Werewolf of London (1935)
Directed by Stuart Walker

Film Review

With their first sound horror films Dracula and Frankenstein proving to be major box office hits in 1931, Universal Pictures wasted no time following these up with similar Gothic-style monster movies, securing a healthy income stream at a time when all of the Hollywood studios were fighting for their lives.  The Mummy came along in 1932, followed by The Invisible Man one year later.  The next gruesome ghoul in this illustrious line-up was the wolf man, although, unlike Universal's previous nasties, his first screen outing was not at all well-received.  

Werewolf of London is little more than a thinly veiled reworking of R.L. Stevenson's story The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  This would not have been a problem were it not for the fact that Paramount had, just a few years previously, made a prestige screen adaptation of Stevenson's novella, with Fredric March unleashing his inner beast to great effect.  Critics and audiences were quick to write-off Universal's werewolf film as just an inferior version of Paramount's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the film was inevitably a flop.

Despite this failure, Universal still saw some mileage in the werewolf idea and brought him back in their 1941 film The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. suffering from an acute case of lycanthrope, aided and abetted by Claude Rains.  This film was a hit and was followed by several popular sequels, including some improbable link-ups with other Universal monster stalwarts and comedy duo Abbott and Costello. 

Judged on its own merits, and with a sufficient quantity of strong liquor in your bloodstream, Werewolf of London is not a bad monster romp.  Whilst it may lack the stylistic brilliance of Universal's previous Gothic horror films, the story is well-structured and well-paced, the werewolf is convincingly realised (another achievement for Universal's makeup maestro Jack Pierce) and the sets and camerawork convey a mood of menace and inescapable doom.  The film is not a classic but it still has much to commend it. 

On the downside, Henry Hull makes an unsympathetic hero, showing little of the heart-wrenching pathos that would mark Chaney's portrayal in The Wolf Man.   Also, some of the comic excursions (such as the sequences with the drunken old crones, who look disturbingly like a Monty Python tribute act) appear out of place and weaken the drama at a crucial point in the narrative (i.e. just when things start to get scary).

Stuart Walker's directorial contribution is workmanlike but not particularly inspired, although this is partly compensated by Charles J. Stumar's atmospheric cinematography.   The respectable principal cast includes Warner Oland, the Swedish character actor who was well-known to cinema audiences at the time for his portrayal of Charlie Chan in a long series of films made by Twentieth Century Fox in the 1930s.
 
Completely overshadowed by Universal's subsequent Wolf Man  films, Werewolf of London has been consistently overlooked, even by aficionados of the horror genre.  No one in his right mind would ever rank this alongside Universal's great Gothic horror classics, yet the film has a quirky off-the-wall charm that easily makes up for its lack of genuine horror thrills.

Film Synopsis

The renowned English botanist Wilfred Glendon travels to Tibet in search of a rare plant, the mariphasa lupina lumina, which is reputed to blossom only in moonlight.  In the course of his expedition, Glendon is attacked and bitten by a werewolf.  Having survived the attack, the botanist discovers the elusive plant and returns to England.  Whilst his wife Lisa is hosting a party at their London home, Glendon receives an unwelcome visit from a strange Oriental, Dr Yogami, who insists on seeing the mariphasa specimen.  Yogami reveals that the plant is the only antidote to lycanthrophobia, an illness that causes men to transmute into werewolves whenever there is a full moon.  Glendon politely refuses to accede to his visitor's request and resumes his attempts to stimulate the plant with artificial moonlight.  In the course of the experiment, Glendon begins to change into a werewolf.   He manages to halt and reverse the transformation with a flower from his mariphasa plant.  The next time, he is less fortunate.   As he becomes a werewolf for the second time, Glendon notices that the remaining flowers have disappeared, stolen by Yogami.   Without the antidote, the botanist cannot prevent himself from turning into a savage homicidal half-man, half-wolf creature.   His one thought is to kill, and so he goes out into the streets of London, intent on finding his first victim...