Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, 1935)

The first Hollywood werewolf movie, Werewolf of London is somewhat overlooked in favor of 1941's The Wolf Man, but it's a damn good movie in its own right and a surprisingly funny and modern-feeling one. If lead actor Henry Hull is a bit duller than the originally cast Boris Karloff (who decided to do Bride of Frankenstein instead), he's merely the center for a great cast of character actors to react to, and he makes a pretty good werewolf.

Werewolf of London opens in Tibet (giving the filmmakers an excuse to squeeze in a little anti-Asian racism, a Hollywood epidemic in the 1930s; at least it's relatively mild here with a few jokes about superstition and a little too much effusive excitement at our white characters encountering another white character), with famous botanist Wilfred Glendon (Hull) and his assistant on an expedition to acquire a rare flower called a mariphasa that exists only in Tibet and blooms under moonlight. Dr. Glendon finds his mariphasa on a Tibetan mountain range, but he's also bitten by a werewolf in the process. Glendon never gets a good look at the werewolf, so he assumes he was bitten by a regular old wolf of the non-were variety.

Back in London, Glendon is so wrapped up in his mariphasa experiments that he ignores his delightful, attractive wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson, who, unlike Karloff, managed to appear in this movie and Bride of Frankenstein). Lisa ends up spending much of her time with an old flame, Paul (Lester Matthews), who is visiting his native London on a vacation from his current home in California. Glendon is sometimes irritated by and jealous of his wife's ex, but he's so consumed by botany that he frequently cancels plans to join them.

Side note: Glendon's lab pushes this film toward science fiction. Not only does he have a large apparatus that supplies artificial moonlight, he also has your standard array of weird bubbling liquids in tubes and your non-standard Hi-Def TV security system that broadcasts the front door of his home directly to his lab. It's not even mentioned that a freakin' botanist invented a television/security camera hybrid in 1935.

Another famous botanist, Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland, in a role originally planned for Bela Lugosi), shows up in olde London towne with a strange request of Glendon. Yogami also tried to bring a mariphasa back from Tibet on an expedition that coincidentally coincided with Glendon's, but his plants died on the trip home. He wants two flowers from Glendon's plant because these flowers work as an antidote to werewolfery, and he knows two werewolves. Glendon doesn't take him seriously, but later that night, during the full moon, Glendon's hand wolfs out. He pokes it with the flower, and it de-wolf-ifies back into human hand form. Oh shiitttt!!

Glendon proceeds to wolf it up and wolf it down all over London town during the next several full moons while also trying to control his wolfly urges and keep Lisa out of danger. Meanwhile, the cast of characters surrounding the Glendons grows to include Lisa's aunt, Miss Ettie (Spring Byington), a society woman/goofball who refers to Dr. Yogami as "Dr. Yokohama," says the singer at one of her many soirees is singing a Botticelli, and likes to party but can't hold her liquor, and a pair of elderly alcoholic landlords, Mrs. Moncaster (Zeffie Tilbury) and the wonderfully named Mrs. Whack (Ethel Griffies), who really should have their own movie.

Special effects makeup artist Jack Pierce also designed Lon Chaney Jr.'s makeup for the iconic 1941 Wolf Man, and the werewolf makeup in this film would have more closely resembled that film's look but for a dispute with Hull. The actor complained that Pierce's designs were too elaborate and would have obscured too much of his face. Unlike many other werewolf films, the story of Werewolf of London required the other characters to recognize the man inside the wolf, or at least get an inkling of recognition. Hull and Pierce couldn't agree, so producer and studio head Carl Laemmle broke the stalemate by siding with Hull. A less charitable to Hull version of events has it that the actor just didn't want to sit in the makeup chair for hours and/or that he was too vain to let his face be completely obscured. Whatever the facts, the werewolf makeup is still pretty cool, even in scaled-down mode.

Director Stuart Walker has a natural, graceful classic Hollywood style that suits the material well, and the comedic moments complement the horror instead of undercutting it. Surprisingly, his forays into the genre were extremely rare. Besides Werewolf of London, his only horror-adjacent film is the dark psychological thriller Mystery of Edwin Drood. Walker specialized in musicals, comedies, romances, and melodramas. His directorial career lasted a brief four years, though in the classic Hollywood workaholic era, he still managed to direct 12 films. Walker was a theater actor, director, and producer for many years before transitioning to film, first as a screenwriter, then as a director. He quit directing in 1936 to concentrate on producing. He produced most of the Bulldog Drummond franchise and several other films before dying of a heart attack in 1941 at the age of 53.

Werewolf of London is a sophisticated, entertaining, and well-written piece of '30s horror, with developed, fleshed-out characters and a great sense of humor. As a bonus, I just finished watching Shudder's excellent documentary mini-series Queer for Fear, which made me look for gay subtext in this film much more than I would have done had I seen it last month. Werewolf stories tend to work well as metaphors for closeted homosexuality, and Werewolf of London is no exception. Looking at it through that point of view adds another layer to an already fascinating film, and the tug of war between repression and transgression is part of what makes horror such an endlessly fascinating genre.