The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)

Happy Halloween, ghouls and freaks. This year, we have a seasonally appropriate Universal monster classic. I couldn't be happier that this blog's movie choice roulette landed on The Wolf Man on such an auspicious date. In addition to kicking off Halloween weekend, yesterday was also drizzly and overcast, which fit the film's Gothic, fog-drenched atmosphere to a tee, and I made a big pot of turkey chili for the occasion. It was a solid day-before-Halloween night. (Turkey Chili and the Wolf Man would be great nicknames for a couple of rowdy bikers, by the way. "Brothers, Turkey Chili and the Wolf Man are riding in from Durango. We're gonna need at least three more kegs and way more cocaine.")

The Wolf Man has long been considered a horror classic, but people who know it only by its reputation or pop-cultural influence may be surprised by the movie's understated approach. (To be fair, the fog is not understated. Those fog machines are cranked to the max, baby.) It's a movie that relies on mood, atmosphere, and quiet tragedy instead of jump scares, menace, and sensationalism. I'd seen parts of it on television as a kid, but this was my extremely belated first time watching it in its entirety, and I was completely absorbed by both its mesmeric style and the quality of the classic Hollywood filmmaking.

Much of the credit for The Wolf Man's success, aside from the solid cast, is the trio of unique talents guiding the behind-the-scenes creative decisions. Curt Siodmak, a science fiction and horror novelist and screenwriter (his other credits include the Boris Karloff films Black Friday and The Ape, the Jacques Tourneur classic I Walked with a Zombie, The Beast with Five Fingers, and the plethora of movies adapted from or inspired by his novel Donovan's Brain) and the younger brother of great film noir director Robert Siodmak (the Siodmaks were German Jews who fled Nazi Germany, Curt for England and Robert for France before both men made the move to Hollywood), wrote the screenplay, and George Waggner, who also made another excellent Lon Chaney Jr.-starring horror movie called Man Made Monster (reviewed on this blog last May) and was sometimes credited as "George waGGner" to combat the frequent misspelling of his last name, served as director. Most of cinematographer Joseph A. Valentine's previous experience was on B-movies, low-budget Poverty Row pictures (including 1933's Night of Terror, reviewed on this blog in 2020), and teen romance movies marketed to adolescents, but his beautiful work on The Wolf Man led to three films for Hitchcock (Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, and Rope), several Hollywood melodramas and films noir, and Victor Fleming's version of Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman in the lead.

Lon Chaney Jr. gets a lot of grief for his lack of dynamism and charisma (especially compared to his man-of-a-thousand-faces father, who dominated the silent era's horror films, adventures, and crime thrillers, and any movie that just needed a really weird guy), but he has an everyman persona and a sadness in his eyes that work well in certain roles, particularly his two horror films for Waggner (aka waGGner). In The Wolf Man, he plays Larry Talbot, the estranged son of a wealthy Welsh family. Larry has lived in the United States for 18 years, apparently enough time to lose his Welsh accent and gain an aw-shucks U.S. cadence. His older brother (not a twin but apparently identical if his painted portrait above the fireplace is accurate) was recently killed in a hunting accident, inspiring Larry to return home, make amends with his father Sir John (Claude Rains), and prepare to take over the estate, which is a big deal to his dad but seems like a pretty easy be-a-rich-guy-and-let-the-servants-do-the-work kinda gig to me. His dad's buddies include police captain Paul Montford (Ralph Bellamy), a childhood classmate of Larry's, and village doctor Lloyd (Warren William).

After a typically understated UK father/son reconciliation, Larry fixes Sir John's telescope and gets an eyeful of the woman living above the antique store across the street, Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers). Gwen and her father Charles (J. M. Kerrigan) run the antique store, and the Conliffes are longtime friends of the Talbots. Larry wastes no time pursuing Gwen, who doesn't know who Larry is despite him looking exactly like his dead brother. Larry is mostly a sympathetic guy, but he hits on Gwen in an aggressively smarmy way, telling her about the earrings she was wearing when he saw her through the telescope and where she put them in her bedroom. She's understandably creeped out (but also a little intrigued) and mentions both her father and her fiancé Frank (Patric Knowles, playing a classic '40s milquetoast) to try to get him to simmer down.

Larry gives her some jive about being psychic instead of 'fessing up about the telescope, but he does buy a cane with a wolf's head carved into the handle, leading to much talk about the local werewolf legends. He tells her he'll pick her up at 8:00 so they can take a walk and get their fortunes read by the gypsies who have recently arrived for the annual carnival and whose caravan is parked on the outskirts of the village. Gwen tells him she's engaged and has no intention of meeting him.

When the witching hour (minus four) of 8:00 p.m. arrives, Gwen is waiting for Larry after all, but she's brought along a friend, Jenny Williams (Fay Helm). The trio walk through the fog-shrouded forest and discuss the local werewolf legends until they arrive at the caravan. Two of the gypsies prepared to tell fortunes are a mother and son, Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya, who makes the most of every second she's onscreen and is the movie's secret MVP) and Bela (Bela Lugosi, excellent in a small but memorable role). Gwen and Larry saunter off by themselves while Bela attempts to read Jenny's fortune. Bela sees something in the fortune that stops him cold, alarming Jenny. He then tells her to leave immediately and come back tomorrow. Jenny runs off but is attacked by a wolf. Larry runs to help her after hearing her screams, but he's bitten on the chest while bashing the wolf with his cane, setting up the events that bedevil the entire village for the rest of the film.

Part of what keeps this movie so fresh 85 years later is its human touch and its lack of hammy theatrics. The actors give emotional performances, but those emotions are relayed with adjustments in facial expression and body language instead of cranked-up melodrama. Feelings are suppressed or endured until they can no longer be suppressed or endured. 

Academic interpretations of the film have read it as an allegory for puberty, the ego and the id, sexual repression, patriarchal guilt, the betrayal of our bodies through illness or accident, and the fascist creep of Europe in the years leading to WWII. I can see how all those readings could be applied, and they only add to the experience, but I think the film endures mostly because of the magic combination of its style and atmosphere and its two simple human stories of the struggle with our conscience when our behavior diverges from our values and how we deal with our lives when bad shit happens outside of our control.

The Wolf Man is deserving of its classic status and a great pick for Halloween weekend. I'm glad I finally caught up with the whole shebang after piecemeal childhood viewings. It's a worthy member of the classic Hollywood, classic horror, and Universal monster canons, and it was a belated triumph for makeup effects artist Jack Pierce, who finally got to use the werewolf design he'd created for Universal's previous werewolf movie, 1935's Werewolf of London (an excellent and underrated film that gets overshadowed by this one and which I reviewed on this blog in October of 2022).  

 

Werewolf of London star Henry Hull vetoed Pierce's initial werewolf design because he said it made him too unrecognizable. Some people think Hull had an ulterior motive of avoiding the hours of makeup the design required, but the plot of that movie really did hinge on the other characters recognizing the werewolf as their former colleague, so who knows? Pierce finally got to use his full werewolf design on Lon Chaney Jr. seven years later, though Chaney probably wished he'd pulled a Hull, subsequently complaining about the time and discomfort in press interviews. (I like both designs, though the iconic 1941 version looks just a little more quaint to me than the 1935 Hull-approved look, and Hull's movements are a bit creepier than Chaney's amusing tip-toe wolf walk.)

Disconnected (Gorman Bechard, 1984)

Disconnected is a deeply eccentric slice of regional underground horror, made in Waterbury, Connecticut, by DIY filmmaker Gorman Bechard and a cast and crew of mostly local talent. It starts out as an offbeat hangout movie, turns into a slasher and a suspense thriller, and finally morphs into a semi-abstract arty depiction of a mental breakdown or torment by a malevolent entity (or both). Not everything is successful and a few scenes have poorly recorded sound, but it's got personality, atmosphere, humor, creepiness, power-pop jams, some striking shot compositions, and lots of local color, and it's probably the only film where someone is murdered to XTC's "Complicated Game."

The film opens with video store clerk and classic Hollywood film buff Alicia (Frances Raines, the great-step-niece of Claude Rains, who gets name-checked, and, yes, that's how they spell their names) arriving at the two-story home where she rents the top floor. A weird old man (William A. Roberts) is trying to get in. Alicia assumes the old man is looking for her twin sister Barbara Ann (also played by Raines) because a lot of men in town are looking for Barbara Ann, and she lets him inside. He does something weird to her telephone and disappears. Say what?

The strangeness of this scene and everyone's behavior in it aside, I really dig how Alicia decorates her top-floor pad (though the credit belongs to director Bechard, who was actually living there at the time). There are classic Hollywood posters everywhere (her top faves are Marilyn, Bogart, and Hitchcock), an antique clock, a hi-fi stereo (Talking Heads' Speaking in Tongues at the front of the record pile), and all kinds of early 20th century kitsch, much of it also connected to movie people (lots of Groucho stuff), and the place gets excellent natural window lighting. I get a sweetly painful melancholic feeling thinking about the various pop-cult-decorated living spaces of friends and acquaintances in my pre-21st-century-tech/phone/social media college-town days, so when a movie really nails the look of one of those spots, it punches me right in the heart.

The movie quickly jumps from this oddball opening sequence to a hopping bar scene. Alicia, her boyfriend Mike (Carl Koch), Barbara Ann, and Barbara Ann's date for the night are catching up over drinks, though Alicia is a bit on edge because she suspects that Mike and Barbara Ann are having an affair. It's frustratingly hard to make out the dialogue in the noisy, crowded bar in this scene (the sound improves in most of the subsequent scenes), but my frustration turned to delight when the camera swept down the length of the bar, capturing little moments from the other patrons including a guy using magic tricks to impress the woman sitting next to him (she seemed to be into it), and when the scene shifted to the dance floor. Our characters and several extras start busting moves as only 1984 Caucasian Connecticut new-wavers can to the new-wavy power-pop jams of local band The Excerpts, playing a live gig in the bar.

Time for a digression about an Excerpts band member. Making his onscreen debut in Disconnected, 19-year-old Excerpts singer/guitarist Jon Brion would go on to incredible success in the years ahead. After the dissolution of his post-Excerpts power-pop band The Bats (not to be confused with the excellent New Zealand band The Bats), Brion moved to Boston, met Aimee Mann (they were a couple for several years), and became touring guitarist for 'Til Tuesday in that band's final years. Brion then moved to Los Angeles, founded short-lived band The Grays with ex-members of Jellyfish, became a go-to session musician and arranger for dozens of disparate artists, produced albums for Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Rufus Wainwright, Robyn Hitchcock, Of Montreal, Frank Ocean, Janelle Monáe, Katy Perry, Mac Miller, Sky Ferreira, Best Coast, and pre-insanity Kanye West, had a wildly popular years-long weekly residency at Largo, and enjoyed a parallel career as a film composer. He was Paul Thomas Anderson's go-to composer prior to Jonny Greenwood, co-composing the score to Hard Eight with his ex-girlfriend Mann's husband Michael Penn, playing on Penn's Boogie Nights score and appearing in a small role, composing the scores for Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, and contributing a few leftover pieces from these earlier scores to One Battle After Another. His other film composing credits include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I Heart Huckabees, Synecdoche, New York, Step Brothers, Lady Bird, and Pee-wee As Himself (with Penn). Digression complete.

Dance party concluded, Alicia gets into an argument with Mike in the car, where his denials about sleeping with Barbara Ann don't seem that believable. Alicia heads home, where she hears weird distorted sounds on her phone and a conversation between Mike and Barbara Ann about their affair. Is she imagining this? What is up with her phone? Meanwhile, young women are being raped, murdered, and mutilated all over the city. A fifth victim has been found, exasperating Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, hoagie-eating (or, in Waterbury parlance, grinder-eating) homicide detective Tremaglio (Carmine Capobianco), who can't catch a grinder break. His partner slaps him on the back when he's on the roof of a parking garage, causing him to drop his grinder on the street below. Later, on stakeout and eating a grinder in the car, his partner admonishes him for sitting on his ass and eating too many grinders, reminds him that the murdered women can never eat a grinder again, and tells him to leave his half-eaten grinder in the car despite Tremaglio's complaints that it will get cold. The man just wants to eat a hot grinder in peace while he brainstorms how to catch the killer.

At work the next day in her small, strip-mall video store, Alicia is admonished by a customer named Joey (the hilariously monikered Professor Morono, who plays a character named Joey the Creep in Bechard's subsequent feature Psychos in Love), who demands to know the names of the newest porn rentals and whether they're any good. When Alicia says she doesn't watch porn, Joey is flabbergasted, yells "fuck this shit!," and hits the road.

Just as flabbergasted by Joey's behavior is the only other man in the store, Franklin (Mark Walker). Franklin is a polite, soft-spoken, friendly, but deeply strange young man who has a crush on Alicia after seeing her in the bar. He complains about the lack of foreign and classic films in the store to Alicia's agreement, remarks on how many new movies they have, and says he doesn't own a VHS or Betamax machine but that he would rent movies here if he had one. He then asks her out. Alicia says she'd like to but has a boyfriend. Franklin takes this rejection well, offers to bring her lunch and a soda, and leaves his number in case she changes her mind. He then exits with his signature farewell catchphrase, repeated multiple times throughout the movie and filling me with joy and delight each time. When Franklin bids you adieu, he says, in his particular soft-spoken style, "okay, see ya bye" with the "see ya" and the "bye" pronounced so closely to each other that they sound like a single word ("seeyabye"). This never stops being funny, and I want to say it to everyone when I exit the premises.

Alicia eventually makes up her mind that Mike and her sister have been getting their bone on, so she calls Franklin to take him up on his offer of a date. Franklin is happy to hear from her, but is soft-spoken seeyabye Franklin also our killer? Oh shiiiit! Is this seeyabye forever for Alicia?

Events proceed in this direction until everything is cleanly but semi-tragically wrapped up by the film's halfway point. WTF? Or is it? Much of the rest of the film takes place in Alicia's top-floor pad, where she drinks her sorrows away in her underwear and is constantly tormented by her phone. Her mental state fractures and the film's style becomes claustrophobic and abstract, leading to a truly strange and baffling ending that I'll be chewing on for a while. The sound design becomes very important here, with the ringing of the phone, the ticking of the clock, and the bizarro demonic noises coming from the receiver amplified on the soundtrack. This is a wild swerve in direction from Bechard, and, while it's not as much fun as the film's first half and can even drag in places, it's a pretty daring move. I had to admire it.

Flawed as it is, Disconnected is an original and subversive twist on the slasher film, and the actors all have a refreshing non-Hollywood personality, delivery, and eccentricity. Raines gives both sisters completely different attitudes and physical presences, Walker makes Franklin such a fascinatingly kooky dude, and Capobianco really sells his grinder exasperation. We've all been there, even though I call them hoagies (and used to call them submarine sandwiches in my youth). I love the local Waterbury detail (the rental house, the video store, the bar/rock club, the neighborhoods, the city streets and buildings), and I like how Bechard gets so many memorable images on such a tiny budget. (I talked about the rest of Bechard's career and how he moved from low-budget horror movies to indie dramas to documentaries, including several docs about musicians, animal rescues, and pizza-making, in my post about Cemetery High a few years ago.) I really liked this movie, mostly. Okay, seeyabye.