Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) has just returned from Tibet, having successfully retrieved a sample of the phosphorescent moon flower. While secluding himself in his laboratory in an attempt to replicate the moonlight that makes the flower grow, Dr. Glendon is keeping a dangerous secret from his estranged wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson). In Tibet, Glendon was mauled by a mysterious wolf-like creature, and old acquaintance Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland) believes Glendon was bitten by a werewolf – a bite that will cause Glendon to mutate and murder that which he loves most.
We can speculate all day about why it was that Chaney’s Wolf Man became the third cornerstone of the Universal Monsters trinity (with Karloff’s Frankenstein and Lugosi’s Dracula) while Hull’s didn’t. Perhaps the standout feature for me came in discovering that there is very little sympathetic about Glendon, even before he mutates into a werewolf; he is neglectful of his wife, suspicious of her only friend in the film, and utterly consumed by his work. Yet where Colin Clive elicited some degree of sympathy as Henry Frankenstein, addicted to his scientific endeavors, Hull is entirely heartless and downright antisocial in his monomaniacal pursuit of the “mariphasa” flower.
That’s not to say, however, that Hull isn’t eminently watchable. Indeed, as a sneering cad, he gives a delightful character performance that leads me to wish we had seen more of him in the Universal Monsters canon. I feel similarly about Jack Pierce’s makeup effects; all too often, makeup artists were the unsung heroes of monster films, and Pierce’s work transforming Hull into a werewolf – recognizable as both man and wolf simultaneously – is the actual scene-stealer in the film. Under the slightly minimalist makeup, Hull gets to snarl and skulk his way through the film in a performance that practically screams how much fun he’s having.
In watching Werewolf of London, I was struck by how the film seems to anticipate the morality play aspects of later slasher films. We all know that when teen campers get handsy in their tents, the serial killer is most likely to strike, subtextually communicating the value of chastity to the audience. Werewolf of London, too, plays the same game; in one memorable sequence set in a zoo, Glendon’s victims discuss their intent to commit adultery without any subtlety. “I hadn’t ought to do this,” the man says, “me with a wife and kids.” His mistress replies, “But you don’t love your wife and your kids. You love me!” It’s so on the nose that a neon sign practically announces their imminent mortality, a delightfully unsubtle beat that reminds us how simple – or rather, how willfully uncomplicated – classic films could be. As much as we might love the Monsters, these films often take pains to show that good people (and usually, happily married ones) will always prevail.
Perhaps what Werewolf of London needed, then, is a clearer positioning of Glendon as the film’s antagonist. Instead, the film includes Dr. Yogami as his adversary, particularly in the pursuit of the mariphasa. Dr. Yogami is, in a sense, the elephant in the room, because it’s Warner Oland continuing to do his Charlie Chan routine, albeit as a villain this time. As retrospectively uneasy as Oland’s yellowface performance is, and over and against Oland’s own dubious claims to Mongolian ancestry, it can’t even be said to be in service of the character (as one might argue for Chan) because there’s no reason for Dr. Yogami to be Asian, aside from invoking “Yellow Peril” as shorthand for Yogami’s villainy. In fact, we know little about Dr. Yogami, how he came to need the mariphasa, or what he might do without it. He remains only an obstacle for Glendon to overcome, even though there might be an even more interesting story if Yogami were given any of the film’s attention.
Likewise, the film gets distracted from the much more interesting werewolf plotline by several subplots that never quite go anywhere. We’ve got Yogami, yes, but the film also pays a good amount of attention to a will-they/won’t-they between Glendon’s wife Lisa and her childhood friend, aviator Paul Ames (Lester Matthews). It’s interesting to watch the ways this plotline invokes Glendon’s ire and jealousy, but the film never pushes the relationship beyond what the Hays Code would allow. Moreover, the film ends with what is apparently Paul’s plane flying away from London – though why the film ends there is anyone’s guess. Elsewhere in the film, Glendon rents a room to isolate himself from his wife and thereby save her from his lycanthropic bloodthirst. Yet every time the film cuts away to Glendon, it first lingers with his landladies, two elderly drunkards who indulge in protracted bits of odd comedy that never quite lands. Maybe it’s the accents, maybe it’s the historical distance, but Mrs. Whack and Mrs. Moncaster are a far cry from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and I found myself begging for a full moon to clear them from the deck.
The lingering image I take from Werewolf of London, though, is its delightfully dapper werewolf, who makes certain to grab his coat and scarf before he goes on the prowl. No torn sleeves or muddy trousers for this beast – Glendon is a werewolf of class, and watching him carefully don his overcoat had me howling with delight. It’s this air of sophistication that makes him more Dracula than Frankenstein, proving that monsters with panache are just that much more intriguing. The furry beast that mauls Glendon in the first act is scary enough, but Glendon’s own refusal to lose his sophistication and humanity puts one very much in the mindset of Warren Zevon’s song of the same name. If only we’d gotten to see Glendon eat beef chow mein in the sequel!
Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, worlds collide when Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. For bonus werewolf shenanigans, Silly Sunday has Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange.
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