THE WOLFMAN 1941THE WOLFMAN 1941
Starring : Lon Chaney Jnr, Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi,
Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles, Maria Ouspenskaya & Evelyn Ankers
Lon Chaney Jnr stars as Lawrence Stewart Talbot, heir to the noble estates of Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Bitten by a werewolf (Bela Lugosi), Talbot himself becomes infected. He finds himself unwillingly condemned to change into a wolf and kill for all eternity, a fate explained to him by the strange gyspy fortune teller Maliva (Maria Ouspenskaya), Lugosi's mother.
Nobody will believe Talbot's wild story and the murders continue until his father manages to kill him by smashing his head in with a silver tipped cane.
With a very strange Hollywood version of Wales, the fine acting by all the film's principals, plus superb make-up by Jack Pierce, involving a rubber nose piece, yak hairs, and a six-hour session in the make up chair, with a further twenty-two hours to film the metamorphosis from man to wolf.
The Wolf Man established itself as the definitive werewolf film. For Lon Chaney, destined to play the eventually doomed and tragic Lawrence Talbot untill he met Abbott and Costello, the creation was his own personal triumph, making all the agonies required for the transformation scenes worth every painful minute.
Curt Siodmak's literate script established new monstrous traditions, notably the law that the bite of a werewolf turned the bitten one into another doomed to eternal life of murder at the full moon, and that the creature could only be killed by a silver bullett or by a stick covered with silver.
"Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, Can become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright."
Ancient gypsy proverb in The Wolf Man....
