Director: George Waggner
Cast: Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Bela Lugosi, Warren William
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. Although my strongest memories of the film probably come from a Universal Monsters coloring book I got in the early 90s. I had some really great times with that coloring book. Now I wish I had just gone over it in grey and black and hadn’t used any of the other colors…
Did I Like It: Interesting that Chaney is perhaps the saddest-sack movie star who ever lived (imagine if he had ever played Willy Loman), and somehow Forrest Gump-ed his way into being the Nick Fury of the Universal Monsters, that first shared cinematic universe.
He’s certainly affecting in that capacity, and managed to do so over the course of five films in the roll, the longest sustained run in the Universal canon, and it still feels like the horror series is a something of a priority for the studio, even if James Whale has since retired from the motion pictures and the peak of the series is now firmly in the past. Yes, the entire affair has a bit of a feel of a TV special (see the opening titles), but the photography is interesting, and the ending where Sir John (Rains) unknowingly killed his son is deeply and tragic, and the film certainly reaches for a “less is more” aesthetic with its werewolf transformation.
And yet, by about minute 56 in the film, I’m bored. That’s not a great sign, considering that the film will be over in just over 10 more minutes. Chaney’s pathos cannot hope to hold up in comparison to that of Karloff, and the atmosphere is largely perfunctory, which leave it in the shadow of even Dracula (1931), which is saying quite a bit.