“Gaze, if you will, dear reader, on the face of the real werewolf. His name is Edward Hyde.” - Stephen King, Danse Macabre
Stuart Walker’s Werewolf of London holds a historic place in horror history: the first werewolf movie. However, the picture fails to live up to its status, instead repeating and diluting the tropes of Rouben Mamoulian’s superior Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Once again, a scientist, obsessed with his studies and distant to his wife, suffers a curse that transforms him into a monster that stalks the streets of London. The similarities were not lost on the critical establishment of the day, as The New York Times noted “[Werewolf of London] goes…back to Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and permits Mr. Hull to be transformed…from a frock-coated botanist into a fanged apeman with homicidal tendencies.”
The film begins in Tibet, as Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) ignores local superstition and finds a “mariphasa” flower (Asia’s wolfsbane) in a forbidden valley. After an attack from a hairy assailant, he returns to London to study the bloom, and he learns that the flower’s sap can treat his werewolfism. Unfortunately, the elusive Tibetan assailant learns this as well, and the film becomes a race who will be cured and who will be damned.
Director Stuart Walker directed Werewolf of London for Universal in the wake of the studio’s first successful monster pictures (The Invisible Man, Dracula), and while his work is efficient (the film’s only seventy-five minutes long), his style and imagination remain fleeting. The opening in Tibet evokes an eerie displacement, recalling the imposing Romanian landscapes of Nosferatu, and the transformation and effects, headlined by Jack Pierce (makeup artist from Frankenstein) highlight the skillful monster makeup. A highlight (see pictures) involves Hull transforming via wipes disguised behind foregrounded pillars. Unfortunately, the majority of events take place as drawing-room conversations between Glendon, wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson, stalwart), and romantic foe Paul (Lester Matthews, upright).
The performance by Henry Hull as the dispassionate Glendon proves problematic. Lacking the sympathy granted to Fredrich March’s Jekyll, much less the puppy-dog sincerity of Chaney’s Talbot in The Wolf Man, Glendon walks stiffly, declares curtly, and fails to emphasize the tragedy. The drama from transformation stories depends on the disparity between opposing personalities, but Glendon’s natural state proves too neutral. He mutes the dynamic. To be fair, there’s some mild erotic intrigue, as Glendon’s lack of interest in his wife contrasts with his feral attacks on the looser women of London. Indeed, his impotency, emotional and otherwise, becomes clear when he forces a kiss upon Lisa halfway through the picture, trying to prove that their love is real, and, of course, it is not.
Even then, Hull’s performance lacks juice, and the sexual energy here can only echo Mamoulian’s animalistic predator, who still feels transgressive and boundless. Even now, there are few scenes in horror as potent and lustful as the moment when Hyde gazes upon the naked back of Ivy. For much of history, Werewolf of London remained little-known, a stop-gap for horror connoisseurs between more significant fare. While it’s not a bad picture, perhaps we’re just as well ignoring it. Werewolf of London may offer some interest to genre completists, but, even then, the appeal is small, as are the rewards.
RATING: C+
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