The Werewolf (1956)

Director: Fred F. Sears 
Date Watched: 10-24-2024
Where: At home, on a Blu-ray I own
Rating: 6.5/10

I’d never heard of this film before buying a 4-Disc Blu-ray box set, Cold War Creatures: Four Films from Sam Katzman. I’d never heard of Sam Katzman either, and of the four films included in the box set, the only title I recognize is The Giant Claw, and even there I have but a vague notion of what the film is about. I think it’s about a giant bird, and in my mind it’s a Rodan knock-off. Then again, I assumed this would be a run-of-the-mill werewolf movie, but it’s a lot more than that, so maybe The Giant Claw is going to be a revelation.

Taken strictly as a horror film, The Werewolf is fairly mundane. It’s not terribly scary, and the monster is more sympathetic than frightening. What makes the film so interesting to me is that it plays more like a film noir than a monster movie. Sure, there’s a werewolf– how could there not be, it’s called The Werewolf?— but he’s barely menacing. On top of that, he’s not your typical werewolf. He doesn’t transform during a full moon, or even at night, and you don’t need silver to kill him. He’s a good, clean-living family man who had the bad luck of running into a couple doctors who experimented on him, and now he transforms into a werewolf during stressful moments. He’s more akin to the Hulk in that regard, another sympathetic monster.

As Duncan Marsh, the man who becomes a werewolf, Steven Ritch isn’t the first actor to play a lycanthrope for pity. Lon Chaney Jr. did the same for his cursed alter-ego. Chaney overdid it, some might say, but Ritch makes Duncan Marsh seem more desperate and less depressed than Lawrence Talbot. With Talbot, I never particularly cared if he was cured, and I mostly wanted to see him turn into a wolf and fight Frankenstein’s monster, or chase Claude Rains through a bog. In Marsh’s case, especially once we meet his wife and son, we are definitely pulling for the werewolf, and despite knowing in the Hays Code universe our guy (wolf?) is going to have to go down in the final reel, we really do want some kind of happy ending to materialize for that family.

Another interesting aspect of this film is that Marsh isn’t always the focus of the action. Unlike most werewolf films, where we follow both man and wolf on their adventure, this film plays more like a ’50s alien invasion or giant monster movie. We spend most of our time with the police and town doctor, who are strategizing ways to bring the werewolf in without hurting Marsh. That also feels fresh. The people in the town he threatens act in a much more nuanced and humane manner than one typically gets in a monster movie, and overall this is a much more intelligent and interesting film than a lot of the monster movies of its era.

Going back to the film noir elements of the film, I enjoyed the way Marsh’s plight was kept shrouded in mystery for the first half of the film. We know he was in some sort of accident, and he hints at being seen by two doctors, but we don’t learn for quite some time exactly how it all went down, which again feels more like a noir tale of a doomed man, falsely accused of a crime, trying to track down the clues and solve the crime himself. This is like D.O.A., except instead of being poisoned, Frank Bigelow has been inflicted with lycanthropy, and he’s got until the final reel to figure out who did it, and why.

This is good stuff. It’s not great, and if you watch it strictly for scary thrills you may be disappointed, but watch it like the alternate universe monster movie version of The Big Clock and you might find it to be a lot of fun!

The Werewolf Movie Poster

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