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Synopsis: A beggar wanders into a Spanish town. There is nothing to be had in this town because it has all been seized by the local marquis, who, as fate would have it, is having a banquet that very night. The beggar ventures to pay the marquis a visit during the feast. The marquis doesn't take kindly to party crashers and decides to execute the beggar, but the marquesa intervenes to spare his life, though perhaps death might have been kind. The beggar is thrown into an oubliette, and forgotten by all save the jailer and his daughter, who feed the beggar. One day, driven mad by hunger and confinement, the beggar rapes the jailer's daughter. She runs away rather than face her shame, and is taken in by the Corledo. family. In time, she grows round with the beggar's child and on Christmas, she dies giving birth. Don Corledo names the child Leon and raises him as his own . When Leon is six years old, he begins to have horrible nightmares. A kind-hearted child, Leon flinches at the death of a squirrel and kisses the gunshot wound to make it better. The taste of blood is on his lips from then on. Concurrent with these are raids on neighboring sheep by wolves. One night, Leon comes home with an inexplicable injury: he's been shot in the leg. The shepherd swears up and down that he shot at a wolf; Don Corledo makes the connection in his mind. Soon, it is painfully obvious that Leon suffers from lycanthropy. Consulting the family's priest offers some solutions: Don Corledo puts bars on Leon's windows--to keep away the nightmares, he tells his adopted son--and lavishes love and kindness on the child. This seems to work and Leon grows into a fine young man. When Leon decideds to venture out into the world to make his own way, his father admires and encourages him. But the world is not so full of lovingkindness as his family, and when Leon encounters the temptations of the flesh, the beast within him is awakened...

Source Materials: The Curse of the Werewolf is nominally based on Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris. I say "nominally" because what this film takes from its source novel is the origin of werewolf and practically nothing else. The film, notably, is not set in Paris, nor even in France. There is no long medition on violence and massacre as the lycanthropic pursuits of ordinary men, there is no long set piece in the Paris Commune. The movie bears no resemblance to Endore's novel whatsoever. While it's fairly common for literary adaptations to wander far and wide, and given that the origins of lycanthropy as laid out in the novel are folkloric and there for the taking for anyone who wants them, one wonders why Hammer Studios gave credit to the novel in the first place, let alone paying for the rights to it. The Boys of Bray were notorious skinflints, so one might even presume that they paid for the rights on the advice of their lawyers, because, lord knows, the rest of the movie shows a cost-cutting studio at work. And cost-cutting is at the heart of almost everything that is wrong with this movie. It's a movie that does so much right that it almost hurts to see the studio sabotage it.

Oppulence on a Budget: No other director squeezed as much mood out of Hammer's familiar sets than Terence Fisher. Fisher's films were consistently the most accomplished of Hammer's output and The Curse of the Werewolf is no different. With limited resources to re-dress Hammer's standing sets, Fisher managed to give the film a look that none of the other gothics from the studio--not even those he himself directed--much resembles. I know intellectually that the Marquis's banquet hall is a hold-over from the Dracula films, but it doesn't look it in this film. Ditto the sleepy little town in the shadow of the castle. Unlike the other films from the studio, this one isn't set in England or in Eastern Europe, but in Spain, and damned if Fisher doesn't fool the audience into thinking it was shot there. A number of shots in the film showcase Fisher at his most artful: specifically the shot where Leon's lady love searches for him in the street, unaware of his presence on the rooftops behind him; and the shot earlier in the film in which the young leon pulls vainly at the bars on his window as the full moon shines on his face. This is an attractive movie.

Subtext: The werewolf myth is given a different spin here. Lycanthropy isn't transmitted by the bite of a werewolf. The werewolf in this film is born bad. He's a child of rape born on Christmas day. The film doesn't go as far as some folkloric werewolves, in which simply being evil was enough to bring on the curse. In this, the film follows on the heels of Universal's The Wolf Man, and like poor doomed Larry Talbot, Leon is a tragic figure, a good man with an affliction (it's called an "affliction" in the movie, as it so happens). Unlike the Universal werewolves, though, Hammer's werewolf carries with it the moralizing tendencies of the studio. It's worth keeping in mind that horror movies as such were banned in the UK for many years on moral grounds, so it is perhaps understandable that Hammer might feel the need to provide a sermon with every one of their movies. Given the later furor over so-called "video nasties," they may even have been justified in this posture. The end result is an idiom of conservative--even reactionary--moral rectitude. The Curse of the Werewolf is no different. One can see in this movie an allegory for original sin. This is made explicit late in the film when Leon is confronted with sin as such, which provides the trigger for the wolf inside him. This is yet another Hammer film in which sexual awakening is equated with evil. Unusual for Hammer, it is the sexual awakening of a male character, which mitigates the institutional misogyny of which the studio was often guilty, but that doesn't stop the film from punishing the sinner. Sex equals death in the Hammer universe.

The film benefits from two superb performances. Oliver Reed was soon to prove himself a talent too large for Hammer studios, a fact on full display in this film. Reed did some good work for Hammer, and this is the best performance he gave for the studio. Hammer never really took advantage of the menace Reed was capable of generating, which is too bad, but on the other hand, this film showed Reed at his most sympathetic. Clifford Evans gets the role of the savant in this film, playing Leon's father, Don Corledo. Unlike most of Hammer's savant characters--Van Helsing, for instance--Don Corledo seems more of a New Testament kind of savant. His initial solution to his son's problem is loving kindness. I can't imagine any of Hammer's vampire hunters trying such a thing. And at the end of the film, when that has failed, there is no catharsis in the demise of the monster. This may be an element built into the werewolf myth, because the werewolf, after all, is a reflection of ourselves in a way the vampire is not. The vampire is ultimately an external evil, and its destruction feeds a basic xenophobia, but the werewolf...well, the werewolf is the baser nature of all human beings.

Cost Cutting: Hammer's werewolf is pretty good, as such beasties go. He's more convincing and more menacing than Universal's werewolves ever were, though perhaps not as convincingly trapped between beast and man as the werewolves in more contemporary films. The transformation here is a variant on the one in the Universal films, in which lap disolves between stages accomplish the change rather than on-camera effects. But we only get one transformation and that's ten minutes before the end of the movie. Here's where the movie stumbles. Having teased the audience with the promise of a werewolf, the film skimps on werewolf mayhem. And once the actual werewolf mayhem is on-camera, the movie abruptly ends. A quick look at the 90 minute running time of the film shows that Hammer's well known formula has imposed its tyranny here, much to the movie's detriment. Would it have killed them to have budgeted for another ten minutes of running time? Would it have killed them to have provided a set-piece or two for the werewolf they so lovingly created? Alas, it was not to be. For all of the film's virtues, it seems truncated.

But even in this form, the movie closed the book on werewolf movies for a long, long time. It was twenty years before another significant werewolf movie showed up, though I wonder if that had more to do with the changing nature of the horror movie than any other cause. In the late sixties, Hammer's brand of moralizing horror would be swept away.

5/21/06.