"For The Wolf Man, Universal did a lot more than round up the usual suspects." "They hired the classiest character actors in Hollywood." "The studio rightly took pride in this cast." "Except for The Black Cat, none of the other Universal horrors used this gimmick of showing the actors in a clip from the movie." "Claude Rains had four Oscar nominations, including one for Casablanca." "Warren William was a star at Warner Bros throughout the '30s." "Ralph Bellamy later won a Tony and an honorary Academy Award." "Patric Knowles was a rising star brought from England as a threat to Errol Flynn." "Bela Lugosi was one of the top horror stars in Hollywood." "Maria Ouspenskaya received two Oscar nominations." "She was one of Hollywood's most respected acting coaches." "Evelyn Ankers and Lon Chaney were both horror stars in the making." "My name's Tom Weaver." "Listen to me for 70 minutes as I pass on important information." "The shot of the forest that you're seeing also turned up behind the credits of Ghost of Frankenstein, Night Monster, and The Mummy's Curse." "Curt Siodmak wrote The Wolf Man." "He did a lot of research into werewolf myths before he wrote his screenplay." "When we see the encyclopedia entry in a few seconds, notice that the word "legend" has been capitalised." "George Waggner said that a Universal executive insisted on that, to emphasise the fairy-tale quality of the story." "The book mentions Talbot Castle without saying where it is." "The Wolf Man is set in Wales, but not once does anybody mention Wales." "In the script, Wales is mentioned many times." "Somebody must have decided not to specify where the movie takes place." "Siodmak sometimes talks about it as though it's set in Germany." "At other times he's said it took place in England." "You don't think of Wales as a country steeped in superstition, but this is the most werewolf-happy town I've ever seen in any movie." "Let me point out that the one thing you expect to see in every werewolf movie, you don't see in The Wolf Man." "See if you can guess what it is." "There's Claude Rains greeting Chaney." "Claude Rains's career was launched by a Universal horror film:" "James Whale's The Invisible Man, 1933." "Here comes Ralph Bellamy." "This terrific set was reused in a lot of later pictures." "It's Dr Frankenstein's house in Ghost of Frankenstein, the manor in Night Monster, and so on." "Claude Rains is a terrific actor with Oscar nominations, but not good enough to convince me he's Chaney's father." "They look like Mutt and Jeff together." "I wanna know what Larry Talbot's mother looked like." "In this scene Claude Rains says "we are a backward people"." "Which turns out to be true." "Most of the villagers are superstitious." "Maybe that's why the references to Wales were omitted." "Universal was afraid they'd be offended at the way they're depicted here." "That candleholder was also used in The Raven, during the "Pit and the Pendulum" scenes." "There's a correlation between Chaney and Talbot." "Larry Talbot left home because he was the second son, and therefore his older brother was going to inherit the title and everything else." "Larry had the Talbot name, but it wasn't doing him a lick o' good." "So here's Larry Talbot with a name that should entitle him to things, and it didn't work out that way." "Lon Chaney was the son of Lon Chaney Sr, one of the big stars of the silent screen, and Junior wanted to get into show biz." "He probably expected his father to open doors for him." "But Senior discouraged his son." "He got after him to go into business, and Lon Jr ended up a plumbing contractor." "In The Wolf Man and in real life, someone died before the son got what he wanted." "Larry's older brother died and now Larry, who got no respect before, is in line to inherit the estate, and in real life it wasn't until Lon Chaney Sr died in 1930 that Chaney Jr could get into pictures," "which is apparently what he wanted all along." "Maybe Chaney Jr realised this about the role of Larry Talbot." "He's playing a son who got short-changed all his early life." "A guy with a dominating father doing all the things the son would like to do." "A guy who wasn't allowed to be what he wanted to be." "It would be tough for Lon to play that character for three weeks, without thinking of his own real-life situation." "Three weeks is how long it took to shoot The Wolf Man." "It began production on October 27, 1941, and they wrapped up on November 25, the 25th day of shooting." "When they began the title was Destiny, which is kind of a crummy title." "At some point late in production the title was officially changed to The Wolf Man." "From the top of the castle you get a view of the road." "It must be a special lens." "Sir John doesn't seem so hard that Larry would've left home to get away from him." "When Larry's in anguish, somebody asks Sir John what he's concerned about:" "Larry or the family name?" "If some stiff-upper-lipped Englishman had played Sir John, the audience might wonder too." "But Claude Rains plays Sir John in the way actors always played American fathers in the Hollywood movies:" "Stern, but with warmth and compassion." "Which was the right decision." "Larry's gonna end up with enough problems, without the father turning his back on him." "Now and then I'll refer to the Larry Gill version of The Wolf Man script." "In an early version of the script, the wolf man isn't the son of Sir John, he's Larry Gill, an American who's come to install Sir John's new telescope." "For the first half of the script, that's about the only difference:" "It's an American named Larry Gill, a visitor to the castle." "And we'll come back to that later." "Evelyn Ankers acted in some English movies." "Then she was on Broadway - notice the half-moon earrings - before she came to Universal, who gave her one American part after another." "She had to work at losing her English accent, had to say "noo" instead of "new" and "reckerd" instead of "record"." "But after four pictures she nailed it." "Then Universal put her in The Wolf Man and she had to reverse the whole thing." "That story is part of an introduction that Evelyn Ankers wrote for" "The Golden Age of B Movies by Doug McClelland, where she also tells some great stories about the making of The Wolf Man." "She and Lon Chaney acted together on a whole bunch of horror pictures." "They were the Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald of Universal horrors, but they had no use for each other." "The trouble started when Ankers was told she was being given a new dressing room because Universal was pleased with her." "She was thrilled, until the first day of The Wolf Man when Lon Chaney came up to her, all ticked off, and said:" ""You swiped my dressing room."" ""You took it from Broderick Crawford and me." "That's a hell of a thing to do."" "Ankers didn't know what was going on, but found out that what they used to do was take bottles into Chaney's dressing room, get loaded, hang all the furniture up out of the way and then just fight." ""On Monday", she wrote," ""the cleaning crew was treated to a sight resembling a WWll battlefield."" "That was just the beginning." "Chaney liked to come up behind her, made up as the wolf man, and scare her." "When making Son of Dracula there was a lunch where Chaney and Ankers' husband, Richard Denning, nearly got into a fight." "There was always grief and neither one of them ended up a big fan of the other." "Evelyn Ankers had no interest in acting, and was even more turned off by having to act in monster films." "Evelyn's mother pushed her into acting." "Richard Denning told me the mother was dependent on Ankers." "Evelyn's dad had left them when Evelyn was a little girl, and the mother had to raise Evelyn." "But once she grew up and got into acting she became the mother's meal ticket." "Ankers couldn't stand the discipline." "Her agents would set up interviews for her, and she'd always be late to the interviews because she just wasn't into it." "When she dropped out of acting, she stayed out." "After the Dennings moved to Hawaii, and Denning was playing the governor on Hawaii Five-O," "Ankers was offered the role of the governor's wife and she turned him down." "If you were to ask Wolf Man fans what prop they'd like as a souvenir, probably a lot of them would want this cane, which is still around and has ended up in the hands of a Wolf Man fan." "Bob Burns is a lifelong horror/sci-fi movie buff." "If you know his name, it might be because he worked on a lot of the early AIP films, helping make monsters for The She-Creature and Invasion of the Saucer Men." "In the late '40s, Bob was a kid going to school with Sonny Berman, and Sonny's father, Ellis Berman, was a prop maker for the movies." "Ellis Berman's shop was about six blocks from Bob Burns's house, and Burns used to go after school and see Ellis Berman doin' all kinds of stuff." "Around the time of this story, Berman was building the dinosaurs for the movie Unknown Island, starring Ankers' husband Richard Denning." "Burns got to see Berman making the T-rex suit for Unknown Island." "Anyway, Berman had the head of the cane sitting on a shelf in his shop, and Burns, a Wolf Man fan, recognised it immediately." "Berman would let him play with it and one day he just gave it to him." "Burns was "just thrilled beyond belief"." "And he says that's probably what got him into collecting props and masks." "In fact, he's got such a huge collection that he's putting together a book about it." "The head of the cane is made of vulcanised rubber, like the tyre of a car." "I'm guessing this, because twice in The Wolf Man the cane is used as a club." "So, in case anybody got nailed with the thing, it wouldn't do as much damage." "And because it's vulcanised rubber it's lasted all these years." "Here's our first look at Bela Lugosi and Ouspenskaya as they arrive in town." "Also our first look at Maria Ouspenskaya's stunt double." "Lon Chaney was very proud of The Wolf Man." "He'd say "That's my baby."" "He never had anything nice to say about The Mummy." "And most of the other roles he'd never talk about." "Chaney thought that next to Of Mice and Men, it was the best role he ever had." "When he was asked to name the role he found the most satisfying creatively, he said The Wolf Man right away." "Maybe that was because he was talking to a monster magazine, and maybe he figures that's what they wanted to hear." "The Wolf Man was the first thing he said." "After talking about that, he got around to mentioning Of Mice and Men." "Maybe one of the things Chaney liked about The Wolf Man was the fact that" ""The Wolf Man was mine, all alone."" "He said all the other monsters, Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, he was doing them a second time." "They'd been originated by others." "Chaney said in 1962 that he'd played this role six times, which is wrong." "He'd only played it five times." "But maybe he was counting the Route 66 episode he did with Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre." "He got made up as the wolf man in that." "He played a werewolf in a Mexican movie whose translated title was:" "The House of Terror." "Maybe he was counting one of those." "Or maybe he just made up a number." "He also said "All the best of the monsters played for sympathy."" ""That goes for my father, Karloff, myself, and all the others."" ""They all won the audience's sympathy."" ""The wolf man didn't want to do all those bad things."" ""He was forced into them."" "Chaney was one of those interviewees who never hesitated to make a good story a bit better." "In the interview about monsters being sympathetic, he also said that he played both the wolf man and Frankenstein in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." "He said that Bela Lugosi was signed, but "poor old Bela" didn't have the physical strength to handle the role." "So he played them both." "One day he'd play Frankenstein, and the camera would be on the back of the head of the wolf man, and the next day he'd do the same scene again, playing the wolf man." "Then, Chaney said, he did the same thing in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." "He said that Glenn Strange broke his ankle on the second day and so he, Chaney, did both roles." "This is Chaney talking:" ""Nobody ever knew about it either time."" "Nobody knew about it, beginning with Bela Lugosi and Glenn Strange, I'm sure." "No one knows what happened to Fay Helm." "She's a very good supporting actress who has nice parts in Universal horrors." "She's in Captive Wild Woman, Calling Dr Death and Night Monster." "She was also in a film noir called Phantom Lady." "She played the title role even though, again, that's just a supporting part." "Curt Siodmak told me there'd been some werewolf films before The Wolf Man, but none with that sharp definition of character." "Actually, except for a few silent movies nobody remembered even in 1941, there had been only one werewolf movie, Werewolf of London, Universal, 1935." "But Werewolf of London just didn't grab people the way The Wolf Man did." "Maybe it was because Henry Hull, who played the werewolf, wasn't sympathetic." "Maybe it was partly the minimal make-up." "Characters had to recognise that Henry Hull was the werewolf." "There were two werewolves in that film, and Lugosi was considered for the smaller werewolf role." "But Universal got Warner Oland instead." "I never quite understood this part." "Lugosi is a werewolf and knows it." "It's three minutes before the moon rises, but he's open for business and reading fortunes like it's noon." "In case you're counting, I'll save you the trouble." "Lugosi has seven lines." "This is the one time Lugosi got to play a werewolf." "When he transforms, he transforms into a dog rather than a traditional, two-legged werewolf." "In Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, he played the monster and got into a big climactic fight with the wolf man." "And then, five years after that, he played Dracula and got into a big climactic fight with the wolf man." "It happened again when he played a vampire in Return of the Vampire." "He had a werewolf assistant in that, obviously inspired by Lon Chaney." "The actor looks like him." "And even at the end of that movie, Lugosi is attacked by his own werewolf." "Lugosi just couldn't catch a break, werewolf-wise." "The Wolf Man is a crash course in werewolf-ology, Curt Siodmak-style." "We've already heard "Even a man who is pure in heart" three times." "We've been told about wolfbane." "We've seen wolfbane." "When we get to the fortune-telling scene, we get an illustration of how the werewolf sees the pentagram in the palm of his next victim's hand." "According to Siodmak, he read books on lycanthropy." "That was standard procedure for him, to read up as much as he could." "The thing Siodmak is proud of is that The Wolf Man catapulted werewolves out of European obscurity and into the middle of American pop culture." "A lot of the werewolf rules he made up are so embedded in people's minds, via The Wolf Man and all the movies it inspired, that it's hard to know where the werewolf myths leave off and where Siodmak's stuff begins." "I think Siodmak has mentioned it in every interview, that everybody thinks "Even a man who is pure in heart" is from German lore, part of the actual werewolf legends." "And it isn't." "He just made it up." "In 1981, two big werewolf movies went head to head, and both of them acknowledged The Wolf Man." "In An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis," "David Naughton is in bed with his girlfriend, and he asks her if she ever saw The Wolf Man." "Meanwhile, in Joe Dante's The Howling, about a whole community of werewolves, one human character is watching it on TV and getting pointers on werewolves." "The Howling features the in-joke that the main male characters are named after the directors of werewolf movies:" "George Waggner, who directed The Wolf Man, and other characters are named R William Neill, Erle Kenton and Charles Barton." "They are the guys who directed The Wolf Man sequels." "The way that Bela's transformation spooks the horse is a nice touch." "Later, after Larry's been bitten, a dog gets scared and barks at him, even while Larry's in human form." "Universal liked that touch:" "Animals recognising when someone is a monster." "It recurs in a lot of their movies, from Werewolf of London to House of Dracula, and probably a whole lot of others." "In Captive Wild Woman, Acquanetta, who is really a half-girl, half-gorilla, gets a job as an animal trainer because the animals are so scared of her, she can control them." "Here's a nice, gruesome shot of the wolf gnawing on the dead girl." "I hope you're not hoping that I'll finally be able to tell you why Lon Chaney turns into a wolf man but Bela Lugosi turns into a dog, because I have no idea." "I know Chaney once claimed the studio rounded up dogs that looked like wolves, but they wouldn't wrestle with him so it wouldn't work." "There was a studio watchman who owned a police dog and Chaney asked to try him." "Try the police dog, not the watchman." "He gave Chaney a real fight because "He was a smart dog who knew what to do."" "Well, this smart dog supposedly chomped down on Chaney's hand and broke some bones." ""So we fell in love", Chaney said." ""I bought him from the watchman and he is a very wonderful dog."" "Robert Boyle, the art director, says he went to the Universal back lot and found some trees and had them brought onto a sound stage." "Once the set was lit and filled with this fog, it looked just great, as you can see." "They'd shoot a scene on this atmospheric interior forest set and for the next forest scene they'd rearrange the trees, or just spin a few of them around, and it would look like another part of the forest." "Robert Boyle, who is still working, has four Oscar nominations, including ones for North by Northwest and Fiddler on the Roof." "Look at that great face." "In 1941, Madame Maria Ouspenskaya was running an acting school, and one of her students was Dorothy Morris, who later got a contract with MGM." "One day she asked how old Maria was and was told 55." "This was around 1941." "Dorothy said she lived the rest of her life in terror of turning 55, because she thought that at 55 she'd have a face like Maria Ouspenskaya." "There's a blooper coming up here." "You see the door open and Evelyn Ankers and Chaney come in." "And now - oops - the door is just being opened again." "Actually, I have a theory as to why Bela changes into a dog instead of a wolf man." "In the early version of the script, you, the audience - or more accurately, you, the reader of old scripts - you didn't know whether Larry changed into a wolf, or if he was suffering from the delusion that he changed into a wolf." "Right up until a few weeks before shooting, this was the plan." "Then somebody decided to toss out the ambiguity and they added wolf-man scenes to the script." "Well, maybe nobody realised Larry got bitten by a four-legged werewolf and turned into a two-legged werewolf." "Maybe they didn't know how to fix it or didn't care, but that's my theory:" "The four-legged Bela is a leftover from one of the old scripts where Larry, in his own mind or in reality, transforms into a four-legged Larry." "Coming up here out of the darkness is Patric Knowles, who takes the pipe out of his mouth once." "Twice." "Another blooper." "And Forrester Harvey, playing the timid Mr Twiddle." "Forrester Harvey was Una O'Connor's husband, Mr Hall, in The Invisible Man." "And five years after The Wolf Man he was going to play a pretty big part in She-Wolf of London, a female switch on The Wolf Man." "Forrester Harvey died unexpectedly during production but before any of his scenes were shot, and Universal replaced him with Lloyd Corrigan." "I always got the impression that George Waggner liked to use actors from silent-movie days in small parts in his films." "Which is very plausible because he, Waggner, was a silent-movie actor." "One of his movies was The Iron Horse." "He played Buffalo Bill." "There aren't many silent veterans here, compared to some of his later movies, but in The Wolf Man you do have Caroline Cooke and Eddie Polo, who was a star of silent serials, and you've even got Gibson Gowland," "who was the star of Eric von Stroheim's Greed, one of the silent masterpieces." "Gowland was also the guy who led the mob after Lon Chaney Sr in Phantom of the Opera." "They killed him down at the Paris waterfront." "At the end of this, he's one of the hunters who is on hand when Chaney Jr dies." "So Gibson Gowland helped to hunt down and kill the most famous monsters ever played by Chaney Sr and Jr." "Universal considered a werewolf movie four years before Werewolf of London." "Only recently have a few details come to light." "In 1932, Robert Florey wrote a treatment called The Wolf Man for Universal, around the time he was directing Murders in the Rue Morgue." "It's set in the Tyrolean Alps and it revolves around the child stolen by a she-wolf, and who in turn becomes a werewolf." "This is how Florey describes one of the wolf attacks:" ""The woman struggles to the edge of the bed, her eyes upon the door that is slowly swinging inward, nosed open by a long, deadly-looking head with glowing eyes and bared fangs."" ""There is a sudden rush in the room, the light is overturned, and there is the terrible shadow-painting on the moonlit wall of a tense, outspread hand thrown upward in extreme agony."" "In another scene, the wolf man undergoes a transformation while in a confessional." "Somebody in the story department read the treatment and predicted that Catholics would be offended if the scene was left in." "The Florey Wolf Man was meant to be a vehicle for Boris Karloff, whose Frankenstein had just been released and was a big box-office hit." "Had the Florey Wolf Man been made, it would generally be thought of as the first werewolf movie." "Horror movie fans think of the 1940s as the decade of Val Lewton, and with justification." "He was the RKO producer who, along with Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson and Robert Wise, turned out psychological horror movies, very different from the stuff Universal did." "Lewton never passed up a chance to roundaboutly bad-mouth Universal." "He gave the impression he was putting down cheap horror movies generally, but you could tell he was thinking of Universal when he made fun of movies with a werewolf chasing a girl." "He wrote that the horror film was the backward stepchild of movies, because "it has dealt so childishly with such childishly unreal material."" "Too many camera tricks were used to show men turning into beasts." "Too little trouble was taken to make it psychological." "Result:" "A limited audience, limited budgets, mostly tawdry and unreal, cheap and uninteresting movie entertainment." "By and large it ranked with the cheap Western." "To me it always sounded like sour grapes when Lewton would say things like that." "I bet what got on his nerves was the fact he spent months putting together movies like Cat People and The Body Snatcher and then Universal would toss out a monster picture and there wouldn't be any difference at the box office." "But Cat People, the movie that put Lewton on the map, is so close to The Wolf Man that it might well have been an intentional imitation." "Lewton was signed by RKO in March 1942, around the time The Wolf Man was getting close to the million-dollar mark, and the first thing that happens is that an executive gives him the title Cat People and tells him to make a movie with that title." "The movie Lewton made involved a cat woman instead of a wolf man, but Cat People did exactly what the unfilmed scripts of The Wolf Man did." "The Wolf Man, right until two and a half weeks before production, had the premise I've mentioned." "The wolf man would never be seen, except through Larry's eyes, reflected." "The audience had to decide whether he was turning into a wolf man or if he was mentally disturbed and imagining it." "That's not how it was made." "In The Wolf Man, you know it's not a delusion." "But a lot of dialogue, left over from previous drafts of the script, is still in the film." "Psychobabble dialogue where people discuss the possibility that Larry feels so alienated that he hypnotised himself into believing it." "There's more than enough of this dialogue to give someone the idea that a monster movie, a very good, interesting monster movie, could be made without a monster." "Then Lewton's Cat People comes along and Simone Simon plays a Serbian girl in New York." "A stranger in a strange land, just like Larry Talbot, and this movie gives the audience reason to wonder if she becomes a panther or if it's all in her mind." "I don't think it's a coincidence." "Maybe part of the reason Lewton put down Universal horror movies, was the fact that he knew that he never got anywhere in Hollywood until he had copied one of 'em." "The way this church scene was written in one of the early drafts is almost too bizarre." "Larry watches Bela's coffin being carried into the church, and it's covered with a sheet." "After the men leave, Larry goes over to the coffin and removes the sheet, and there's a hole in the coffin lid just above Bela's face, and we can see Bela." "He's got a bandage around his head, the pentagram is very bold on his forehead, his eyes are open, he looks like he's alive, and he's staring at Larry with an evil grin." "The gravediggers come back and carry the coffin into the churchyard." "Siodmak's script had the instruction that the camera should be inside the coffin, pointing upward as if from Bela's point of view in order to create the impression that "Bela is alive but unable to move"." "We've seen that in Vampira and The Crime of Dr Crespi." "It is a scary effect." "The gravediggers carry the coffin in." "Larry's looking at Bela's face when Maleva comes in, holding wolfbane." "Larry hides and watches as she takes a flower and touches Bela's mouth with it." "The fiendish grin vanishes." "She touches his eyes with the flower and they close." "She touches the pentagram on his forehead and it disappears." ""Bela lies there, a happy smile on his face, as if he had found peace at last."" "It's good spooky reading but I think Siodmak was overdoing it, and I'm glad they left it out." "Here's another famous ditty coming up:" ""The way you walked was thorny."" "It's no "Even a man who's pure in heart"." "No chartbuster." "But it's very memorable and quotable and part of the Wolf Man legend now." "At the end of this scene, after Ouspenskaya leaves the crypt," "Lon Chaney comes out of hiding and he starts crying over Bela Lugosi's coffin." "Film historian John Brunas interviewed an actor named Don Porter." "Porter, who was at Universal with Chaney, said "Chaney always liked to have a scene where he could cry."" ""He had done it very effectively in Of Mice and Men."" "Lon Chaney once talked about the Mice and Men screen tests." "Some of the people auditioning for the part of Lennie played the role for comedy, and others played it for plain horror effect." "Lon said "I played it for tears."" "He got the part and everybody thought he was very effective in it." "So from then on he liked to have scenes in which he could cry." "And The Wolf Man gives him a couple of crying scenes." "We're about to see the back of an actor named JM Kerrigan, who might look familiar because he's in Werewolf of London." "He played Henry Hull's lab assistant." "JM Kerrigan was born in Dublin." "He was a reporter before he got into acting." "He spent nine years at the Abbey Theatre." "He acted in London and New York." "He started making movies in 1916." "His first picture was an Irish movie called O'Neill of the Glen." "Kerrigan starred and directed it." "In that picture the interiors were really exteriors." "They'd take a wall or the ceiling off the stage to let in sunlight." "In Hollywood, Kerrigan was in a lot of classics." "He was famous for never watching his own pictures." "Someone asked why not and he just shrugged." "It made him self-conscious." "The Daughters of the American Revolution have started to act up." "That's Doris Lloyd doing the talking." "And on the right you see Ottola Nesmith." "She's in 1001 movies, from Invisible Ghost and Return of the Vampire to some of the Val Lewtons, and then in the '60s, she had a couple of memorable parts on Karloff's Thriller TV show." "A favourite is "Pigeons From Hell"." "She was the old zombie woman who killed people with an axe." "She's also in "The Hungry Glass"" "as the old hag who wants to be left alone with her mirrors." "Ottola Nesmith was also a Los Angeles TV horror host in the '50s." "Around the time of Vampira, she called herself "the lady ghoul"" "and she was a demented garbage-picking old witch." "One night, hosting Frankenstein, she introduced herself as Mae Clarke, the leading lady of Frankenstein, and she did the whole show saying she was Mae Clarke." "Ottola has left, but we'll continue." "The next morning Mae Clarke is in a beauty parlour and hears people saying how horrible she looked on TV last night." "She must be hitting the bottle, yadda yadda." "And Mae Clarke gets sore and sues for a million dollars." "And if this isn't weird enough," "Ottola Nesmith showed up in court in her lady ghoul costume and hammed it up on the witness stand." "Mae Clarke ended up settling for $7,000." "Not quite a million." "You notice the ceiling in all these shop scenes." "An unusual touch in an old movie." "Orson Welles did it in Citizen Kane and got a lot of attention, but here they are in The Wolf Man too." "A reason The Wolf Man is so classy is the photography by Joseph Valentine, real name Giuseppe Valentino, who got into picture-making in the early days, 1918." "He did a lot at Universal." "His first four Oscar nominations were for Universal movies." "He worked for Hitchcock on Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, and Rope, the Hitchcock movie that tries to give the impression the whole thing was shot in one take." "Valentine did win an Oscar for Joan of Arc, which might have prompted him to take the next step." "He announced he was going to retire from photography and try directing." "So there he is on top of the world, and you know where this is headed." "He has a heart attack in his sleep one night." "He died at age 48." "And my next-to-last actor bio, Patric Knowles." "According to everybody, Knowles was a very nice guy." "He worked at Warner Bros, Paramount, and Universal." "He said working at Warner Bros was a training experience," "Paramount was just work, work, work, but Universal was like family." "It was his happiest film experience." "Patric Knowles was born in England." "He worked at his father's publishing house." "His big break came quickly." "He was in a play when he was spotted by a Warner Bros executive and signed up to work at the Warners studio outside London." "That studio was looking to keep Knowles for themselves, but Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros in Hollywood, saw Knowles and thought he was just right to play Errol Flynn's brother in a movie they were going to make, The Charge of the Light Brigade." "The funny thing is, Warners tried to use Knowles to keep Errol Flynn in line." "Warner Bros told Errol Flynn to behave himself, or he'd be out and Patric Knowles would be in." "Well, Knowles and Errol Flynn knew each other in London." "They were buddies." "Knowles was very contented just to be in Flynn's pictures, even in small parts." "In fact, he hurt his career by doing that." "In the Larry Gill script, Knowles is very gruff and jealous in this scene." "He says things to Evelyn Ankers like:" ""Whenever another man talks to you I can't bear it."" "He's like a British Ralph Kramden." "When The Wolf Man was announced, Dick Foran, a cowboy actor at Universal, was lined up to play this part." "But wisely, I think, Universal gave it to Knowles instead." "Knowles was one of several Wolf Man actors who pooh-poohed the picture." "He was in How Green Was My Valley for John Ford before The Wolf Man." "He said he went from How Green Was My Valley to a "class B picture, one of those wolf-man things, just a small part"." "Universal placed him under contract while he was making The Wolf Man." "He was in a lot of pictures there, including Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." "Knowles worked up to the 1970s, and then he retired and did a lot of woodcarving." "He never wrote an autobiography, and he rarely or never gave an interview about his film work." "Every time he was asked he said he had a seriously ill wife to take care of." "Well, this figures, right?" "The wife outlives him." "He died in 1995." "A sequence was shot where Larry Talbot squares off against a trained bear, as part of this carnival scene." "A gypsy played by Kurt Katch walks into the camp leading a tame bear on a chain." "He shouts "Who will dare to wrestle with the bear?"" ""A florin reward for anyone who can throw him."" "This is not in the script." "I'm assuming it was shot this way." "After a few moments of hesitation, Larry drops his stick and steps forward, a wild expression in his eyes." "As Larry looks at the bear, "He looks strange, tense, as if he were beginning to go into a trance."" "The bear gets scared and begins to back away from Larry." "Larry steps up to it, his fists clenched like a boxer." "Finally Larry starts hitting the bear," ""his expression becomes ferocious, his teeth bared in a cruel grin, his eyes wild with a lust to kill."" ""He looks more like an animal than a man."" ""The helpless beast finally stops defending himself, and a last walloping blow topples him over."" ""Larry rushes in to hit him again."" "Gwen steps in and cries out Larry's name and he snaps out of it." "The crowd, which has been quiet, starts dispersing because they know they just saw something unnatural." "According to the Saturday Evening Post, the scene was supposed to end with the bear cowering under a wagon." "It took two days to shoot the scene because the bear wasn't cooperative." "He had been hibernating and the zoo woke him up for Universal." "The bear was very grouchy and started to act up." "According to the article, it was Chaney who ran and hid under the wagon." "Probably the scene was cut because it shows Larry Talbot going loco, even though he's in human form, and that doesn't fit with the rest of the story." "Look up Maria Ouspenskaya in the reference books and you'll find different dates of birth, some as far back as 1867, and some as "recent" as 1887." "Greg Mank, who wrote about her in his book Women in Horror Films, says he can believe the 1887 date, which would make her 54 in The Wolf Man, five years younger than Bela Lugosi, who played her son." "It does sound unbelievable, but she had the kind of hard life that would make somebody look old." "She was born in Russia, and in 1911 she joined the Moscow Art Theatre, the home of Stanislavsky and birthplace of the Method." "Ouspenskaya was in a hundred plays there and she taught drama." "She lived through Russian revolutions and famine and everything else." "Notice her half-moon earrings." "In America she did what she did in Russia:" "Acting in plays and teaching aspiring actors." "She was in Dodsworth on Broadway with Walter Huston." "Sam Goldwyn brought them to Hollywood to appear in the movie version." "Ouspenskaya got an Oscar nomination for her first Hollywood movie." "Three years later she was nominated for Love Affair." "Ouspenskaya taught acting in Hollywood." "She wore a monocle, and she was a terrible chain smoker." "She smoked in her classes, at the studio, and even when she went swimming." "She'd splash around with a cigarette in her mouth." "When the cigarette went out she'd go ashore, light up, then wade back out." "And she smoked in bed, which caught up with her in 1949." "She fell asleep with a cigarette going and, as one insensitive film historian wrote," ""She went up in a blaze of Luckys."" "She sustained third-degree burns and lingered in critical condition before she passed away, leaving an estate of $358." "The 1887 birth date is on her death certificate, and even on her tombstone, which would make her 62 when she died." "According to Greg Mank, more than anyone else in the cast," "Maria Ouspenskaya gives The Wolf Man its power, its sense of classical Greek tragedy." "The movie most like The Wolf Man is Bride of the Gorilla, 1951, written and directed by Curt Siodmak." "It's set on a rubber plantation where Raymond Burr, then very much a Lon Chaney Jr type, falls in love with his boss's wife and kills the guy." "But an old female servant, very much like Maleva, sees this and she puts a curse on Burr." "The idea was the same as in Siodmak's early scripts of The Wolf Man." "The audience isn't sure whether he turns into a gorilla or if it's all in his head." "Lon Chaney was in it as a policeman, and there's the Maleva character, a wolfbane-like plant of evil, Burr gets caught in an animal trap - everything, right down the line." "It's a disguised semi-remake of The Wolf Man." "Although I've tried, I can't get Curt Siodmak to admit it." "Another piece of useless trivia:" "Back in the '60s there were monster magazines that would take photos from horror movies and give 'em crazy captions." "A set of bubble-gum trading cards did the same thing, and one was a picture of the wolf man in a tree looking down on Evelyn Ankers." "In the caption she's saying "Sometimes I feel there's something hovering over me."" "That goofy trading card is the picture of Ankers that, to this day," "Dee Denning, Evelyn Ankers' daughter, carries around in her wallet." "This scene ends with what I think is the only screen kiss of Chaney and Ankers." "You'd never guess they had no use for each other." "They're also in Ghost of Frankenstein, Son of Dracula," "Weird Woman and The Frozen Ghost, plus some non-horror stuff like North to the Klondike, where Lon Chaney played one of his many, many bad guys." "Another thing that confuses me, if Maleva had a silver charm for Larry, a charm that broke the evil spell, why didn't she give one to Bela?" "Evelyn Ankers remembered shooting the carnival scene with the bear and the bear getting out of hand." "The bear came after her." "Lon Chaney disappeared, and she started running faster than she'd ever run." "She shot up a ladder and an electrician grabbed her and pulled her up onto his platform." ""He blinded the bear with a hot floodlight."" ""The trainer caught up with the animal, retrieved his chain, reprimanded him, and gradually got him back down onto the stage."" "I love this guy here." ""There's a werewolf in camp!"" "You lived with Bela all those years, pal." "Can't you tough it out one more night?" "Maybe they kept Bela on a leash." "Ankers said, when The Wolf Man wrapped up," ""I was relieved and happy that the grey hairs didn't show among the blonde."" "This montage of images was probably inspired by a similar montage in the 1941 Spencer Tracy version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was a new movie when The Wolf Man was being written." "In Jekyll and Hyde the montage was very elaborate and very Freudian." "This one in The Wolf Man doesn't compare." "It's kind of a pile-up of weird images and previous shots from the movie." "But it gets the point across that Larry's starting to really bug out." "Coming up is a great creepy scene where Larry rushes home and starts checking himself for wolf hair." "The music's terrific too." "I love the musical pulse, like a musical heartbeat." "Universal did the same thing in Bride of Frankenstein in the lab scenes." "It's a great effect." "The music is by Frank Skinner and Hans J Salter, who had 11 Academy Award nominations by the end of their lives." "And by Charles Previn, André Previn's uncle, who did win one Oscar." "There's music from other movies in The Wolf Man." "There are some pieces from Man Made Monster, Chaney's first Universal horror, and from The House of the Seven Gables, but probably about 90 per cent of the music in The Wolf Man is new." "And then this Wolf Man music ended up in many of the later Universal horrors." "Some of it is even in Creature From the Black Lagoon." "They even gave the wolf man his own three-note musical motif, which was later adapted, reorchestrated and reused in the later Wolf Man pictures." "In the Larry Gill script you never see him as the wolf man, except at the end." "And you see it through Gill's eyes, reflected in a pool of water out in the woods someplace." "This scene we're watching here isn't in the Larry Gill script, obviously." "In the Gill script, after the gypsy carnival scene there's a fade when the gypsy tells Gill there's a werewolf in camp." "Then it fades back in on the scene of the sleeping village being woken up by the wolf howls, a scene that's coming up." "You see Larry Gill all worked up and ready to believe anything, and then the next thing you see is the aftermath of one of the wolf murders." "These great werewolf boots, or boots very much like them, were later used for the monsters in Night Monster and Captive Wild Woman." "Art director Robert Boyle says the trees in this forest set were painted black, then coated with glycerine so that they'd pick up the light and look damp." "Here's a good look at a tree, and a great first look at the wolf man." "Some fans complain that Chaney was in an undershirt and now he's got his shirt on." "If you can accept this guy turns into a wolf, then you can damn well accept he's wearing a shirt." "The guy digging the grave is Tom Stevenson, and the grave he's digging is the grave of Jenny Williams, the girl killed by the wolf." "There's an awkward shot in here where you can hear the wolf man howling, and yet they show him with his mouth closed." "Tom Stevenson played the gravedigger in this movie, and he's the wolf man's first victim." "But a year later when Universal made Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, he plays one of the two graverobbers who break into Larry Talbot's crypt." "At this point I have to start ignoring the action of the movie for a while." "There's so much to say about the transformation scenes, and I can't cram it all into the few minutes that the wolf man is on camera." "I got some of the information from Bob Burns, and a great deal more of it from Michael R Thomas." "Mike is a make-up man and a veteran of 20 seasons of Saturday Night Live." "He's an Emmy-award nominee for Saturday Night Live." "He's worked on All My Children, The Sentinel, Ghostbusters, and on and on." "More importantly, he's one of the world's number one Jack Pierce fans." "He's fascinated by Pierce, and he's tried to figure out how Pierce concocted and devised some of his monster make-ups." "Making Chaney up as the wolf man:" "According to Mike, Pierce would start with the wolf-man appliances." "Probably the nose appliance would go on first." "You can tell from looking at close-up photographs it starts just above Chaney's eyebrows, and it goes down on either side of his nose, underneath his eye bags, and all the way down to his upper lip." "The edges were probably sealed with cotton and collodion, which was something Pierce used extensively." "At this point, Pierce would probably do all the greasepaint work." "The next step after powdering the greasepaint is in dispute." "Michael Blake, an Emmy-winning make-up man, and the expert on Lon Chaney Sr - Mike's written three books on Sr " "Michael Blake's hunch is that Pierce did lay the rest of the facial hair on by hand." "He says Pierce would have put spirit gum on a section of Chaney's face, taken some yak hair, held it in his hand, cut it at an angle, applied it to Chaney's face a section at a time, and then cut and trimmed it." "That is what the Universal publicity mill wanted people to believe, that Pierce glued every single hair onto the head of every monster he ever made, that he started from scratch every time." "Michael R Thomas believes Pierce might have had ventilated hairpieces made." "The technical term, he tells me, is lace hairpieces." "They're like pre-made beards, moustaches and sideburns, with the yak hair ventilated, or crocheted, onto silk or nylon net." "Mike Thomas thinks that, to save time, Pierce had several of these pieces made - for example, one to go around Chaney's neck like a turtleneck." "Chaney tore out the throat of the gravedigger but he doesn't have a drop of blood on him." "Next we come to the wolf-man wig, which would have been a large one, going from Chaney's eyebrows, over his head, and down the back of his neck." "Most wigs end at the nape, but this was different because the hairline was so much lower than the average wig." "If you look at stills, you see that Chaney's eyebrows are nonexistent." "They're covered up by the snout appliance." "The hairline of the wig starts just above where his eyebrows would have been." "The snout would go on first, then the hand-laid hair, or the ventilated hairpieces, depending on what procedure you think Pierce used, and then the wig." "If you believe Chaney did use ventilated hairpieces, then the next step would be to dress the edges of the hairpieces and the wig using more yak hair." "Yak hair is stiffer than crepe hair and it has more body to it, so it's more manageable." "It's also more expensive." "Before I go on I wanna read a short item from The Wolf Man press book about how Jack Pierce supposedly came up with the wolf-man make-up." ""Five years of research, five months' preparation, and almost five hours of daily work were required by Jack Pierce," "Universal Studio make-up chief, in making the werewolf of Lon Chaney for the horror drama The Wolf Man."" ""Pierce spent five years combing histories of England in a vain attempt to find an illustration of a werewolf."" ""Finally, Pierce decided to create a make-up combining human features with those of a wolf."" "Duh!" "If it took Pierce five years to figure that out, maybe Universal was right when they kicked him out for being too slow." "According to an article written by a reporter who was on the set," "Jack Pierce had a real wolf on hand at some point and he used it as a model." "And supposedly the wolf slunk into the corner of its cage when it got a load of Chaney in make-up." "You can believe those two stories or not." "I don't." "The wolf-man hands were slip-ons, like big gloves." "When you look at the publicity photos you can see a seam around the fingers." "Something like that would usually be made from a mould." "They'd get an impression of Chaney's hands, and use that to make the slip-on wolf-man gloves." "In a photo from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man a sleeve of Chaney's is riding up higher than it should, and you can see buttons on the side of one glove." "Presumably the gloves and the wolf man were made the same way." "They'd slip on, button up, and they wouldn't come off." "Mike Thomas says that the fangs, which went over Chaney's teeth, could have been wood, ivory, or very hard dental wax, which is very sculptable." "Mike Thomas's final theory is that the feet were probably a collaboration between Make-up, Props, and Wardrobe." "He thinks the wardrobe department contrived something to fit Chaney's feet and the prop department modified it so that Chaney could walk around without having to make the muscular effort of standing on tiptoe." "These boots probably pointed his feet and then made it impossible to bend his feet back and stand flatfooted." "They were probably like women's high-heeled boots without the heels and very formfitting." "These are just educated guesses, 60 years after a movie's been made and all the paperwork and the people are gone." "The boots seemed to hold that position so stiffly, it appears they were built to be extremely rigid so that it would be impossible for Chaney to walk flatfooted." "Chaney once said about his monster roles:" ""I guess I have the right attitude about this stuff."" ""It's terribly fatiguing and nerve-racking."" ""Several times they tried making up stunt men to relieve me, but they couldn't take it for more than a few hours, and then it's up to Chaney again."" "It was during the making of The Wolf Man that Universal decided Chaney would play the monster in Ghost of Frankenstein." "Jack Pierce had to start measuring Chaney for wigs for Chaney to play the monster, very likely while The Wolf Man was still in production." "Doris Lloyd's on the steps of the cathedral built for Chaney Sr's Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1923." "The only time you see a facial transformation is near the very end, but if I wait till then to start talking about it" "I'll be talking after the movie's over, so I'm going to continue to ignore the action." "Lon Chaney claimed that for the transformations he had to plant himself in one position for 22 hours while Pierce put make-up on him and they shot a few frames, then Pierce put on more make-up and they shot a few more frames..." "That's baloney." "Here's how they really did it, from the lips of Jack Pierce and Lon Chaney to the ears of Bob Burns and now passed along to us." "Chaney would get into position for the transformation scenes and he'd be given a headrest thing." "In the old days of picture-taking, of taking photographs, the days of old tintype pictures, the people had to stay still for, like, a minute or else they'd come out blurry." "They'd have their necks in headrests and couldn't move." "On The Wolf Man, the movie camera would be in position pointed at Chaney, then they'd set up two cameras, what used to be called portrait cameras, one to the left of the movie camera and one to the right." "All three cameras, the movie camera and the two portrait cameras, would be pointing at Chaney." "They'd triangle in on him like a big letter V." "The portrait cameras would have 8 x 10 pieces of frosted glass as part of 'em, and then while Chaney sat, or laid, or whatever he was doing in the headrest, an artist would draw the outline of Chaney" "on the frosted glass of the two portrait cameras." "They also had a frosted glass piece on the movie camera, and they drew his outline there too." "They could photograph him for a few frames, he could get in the make-up chair and have a bit of wolf-man make-up put on, then he'd go back in front of the cameras, put his neck in the headrest," "and start repositioning himself and wiggling around until he matched up with the outlines drawn on the frosted glass of all three cameras." "More frames would be photographed, then he'd go back into make-up, and on and on until all the transformation was done." "How long did it take?" "We don't know." "All the behind-the-scenes paperwork and daily production reports are lost." "But it had to be a long process." "To do the make-up for an ordinary scene of Chaney running around the woods probably took four hours." "And when I say four hours" "I mean four hours of Jack Pierce doing nothing but working on Chaney." "Add to that four hours the time involved in lining Chaney up for the various shots and him going back and forth from the stage to make-up over and over and over." "Pierce had to do the make-up differently for the transformation scenes." "It's doubtful that Pierce just kept on applying make-up on top of make-up." "It appears that, especially when it came time to put that wolf snout on," "I guess the make-up that Pierce had already applied had to be removed." "Then, after putting the snout on, the make-up would be reapplied." "Six or seven stages of transformation, six or seven dissolves, is an enormous amount of time." "I interviewed Mark Richman, who transformed into a monster in a 1965 Universal movie called Dark Intruder." "His recollection was that that little scene took 15 hours." "Between each stage of the transformation he was back and forth to make-up where he had five or six guys working on him." "Chaney used to say that, for scenes of his hands changing into wolf claws, they'd get little tacks and nail his fingertips to the floor or to whatever, so they wouldn't move during the process." "I was a kid when I first read that." "I knew that couldn't have been how they did it." "The hands would be done the same way as the head shots, with different cameras." "In fact, for a shot of a hand changing or a shot of feet changing, it wouldn't be Chaney." "They'd get a stand-in." "Robert Skotak, the Oscar-winning special-effects artist of Aliens and Terminator 2, tells me that the effects guy at Universal was a guy named Charlie Baker, and Charlie Baker would supervise the miniatures." "Probably the miniature of Talbot Castle at the beginning was Baker's." "According to Baker, his hand had the right character, the right look." "Occasionally, when just hands were involved in a transformation, he'd be the stand-in." "This business of the three cameras was a pretty easy way to do the transformation scenes." "It's also very effective." "As they went along they came up with other clever ideas, like in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, where Chaney's in the hospital bed and transforms into the wolf man." "The pillow that his head is on was actually plaster of Paris with cloth over it - cloth probably glued to it - and the wrinkles never changed." "That's another trade secret that Bob Burns got directly from Jack Pierce." "Coming up here is a nice shot of the forest." "Followed by a repeat shot of the wolf man on the prowl." "The paperwork on The Wolf Man is all gone, but we know about the transformations in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." "The scene of Chaney in the London hotel room talking to Lou Costello on the phone was not directed by Charles Barton, who did the rest of the movie." "It was directed by a guy named Jack Hively." "Hively came in on a Monday to shoot Chaney transforming." "Chaney collapses into a chair and there's a close-up as he changes." "They started shooting at nine in the morning, alternately shooting, making Chaney up, shooting, making Chaney up." "They took a break for lunch and they shot until 5.15 in the afternoon." "And still they weren't done." "They came back the next day, started shooting at 9.50, and finished the transformation scene at noon." "And after that they shot the scene of Chaney running around the apartment." "So that transformation scene took ten hours, spread out over two days." "So Chaney's story that he had to stay in one position for 22 hours, couldn't even go to the bathroom - that's all nonsense." "He went home in the middle of shooting that hotel scene." "There isn't as much information about the other transformation in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, where Chaney changes in the woods." "That appears to have been shot all in one day." "It seems like that transformation might have been shot in 11 hours." "But there's a little guesswork involved, so don't quote me on that." "Now from the not-so-funny department:" "Chaney attempted to commit suicide after Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." "His wife blamed it on The Wolf Man." "She said he was so emotionally exhausted from the transformation that he tried to do himself in." "A friend of Chaney's was quoted in the Los Angeles Examiner saying "Chaney was near collapse from overwork due to the ordeal of roles in which he tried to follow the gruelling characterisations originated by his father." "He'd recently worked as the wolf man in shots which required him to stand in trying positions virtually motionless for eight to ten hours a day, to permit photography showing him changing into a wolf."" ""It was a tremendous ordeal for the actor."" "They don't mention that this happened six weeks after Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." "Chaney was on the Tonight show toward the end of his life and his voice was hideously hoarse." "Chaney said the reason his voice was husky was because 400 kids had stopped by his house one Halloween and they wanted to hear the wolf-man growl." "And he had done it "for every one of the little boogers"" "and he'd screwed up his voice." "That wasn't true, unfortunately." "It was really throat cancer." "Chaney loved The Wolf Man, but he also gave it the blame for things, from a suicide attempt to the throat cancer that killed him." "I should also mention that Jack Pierce and Lon Chaney did not like each other." "They had abrasive personalities." "Pierce was a curmudgeon, not an easy guy to get along with." "Chaney liked to brawl and pick on people and act like a big kid." "He wouldn't like Pierce, and vice versa." "Bob Burns told me about this Pierce-Chaney situation." "His theory is that Chaney Jr felt a little put out because his dad was a great make-up artist and he wasn't." "Burns says Pierce probably needled Chaney about that a little bit." "One thing Pierce did with the make-up was apply the yak hair and then singe it." "That made the ends curl a little more." "Pierce would use a curling iron and every so often he'd burn the hell out of Chaney and say it was an accident." "But everybody, including Chaney I'm sure, knew better." "Pierce and Chaney fought all the time." "Pierce refused to make Chaney up after a while." "House of Dracula is one movie where Pierce did not do Chaney's make-up." "There are photos of Pierce working on Chaney in House of Dracula, but those were for publicity." "Pierce refused to even work on him, and Chaney refused to work with Pierce." "Bob Burns can't be positive but his memory is that it was a make-up man named Emile LaVigne who did the make-up on Chaney for House of Dracula, because Pierce and Chaney had this clash." "They were total opposites and just didn't like each other." "One movie that ripped off The Wolf Man was The Undying Monster, made by 20th Century Fox at exactly the same time as Cat People." "The studios were all trying to jump on the horror bandwagon." "Undying Monster was very traditional, set in and around a spooky English castle." "It had a musical score very much in The Wolf Man style." "It even had a Wolf Man poem written in the same fashion as "Even a man who is pure in heart"." "The poem in Undying Monster goes:" ""When stars are bright on a frosty night" "You wear thy bane on the rocky lane."" "Not as good." "Siodmak tells the story that years after he wrote The Wolf Man, he got a letter from a professor in Alabama pointing out the similarities between Wolf Man and classic Greek plays." "Siodmak could've found that out sooner if he'd asked George Waggner." "In a Saturday Evening Post article, two months after The Wolf Man premiered," "Waggner told the writer of the article:" ""My horror films have to be tragic and inevitable, just like a Greek play."" "Siodmak told me that Waggner's idea of fun was to drink beer and sing songs, so I guess he didn't take that Greek business seriously when Waggner said it." "He waited for the university guy to put it in a letter." "Waggner graduated from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy intending to be a doctor." "But World War I came along and Waggner went into the army." "In the 1920s he went to Hollywood, worked as an actor, and then became a screenwriter." "He was also a composer who wrote over 100 songs." "A schmaltzy pop lyricist, according to film historian Michael H Price." "Waggner wrote movies, became a director, and was one of the main forces behind the Universal horror films." "He directed and/or produced a lot of the best of 'em." "He wound up at the Motion Picture home and was pretty much out of it for a long time before he finally passed away." "I made an effort to get in touch with him there." "So did Greg Mank and a lot of other people." "But we were told that he wasn't in any condition to talk about his career, which is really too bad, because George Waggner would have been the person to talk about the Universal horror movies of the '40s." "He had a set formula for them, and it might have been Waggner, not Siodmak, who came up with the idea of adding modern psychology to the formula, which is what they did in The Wolf Man." "Siodmak studied Freud before he wrote this script." "The way he develops the character of Larry Talbot is very clever." "Larry comes home after years of self-exile, and now he's so American that he no longer seems to belong among his own people." "It's easy to forget while watching The Wolf Man that this is the house Larry Talbot grew up in, because he acts so much like an outsider, and he's treated like an outsider." "Larry has a number of defining speeches where he says things like:" ""I can figure out anything if you'd give me things I can do with my hands."" "At another point he says "I'm no good with theory."" "Over and over, Siodmak has Larry remind us that he, Larry, can't relate to things you can't touch." "Larry kills the wolf and it turns out he killed Bela, Larry's scars heal overnight, and it's been well established that Larry's not gonna cope with any of this." "Curt Siodmak preferred the script where Larry Gill, the American mechanic, becomes the wolf man." "Siodmak says "That's even worse than an Englishman becoming a wolf man."" "He thinks it would have had more impact that way." "He and I have to agree to disagree on that." "I prefer the way he rewrote it, where Larry's not only dealing with werewolfism, but also strained relations with his father and feelings of alienation in his hometown." "As film historian Mike Brunas wrote," ""The resentment of the outwardly kindly Larry comes out in his wolf self."" ""A marauding id terrorising the populace."" "We the audience know Larry really does turn into a werewolf." "We know that this advice from Sir John is all off-base." "This tough-love approach of Sir John's isn't doing Larry a bit of good." "And it's easy to start thinking of Sir John as part of the problem." "But he is as sure as you and I are that there are no such things as werewolves, and so his attitude of "come on, Larry, snap out of it" is pretty realistic." "We think of characters like Sir John, who refuse to believe in monsters, as closed-minded, when they're the most true-to-life people in the movie." "Just to finish up on the Larry Gill script, I'll tell you now how it ends." "Larry Gill and Frank Andrews don't get along." "In the movie, Frank Andrews thinks Larry Talbot is an oddball." "In the Gill script, Frank Andrews is angry and jealous." "At one point he threatens to shoot Larry down like a dog." "This gives Gill an idea." "He wants to get everything over with." "Gill takes the silver charm that Maleva gave him." "He goes into Sir John's observatory and melts down the silver charm and forges it into a silver bullet." "He makes peace with Andrews, but he gives him the silver bullet and tells him to use it on the wolf if the wolf attacks Gwen." "A four-legged wolf does attack Gwen, but Frank Andrews shows up and shoots it with the silver bullet." "The wounded wolf runs off, and then, a few minutes later, Larry Gill, shot, his face unseen by the camera, staggers to the edge of a pool, and sees a monstrous wolf's face reflected in the water just before he dies." "Other hunters run over." "They see the body, roll it over, and it's Larry Gill." "The Larry Gill script ends with nobody ever knowing if he really was a werewolf, or if it was all a hallucination on his part." "Maria Ouspenskaya is antagonistic toward Claude Rains in this next scene." "You'd think she'd talk to him one werewolf parent to another and be a little understanding, but she just taunts the guy." "You can chalk it up to class issues, or maybe Maleva knows intuitively that Sir John is giving Larry bum advice." "I never figured out why she's so catty with him." "Maleva is a mother figure to Larry Talbot." "Maybe that's why they never mention Larry's real mother, to underline the impression that Maleva's his closest thing to a real mother." "To give you an idea how much like a factory most of the studios were," "The Wolf Man wrapped around the end of November 1941, and by mid-December, a couple of weeks later, everybody involved with The Wolf Man was working on their next picture." "Joseph Valentine and Robert Boyle were making Saboteur with Alfred Hitchcock." "That was Boyle's debut as an art director." "Patric Knowles and Maria Ouspenskaya were starring in Mystery of Marie Roget, and everybody else was making The Ghost of Frankenstein:" "George Waggner, Lon Chaney, Evelyn Ankers, Ralph Bellamy, Bela Lugosi, a lot of the supporting actors, and also behind-the-scenes people like Jack Pierce." "It was like an instant Wolf Man reunion." "That's how fast this stuff was made, without time to breathe between pictures." "Scenes for The Wolf Man were being filmed in late November." "By December 9 - there's a repeat shot of the wolf man - by December 9 it was edited and scored, and a print was being shown to a Variety critic in a Universal screening room." "And here comes yet another repeat shot of the wolf man." "A story that Evelyn Ankers told in the McClelland book is about the fog in the movie." "She wrote that the prop men used fog machines to make that low blanket of fog." "It was that real stinky, oily, chemical fog they used in the old days." "The stuff that gave everybody problems." "Anyway, when the wolf man attacks her, she goes down, and had to stay down for the rest of the scene." "And she passed out." "The director said "cut" and everybody forgot her because she was on the floor, conked out, covered by the blanket of fog." "Finally somebody remembered she'd been in the scene, and they found her." "Pay attention to how roughly Lon Chaney treats Evelyn Ankers in this shot." "Sir John is gonna show up and kill the wolf man with the silver cane." "This fits in with the rest of The Wolf Man." "It's a tragedy right across the board." "Larry gets killed by his own father, with the silver cane Larry gave him." "He really does come to a predestined end as Maleva had predicted." "One old script had Sir John shoot the wolf man." "The silver cane is better." "It brings the story full circle to have Larry killed with the cane next to what looks like the very same tree where Larry killed the wolf." "Reportedly Claude Rains got carried away when he belted Chaney with the cane." "Rains had a stunt man for part of this fight." "Probably Chaney did too." "But supposedly Rains really did whack Chaney full force with the cane." "They gave Chaney an ice pack, and it didn't help." "He had a black eye, it was all swollen up, and they had to send him home." "The guys who wrote film reviews did not give horror movies a fair shake." "Most of 'em saw each horror movie as an excuse to set aside constructive reviewing and just be nasty or comical, or both." "The New York World-Telegram:" ""The success of films of this kind depends on suspense and eeriness."" ""The Wolf Man lacks both."" "Baltimore Evening Sun:" ""It isn't Chaney's intention to be comical, but you can't help laughing."" "Portland Oregon News:" ""It takes a lot of imagination to get more than a laugh out of The Wolf Man."" "Lon Chaney's passing through his Don King phase there." "Baltimore Sun:" ""The writing and direction are lamentably bad." "The acting is universally wooden."" "A thing you see in every werewolf movie except The Wolf Man is the moon." "Not once do they show the moon." "And no one ever says "full moon"." "Those things were rectified in the sequels." "In that Val Lewton article, something else he wrote is 100% correct:" "That no type of picture reacts so favourably to better staging, better casts, more time and money spent on quality than the horror film." ""Horror films must be filmed carefully." "They must be just right."" "The Wolf Man was done just right, no matter what Val Lewton might've said." "And it was a huge hit." "It was on a double bill with The Mad Doctor of Market Street with Lionel Atwill." "Within months it had made a million dollars." "George Waggner got a diamond ring for his wife, and the executive producer got a $10,000 bonus." "Curt Siodmak asked for a $25 raise." "And Universal said no." ""Wolf Man makes a powerful appeal to our imaginations", wrote film historian Michael Brunas." ""The tragic story of Laurence Talbot is basic yet compelling, and classically structured."" ""Critics may be reluctant to include the film on the list of horror classics, but its popularity and influence demand its inclusion."" "I'm Tom Weaver." "Thank you for listening."