt of his religious standing.

And then there’s the music by composer Franz Waxman. This is what I was always drawn to with this movie, not because of its brilliance here but because I was familiar with it from the many times it was recycled by Universal into other things, like many of their serials. I first heard this score in the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials and, whenever I would go out into the back garden and play at being one of these two iconic heroes, I would be constantly whistling the score from Bride Of Frankenstein as I played, even though I didn’t know that at the time. It’s very much in the leitmotif style which was becoming increasingly popular in Hollywood and it’s just wonderful. LaLaLand Records managed to resurrect and restore the long thought lost master tapes of the majority of this score last year for a limited edition CD release, which sounds surprisingly great for the age of the recording. You can still, at time of writing, purchase a copy from them in the US here. It’s not only been used in numerous Universal films and serials contemporary to this, it’s also been used in terms of film referencing over the years... perhaps the most blatant being the use of the ‘creation’ music in a parody sequence in Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers. If you’ve never heard it before, well... it’s just wonderful. What I hadnt noticed before is the moment in the opening credits where it says it’s conducted by Bakaleinikoff, who did a number of scores such as those for Val Lewton, whose ‘antidote’ to Universal Horror’ movies for RKO are also very much respected.

And there you have it. Bride Of Frankenstein is one of those rare movies where the sequel actually is superior to the original work... in this case by the same director. And I say that with all due respect to Frankenstein (reviewed by me here) which is a truly great movie too. Definitely this and the two Frankenstein films either side of it are required viewing for all those in love with the art of cinema. And very entertaining they are too. Give them a watch.