SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN THE 1930s - I'D LIKE TO MEET HIS TAILOR

Watching 1935's Werewolf of London 80 years later is taking a peek into a history that never was. The first feature-length werewolf movie in English (and probably the first in all of sound cinema, though it does well to be a bit cagey with absolute pronouncements on the history of genre films) was one of Universal's more distinct misses during its 1930s heyday, and killed the first attempt at werewolves as a sustained movie monster in its crib. Six years later, the studio would start from scratch with The Wolf Man, doing a great deal in the process to solidify what we now think of as werewolf lore, and most subsequent movies about werewolves have started with some variation of that movie as their foundation. As such, Werewolf of London can't help but look like an evolutionary dead end. It's entirely different from both narrative and mythological standpoints, and the only one of its conceits to have meaningfully survived is makeup artist Jack Pierce's creature design. Though his first werewolf was far less complex and impressive than his second, it was in Werewolf of London that he hit upon the largely original idea of the werewolf as a human hybrid who more closely resembles a giant bipedal Pekingese than anything an objective third party might identify as lupine (classical folklore till that point almost entirely conceived of werewolves as all-humans turning into all-wolves). Elements of its story hung around the cultural subconscious - the 1994 Jack Nicholson vehicle Wolf resembles Werewolf of London much more than any of the better-known werewolf pictures in the intervening 59 years - but watching it now, the film is most noteworthy for how little it resembles any of the films descended from it.

In Tibet - do you see what I mean? Tibet. What werewolf movie starts in fucking Tibet? Do they even have werewolf lore in Tibet? Do they have any kind of wolves in Tibet? But in Tibet we are, alongside the brusque and peremptory Dr. Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull), an English botanist hunting for the legendary mariphasa lumina lupina (dog Latin for "man-changing wolf light") a plant that blooms in the moonlight. And he finds it, too, though only after being attacked by a large hairy animal we barely catch a glimpse of, only being able to make out that it has rather more of a human shape than one would expect of a wild creature. Literally bloody but unbowed, Glendon still has his eyes on the precious mariphasa, which he takes back with him to England in the space of a cut.

And back in England, we get a much better sense of Glendon's interest and personality than we had before, and the short version is "arrogant dick". He's so obsessed with his discovery that he can barely feign niceness to his wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson) or pretend to be happy about the party being held in his house, for which he is either the guest of honor or the host, it's a little fuzzy. What matters is that one of the guests at that party, apparently uninvited, is a Japanese botanist, Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland, a genuinely gifted actor whose talents are tough to appreciate in later days, given that almost his entire career was spent in yellowface), who confusingly claims to have met Glendon back in Tibet (hint, hint), and who quite unprompted goes on a little lecture about "lycanthrophobia", as the script laboriously terms it, and explains that the mariphasa is in fact an herbal retardant that staves off the transformation of a werewolf during the three days of the full moon. And would Glendon believe it, but Yogami happens to know of two men with the werewolf curse in London right that very minute (hint, hint).

Glendon first discovers the truth of Yogami's prattling when his synthetic full moon lamp, part of his experiment to force the mariphasa to bloom, turns his hand into a hairy, clawed monstrosity. And while he's able to use the single flower on the plant to return himself to normal, there are not other flowers at the ready, and the full moon is right around the corner. Thus begins the part of the film that actually resembles the subsequent development of the werewolf genre: Glendon's panicked attempt to cure himself or at least keep himself safely locked up, after he murders a woman the first night.

The single element of Werewolf of London that most likely killed it in 1935 happens to be the most interesting part of it now: Glendon is an unpleasant man, and Hull's performance makes it more so. The actor despised the role and the film, and his performance showcases that, but somehow it ends up working to the movie's overall benefit. The character is snappish and unsympathetic, but he also pops off the screen far more than most horror heroes of the '30s, and after so many years of sad, mopey sorts being terrified of themselves as they transform into beasts, it's bracing to encounter a character so direct and intelligent about dealing with this hideous curse. Particularly since wolf-Glendon is apparently more conscious and intelligent than the usual blunt force of animalistic nature. The very first thing he does is to go to find Lisa at a party hosted by her blustering Aunt Ettie (Spring Byington at her most enervating, and I say that as someone who's usually tickled to see Byington's name pop up in the credits), which she's attending in the company of her old flame Paul Ames (Lester Matthews). The film makes a point of clarifying that werewolves instinctively desire to destroy what they love most in human life, but there's enough meanness to Hull's Glendon that there's a little tension underlying his savagery, like he's almost eager, Hyde-style, to go do the wickedness that he can't as a moral man. And that, in turn, deepens his character arc throughout the slender but impressively dense 75-minute feature: the film tracks Glendon's commitment to besting his smug, nasty self, not just taming the animal within. Lon Chaney, Jr's Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man is the best part he ever played, but there just aren't as many layers there, even if he's infinitely more readily likable and pitiable than the prickly Glendon.

That makes for quite a lot to find fascinating in Werewolf of London, though not, perhaps, as much to love. And it is, in fairness, a bit difficult to respond to as a genre film, by '35 standards or our own. Individual moments work beautifully: the moment when Glendon's cat unexpectedly turns on him and leads him to the knowledge that something inside of him is broken, or one of those newspaper headline montages that turns into a bleak projection of what Glendon thinks might happen in the future, or above all, the film's utterly terrific transformation scene, with Glendon looking a bit shaggier every time he walks past one in a series of tall pillars, none of this "freeze frame and dissolve" nonsense. It's quite honestly the best werewolf transformation scene I can name prior to the watershed year of 1981, when The Howling and An American Werewolf in London both showed up.

In between those singularly great moments, though, the film's something of a drag: the exposition, however necessary to a 1935 audience with limited context for werewolves, is dumped in artlessly, and Oland can't ever find a path to make it feel sensible within a character who's already compromised by how transparently he's there for the eminently predictable twist ending. The whole matter of Lisa and Paul Ames's gentle flirtation is out-of-placed, stuffed in just to add a romantic lead, since Hull clearly can't be one. And the film is wretched with comic relief, above and beyond the standards of '30s horror - there's some business with two drunk old ladies that only takes up maybe five minutes, tops, but also manages to never, ever end.

If I had to sum it all up, it would be by saying that director Stuart Walker is no James Whale, and cinematographer Charles Stumar is no Karl Freund. The film has limited style and absolutely no successful management of tone: John Colton's screenplay mixes lightness and horror and pathos well enough, but the movie itself mashes them all into one unpersuasive flatness. It's a movie that feels cheap, even though by the onscreen evidence, that couldn't have been the case; but there's no atmosphere at all. The cast does what they can to keep the drama steady (absent the comic side characters), and the werewolf is different enough from anything we're familiar with, both visually and in his obvious intelligence, that he's always a bit unnerving and threatening. But for all that I honestly do admire the film's strengths, I will not pretend that it's one of Universal's strongest horror films of the '30s - it is average at best - nor does it offer more, really, than an intermittently captivating snapshot of the road not taken towards a more scientific and urbane werewolf genre than the one we ultimately got.

Body Count: 4, though only half of that number are innocent victims.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1994: In which the attempt to make genre filmmaking more prestigious has mixed results

The first half of the 1990s were the worst time ever to be a fan of horror. Even the stretches of time where horror films weren't being made were better, since even the least the absence of horror is preferable to the virtually uninterrupted stream of shit that was North American genre filmmaking in the era between the death of the slashers and the birth of ironic, knowingly bad meta-horror. The Italian exploitation film industry was dying off around the same time, the Japanese horror renaissance was still waiting in the wings, and while there were occasional great horror films, they are vividly notable for their isolation.

Perhaps because of this vacuum, and perhaps owing solely to an accident of history, the same period bore witness to a compact but highly visible run of classy, literary horror films, more interested in dramatic integrity, filmmaking style, and costume film trappings. The first was Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, in 1992, whose success was the obvious inspiration for Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein two years later; I'm not certain if it's accurate to say that it specifically led to the release, also in 1994, of Wolf, or in 1996, of Mary Reilly (the latter a tony variant on Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde), but it certainly smoothed the path for adult dramas with horror elements that are too damn-ass tasteful to really deserve the name "horror".

The outlier among these, and maybe the best (I admire many of the artistic impulses behind BS Dracula, but there's far too much going abysmally wrong for me to seriously consider calling it a good movie), is Wolf; the only one without a literary antecedent, the only one set in contemporary times, and, importantly, the only one that didn't actually belong in the 1990s at all. In fact, it had been stuck in development hell for over a decade by the time it saw the light of day, having originated in the aftermath of the two big werewolf hits of 1981, An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. It is my speculation and nothing else that, when Columbia saw how much Coppola had been able to make for them by doing a glamorous riff on Universal's old monster movies, they leaped at the first grown-up werewolf picture that came along, and that happened to be the Jim Harrison/Wesley Strick script that Jack Nicholson had been infatuated with for years.

Wolf is so goddamn aloof about genre that it never once in two hours even goes so far as to use the world "werewolf" (the writers go to some pains to avoid any lines of dialogue where the absence of that word would become obvious). But that's absolutely what it is: one night, Will Randall (Nicholson), the editor-in-chief of some mid-level New York publishing firm, hits a wolf with his care as he drives from the country back into the city. The animal opens its uncommonly intelligent eyes just as Will gets down to see if it's alive, and bites his hand. This has the immediate effect of giving the saggy old pushover a new lease on life: instead of silently taking it as he's pushed to a bullshit job by Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), the billionaire taking over the publishing company, he launches a crafty, brutal plan to not only keep his position but significantly expand his powers. His vision is improved, his hearing and smell have gone far beyond human norms, and his libido is insatiable, to the tremendous delight of his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan), though since she's already been having an affair with Will's protégé and replacement, Stewart Swinton (James Spader), this doesn't go terribly well for her, not when her husband can literally smell her lover on her skin. But with his new vitality and increasingly youthful pallor, Will switches right over to Alden's rebellious, caustic adult daughter Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer).

All that is the more immediate effect. The longer-term effect involves Will's tendency to grow hair on his face when he sleeps, and to wake up covered in blood and no memories. When he's lucky, it comes from a deer. When he's not lucky, he hears about it on the news the next day. His consultations with folklorist Dr. Vijay Alezais (Om Puri) confirm his suspicions, and give him a ticking time bomb: his condition will set in permanently at the next full moon, and he will be in wolf form forever, unless, he keeps an amulet next to his skin at all times. But during his jealous rage, Will happened to bite Swinton, and the other man is far too self-aggrandising and awful to be a morally-centered, guilt-ridden wolfman like Will, which will make the latter man's attempts at keeping himself human much, much harder.

The very noticeable thing about Wolf is that it cleaves into two almost equally-sized halves: The Wolf Is a Metaphor, and No, the Wolf Is an Actual Wolf. The former is infinitely preferable, for the simple reason that everybody involved in making the film is clearly happier to be making it. But especially, I think, director Mike Nichols, whose best work occupies exactly the sweet spot that drives the first half: sardonic comedy and satire of the lies and social politics between individual humans. Nothing else he ever made hints at even the most glancing interest in making a monster movie, and Wolf is a very dispirited one: everything that's interesting is interesting solely at the level of the writing (the film's idiosyncratic werewolf lore is interesting enough to cover many other sins) and the acting. But the staging of the big werewolf fight climax is lazy and disengaged, with no sense of drama no matter how urgently Ennio Morricone's appallingly bland score tries to promise that it's all very exciting and tense. And the most openly horror-oriented moments - Will's confrontation with a gang of thugs one night (which triggers a latter response scene involving one of the most tone-deaf examples of white filmmakers trying to aplogise for any possible racial misrepresentation in the whole of the 1990s), the run-up to the final fight - are among its most unconvincing and sloppy.

Far better when the film operates on a purely metaphorical level: what would it mean for a man to be a wolf in New York's professional world? The film's answer to that question is surprisingly slick and clever, aided by what may very well be Jack Nicholson's single best performance of the 1990s*: in a role seemingly tailor-made for Jack Doing a Jack, with the flourishes and elaborate nonsense that entails, he's astoundingly tamped-down. There's coolness and predatory calculation behind his eyes that he virtually never lets loose. It's not merely a strong performance of the part as such, it gains intensity from our awareness of how much energy Nicholson isn't emitting, which then seems to be all caught up inside. There are other strong performances, and as the other main characters, Pfeiffer and Spader are in excellent form playing their stock roles (the outspoken woman in charge of her sexuality, and the conniving yuppie monster), but that's simply not as impressive as Nicholson breaking his persona in such consistent, interesting ways.

The performances provide a suitable foundation for an enjoyably smart, cynical thriller on office power plays, and the emphatically '90s form in which that takes place. Will openly and explicitly feels out of his time, and is convinced that the world is going to hell all around him; the glossy tech-focused world is one that he feels helpless in, until he is suddenly able to master it by becoming a devouring carnivore. It's a fine little fable of business world mores that has the gross misfortune to turn into a horror film at a time when nobody quite knew what horror was, and the people making the satiric thriller clearly thought themselves above it, regardless. The actors survive the shift well (in fact, it's only once the film starts to delve into horror tropes that Pfeiffer's really able to make sense of her weirdly-motivated character), but nothing else does: not the tone, not the wit, not the elegance of the filmmaking. I don't know, exactly, whether to call it a film that almost works or a film that almost fails, because it's balanced perfectly on that razor's edge; it is, though, a film that definitely grows increasingly frustrating as it moves on, and nobody ever wants that.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1994
-Disney puts a bizarre spin on the holidays with the sitcommy The Santa Clause
-Robert Zemeckis's sprawling portrait of Americana Forrest Gump is rewarded is, to date, the last character drama to win the annual box office
-The old "violence in art" debate hits new heights of panic and outrage over Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1994
-Jackie Chan stars in Drunken Master II, the most beloved of his mid-period films
-The sweet and surprisingly delicate drag queen comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a watershed moment in the fortunes of Australian commercial cinema
-The future cult comedy Andaz Apna Apna is released in India

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