|
The Tibetan opening offers icy crags slanted like claws and a moonstruck white blossom ("The Mariphasa lupina lumina..."), the perfect lunar preamble. The bloodied hand reaching for the floral specimen dissolves to the darkened laboratory in London, the doctor (Henry Hull) is summoned to a garden party as Stuart Walker's panning camera links the socialites with the exotic displays in the glasshouse. (Botanical tentacles wiggle and devour as Spring Byington flutters and swoons, "Nature is very tolerant, sir.") "It makes you want to howl," says the neglected wife (Valerie Hobson) to her former beau (Lester Matthews), though it is the doctor who gets to reveal the fur under the tuxedo after a run-in with a fellow doomed explorer (Warner Oland), who strokes his lupine scar like an illicit lover. The transformation is strikingly staged—protruding fangs, bushy sideburns and Lugosian widow's peak, each hirsute mutation taking place while the protagonist stumbles behind a column. "This is Scotland Yard, old boy, not Grimms' Fairy Tales." Lon Chaney Jr.'s later creature carries East European dismay, here is a particularly British organism, from the Jack the Ripper tinge of the nocturnal rampages to the proto-Ealing drollery of two tavern biddies (Ethel Griffies, Zeffie Tilbury) who keep peering into keyholes and cold-cocking each other. Lycanthropy as "evolution in a strange mood," a foundation for Terence Fisher and Ken Russell to build on, a distracted-husband fable to go with the anxious-bachelor comedy of Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nabokov's Despair is fascinatingly concurrent, the fallen beast in upside-down close-up dissolves to the flight to America. With Lawrence Grant, Clark Williams, J.M. Kerrigan, and Charlotte Granville. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |