The first, rather ill-fated effort by Universal Studios to create a werewolf film was obviously obscured by the subsequent Lon Chaney Jnr franchise. It’s not too hard to discern why. George Waggner’s seminal The Wolf Man (1941) had style and substance, and created in Larry Talbot a likable everyman victim-villain to embody the classical monstrous metaphor for an irrepressible capacity for destruction and erotic threat remnant in the human character. Werewolf of London‘s director Stuart Walker, who chiefly helmed romantic melodramas in his career, failed to provide Werewolf of London with a similarly concise sense of form and personality, whilst indulging the script’s constant sidesteps, which often stop the narrative dead. The project is notably indebted to the Rouben Mamoulian version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, to the point where it filches the famed transformation broken into stages by passing behind pillars. The mystique Waggner’s film conjured was irresistible, to the point where the ideas it injected into the werewolf myth went right into common folklore. Werewolf of London‘s tilt at creating lycanthrope law was perhaps more interesting, with a plot revolving around a flower harvested from a cursed valley high in the Himalayas that holds the power of keeping werewolf transformations at bay, a concept laced with fascinating qualities of fragile beauty and arcane mystery to counterbalance the savagery of the man-as-beast metaphor; but it’s hard not to admit that nonetheless the talismanic value of silver introduced in Waggner’s film is punchier. Also, the central protagonist, Henry Hull’s tragic botanist Dr. Glendon, never gains the anguished pathos Talbot possessed.
But Werewolf of London isn’t entirely negligible, for its own ideas for the lycanthropic mythos were as potentially fascinating, particularly in presenting its werewolf as a less utterly animalistic beast, not as hirsute as Chaney’s, retaining elements of human will whilst still becoming utterly vicious, stalking the night in cap and coat, and therefore somehow more insidiously threatening in suggesting single-minded violence. The marifasa lupina lumino is the exotic blossom which Glendon tries to procure in a terrific opening sequence, in which he and a friend, Renwick (Clark Williams), venture into the hidden Tibetan valley, against the advice of a priest (Egon Brecher) who hasn’t spoken to a fellow white man in forty years.
Anticipating Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Glendon and Renwick fight against invisible barriers and unseen guardians to penetrate the forbidden abode, and Glendon is attacked whilst taking cuttings of the sacred flower by a lurking werewolf. This other beast proves to be Dr Yogami (Warner Oland), a Japanese lycanthrope after the flower to alleviate his condition, and he follows Glendon back to his London home hoping that Glendon’s efforts to cultivate the plant might offer a perpetual source of blossoms to keep the curse at bay, and also to alert Glendon to his coming, inevitable transformation.
The film’s story development was reputedly worked on at one point by Guy Endore, the famed scribe of the novel The Werewolf of Paris, which repopularised the werewolf myth. But the result, whilst suggesting some Endor’s innate understanding of the werewolf’s symbolic power, has little of his narrative muscle and narrative complexity. The actual screenplay, by John Colton, sets up a domestic triangle as the impetus for Glendon’s lycanthropic rages, as a clear metaphor for an innate male sexual possessiveness warring with his civilised decency. Glendon’s wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson) is increasingly alienated first by his fixation with his work and then by his efforts to keep his distance from her, when he realises at Yogami’s prodding that she will inevitably become his victim, and draws ever closer to her former fiancée, Paul Ames (Lester Matthews).
The necessary, compelling emotional conflagration never ignites, however, as the normally fine Hull’s awkward performance fails to find a happy balance between pent-up, stiff-upper-lip suffering and feral explosion. Hobson is at her most devastatingly bland, and Matthews isn’t worth mentioning at all. The potential for a more than average genre entry is further diffused by constant diversions for supporting characters and some truly crappy Cockney comic relief, although Spring Byington as a flaky family friend provides some sparkle. Intriguingly, a gay subtext presents itself with surprising, almost inescapable force, especially in the moment in which Yogami suggestively strokes Glendon’s hidden scar, his mark of exception, which drives him to nocturnal prowling amongst the demimonde in a conflicted double life. For this aspect, the great opening, Oland’s good performance, Charles Stumar’s fine photography, and Jack Pierce’s intriguing make-up, the film is still more than worthwhile.