Terence Fisher’s very loose adaptation of Guy Endore’s “The Werewolf of Paris” is one of the most famous Hammer horror films, chiefly for being one of the few times the studio offered up a truly interesting, charismatic young star, in the shape of Oliver Reed. Reed’s outsized talent is almost too much even for playing Leon, a hopefully humane but inextricably bestial young man, yearning for love and stability but cursed to transform into a wolf when his baser instincts are aroused. In swinging from poles of gentle, passionate romancer to desperate and tortured soul to rampaging monster, the force of Reed’s star performance is quite amazing, but also lashed down by a narrative in which he doesn’t appear until practically half-way through the film, and doesn’t then get much time to modulate the wild extremes of his character.
Curse of the Werewolf, set in Spain in the late eighteenth century, certainly extends the core motifs and recurring obsessions that defined Fisher’s short but indelible golden era, commencing with one of his most repulsive and effective portrayals of ratbag aristocracy abusing power and privilege. Here, an unfortunate beggar (Richard Wordsworth) falls into the clutches of the amoral Marques Siniestro (Anthony Dawson), overlord of a backward rural township, “buying” him as a wedding present for his new young bride (Josephine Llewellyn), and making him eat scraps of food off the floor and dance to the rollicking hilarity of his wedding guests.
The Marques then casts him in the dungeon in punishment for an ill-advised quip, and he spends decades imprisoned, reduced to shaggy, sickly madness. The jailer’s mute but pretty daughter (Yvonne Monlaur), rejects the now aged, widowed, pox-riddled Marques’ sexual advances, and finds herself tossed into the cell with the beggar, where she’s swiftly raped. When she’s released, she stabs the Marques to death and runs away, eventually rescued from the woods by a doctor, Alfredo (Clifford Evans), and she dies giving birth to the beggar’s son.
This fascinating, compelling deterministic take on the werewolf saga, encompassing social and sexual brutality to construct the personality of a young man who becomes heir to a legacy of oppression and violence that disgusts and yet drives him, enlarges the familiar metaphorical value of lycanthropy as vehicle for exploring the latent potential for animalism in the masculine character. As in The Wolf Man (1941), it’s only a wise father figure who keeps that animalism in check and can discipline the wildness within. Young Leon (Justin Walters) is enmeshed by a mocking Christ parallel, born on Christmas Day, demanding to be sacrificed by his “father” to save others.
Steel prison bars are a constant narrative refrain and visual motif, used at first to enforce rule and define power, they become fragile barriers finally to keep violence of the repressed in check. Leon’s bloodlust, stirred first as a child by seeing a squirrel shot down by the guardian of the town’s animal flocks, Pepe (Warren Mitchell), provokes his first transformations, and a priest (John Gabriel) advises Alfredo that only devoted love and care can keep the beast within Leon contained. That love is provided first by Alfredo and his servant Teresa (Hira Talfrey) and then in adulthood by Cristina (Catherine Feller), daughter of an estate owner the adult Leon
Unfortunately, Werewolf doesn’t mesh as tightly as a story as Fisher’s absolute best work does, for the standard hour-and-a-half running time of a Hammer production presented trouble for compressing such a near-epic narrative. Too much of Pepe’s uninteresting quandary in being mocked for not catching the wolf is on offer, and the supporting cast, except for Dawson, offers few performances of note. No real horror manifests until the final half-hour: even then, Reed’s marauding is brief.
Finally, Leon
Although problematic in its story progression, Werewolf is beautifully produced and shot, with Arthur Grant’s photography responding to the relatively exotic locale in offering up elegant landscapes and muted colours rather different to the bold, drenched gothic picture-book tones of Jack Asher’s work for Fisher. This however suits the material, with brilliantly composed widescreen shots dominated by blocks of dirty browns, whites, and blacks spotted with carefully employed drops of multi-hued colour, especially flowers, as if in conscious imitation of the traditions of Spanish painting masters. At least, until Leon
By this time, with several big hits to their credit and money coming in from an alliance with Universal, Hammer’s horror productions were becoming noticeably more expensive, and the strong period atmosphere and physical detailing is careful, but the film just isn’t as floridly intense as The Brides of Dracula, Fisher’s best film of the same year. The most effective moment of violence in the film is in fact not any of Leon
The settings, with the jagged, Caligari-esque rooftops, the twisted forms of the town centre, and the dusty surrounding countryside, are evoked with deceptive calm, and the volatility of Reed’s performance is finally placed front and centre, where it should be. The finale, which plays a bit like a werewolf remake of King Kong, with the beast-Leon skipping across roofs and finally taking refuge in the heights of a belfry in delaying his inevitable Calvary , is well-staged, and it’s hard to deny the film’s tight craftsmanship and pictorial and thematic intelligence.
