When stab comes to gouge, the Hammer Films we love most are the ones with the best monsters. Oliver Reed’s turn as the soul-tortured hombre lobo is the most successful Hammer creature this side of Christopher Lee’s triumvirate of terror icons. This hairy, ferocious, blood-dripping beast makes its supreme impression with less than a half-hour of screen time. Rated highly by Hammer fans, the sad tale of León Carido unspools in the style format of Edna Ferber: its episodes span thirty years and three generations!
Favorite Oliver Reed (These Are the Damned, The Girl-Getters) more or less began his feature career at Hammer Films, and even though he soon graduated to bigger stardom, frequently expressed gratitude for his time spent as a pirate, Teddy Boy thug, and his role in this movie — perhaps the best screen werewolf of them all.
Although produced as part of a co-production deal with Universal-International, The Curse of the Werewolf doesn’t follow the pattern of Universal’s best(ial)-known shape-shifter, Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man. It also doesn’t adopt all of Curt Siodmak’s added lycanthropic inventions — pentagrams, etc.. The inspiration is the 1933 book The Werewolf of Paris. Novelist Guy Endore reportedly broke into the world of screenwriting with that daring allegorical novel, in which a cursed young man is haunted by lycanthropic nightmares, and commits vampire-like crimes during the French Commune of the 1870s. Scripter ‘John Elder’ retains the idea of a cursed child being conceived through rape, but omits Endore’s detail that the rapist is a priest.
Instead, the episodic storyline nominates a corrupt, cruel Spanish nobleman as its first villain, much like the sordid backstory in Hammer’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. León’s biological father is a forgotten prisoner who has unaccountably become ‘bestial.’ This seems to hook up with screenwriter Jimmy Sangster’s The Revenge of Frankenstein, where brutality and class oppression can somehow ‘devolve’ a man to a cannibalistic state.
The worldview in The Curse of the Werewolf is even more negative. An unpleasant expression of satanic power versus Christian love, the screenplay revels in perversions of Catholic symbols, as if it were a Gothic take on The Exorcist. Spirits pick up somewhat with the entrance of Oliver Reed, a dynamic actor finally given a role he can, uh, sink his teeth into. Reed’s third-act monster scenes are brief but ferocious, and left their mark on many a young horror film fan.
Hammer reportedly relocated the storyline to 18th-century Spain, so as to make use of expensive sets constructed at their Bray Studios headquarters for an abandoned film project. On a whim, the horrid Marqués Siniestro (Anthony Dawson) imprisons a wretched beggar (Richard Wordsworth of The Quatermass Xperiment), and then forgets about him. Ten years later, the man is reduced to a slobbering brute. When a mute servant girl (Yvonne Romain) refuses his advances, the Marqués has her thrown in with the beggar. He dies while assaulting her, and she escapes and attempts suicide. Kindly Don Alfredo Carido (Clifford Evans) rescues the servant girl and gives her shelter, but she dies giving birth to her child. An illegitimate child born on Christmas Day is apparently cursed with the horror of lycanthropy — at his baptism, the holy water boils. Little León’s childhood is filled with nightmares, and local sheep are torn to bits. Don Carido adopts the orphan, and he and the local priest (John Gabriel) cover for him as best they can.
When grown, León leaves home to work in a winery. He falls in love with Cristina Fernando (Catherine Feller), who is already promised to another. The emotional torment triggers the young Carido’s evil, lupine personality. He succumbs to the full moon and commits several murders, only to find that Cristina’s influence, as promised by the Priest, does indeed counteract the pull of the demon within him. The authorities arrest León for the murder of a co-worker, a decision the jailer soon regrets. The tormented young man transforms into a superhuman wolf monster before his very eyes.
The episodic plot of The Curse of the Werewolf has epic dimensions that this budget production cannot fill out. Hammer scales everything down to Bray dimensions. The extended back story with its salacious thrills pushes most of the werewolf content into the movie’s second half, and a real snarl & slash Reed-Wolf does not appear until almost the last reel. As happens in too many Hammer thrillers, the werewolf thrills barely get revved up before it’s time to ring down the curtain.
The elaborate back-story essentially re-starts the movie three times. The imprisoned beggar sympathetically played by Richard Wordsworth remains unknown to the players in the second half of the story. The colorful shepherd (George Woodbridge) and wolf hunter (Warren Mitchell) of the adopted boy’s childhood don’t figure into the later story either; every ten minutes or so Curse must establish a new setting with new characters. The story of the adult León ends up being an extended short subject.
The endearing Cristina (played by Catherine Feller of The Gypsy and the Gentleman and Waltz of the Toreadors) briefly lends the film a positive, hopeful note. Cristina gets full audience approval when her true love promises to redeem our hopelessly damned hero. But the opportunity for a lycanthropic Romeo & Juliet is thrown away. Cristina never gets to interact with her beloved monster; the rushed ending doesn’t even give her a close-up.
The monster is a ferocious original, due in no small measure to Oliver Reed’s already considerable brute magnetism. The silver-haired creation resembles a cross between The WereWolf of London and La Bête in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. León’s determination to end his curse (even if it means being burned alive) and his sweaty shakes prior to going ferally ballistic are an improvement on Lon Chaney’s whining self-pity. This is a werewolf that kids can relate to, a blameless bad boy that can’t control his emotions or his violence. Tormented from within and without, León suffers as James Dean’s overly sensitive teenager never did. If the rebel could identify the forces battling within him, he might very well scream, “You’re tearing me apart!”
What is tearing León apart? The dispiritingly ugly and pitiless pre-ordained curse makes this innocent boy evil for no fault of his own. We’d think that a truly Christian God would bless a poor child born under such sorry circumstances. If God is not to be blamed for the injustice visited on this orphan, all that is left is the bland nastiness of an evil aristocrat. What good is Faith if we can be damned by our geneology alone? This horror film posits a cruel Church-invented cosmology of despair. The only logical conclusion is that The Curse of the Werewolf is saying that it’s part of God’s plan to punish the ‘evil’ León.
Moral misery aside, peerless monster excitement is generated as we anticipate León’s transformations; the climax pays off with a powerhouse prison breakout. Dynamic cutting stresses the lightning reflexes of an unpredictable animal free of its cage. When Reed’s wolfman seems to assault the camera, his lunge lifts us right out of our seats. Even though the ‘good stuff’ is brief, no previous beast-man movie approached this level of impact.
The unusually adult The Curse of the Werewolf is still a Hammer favorite. There was no way my parents would let me near this one at age nine. It’s an early high point for the cult status of Oliver Reed. We American kids heard about his horror thriller Paranoiac, but experienced it solely through random photos in Famous Monsters magazine. When we later caught up with Reed much in Women in Love, he was no stranger to us — his brooding characters were always connected to the silver beast in his Hammer classic.
I don’t see the high production values touted by fans and reviewers that name this as a favorite Hammer picture. Bray Studio’s familiar courtyards and manor house rooms don’t look very Castillian even when ornately redressed; this is the first Hammer Film where I realized that the same steps and doorways were only slightly changed from the Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein pictures. Those familiar ‘squiggly columns’ show up in España antigua, as if having migrated from Dracula’s castle. The final same-old same-old location choice is the sand pit quarry that shows up so frequently in Hammer fare. Not that the re-dressings aren’t clever or authentic … it’s just that we never seem to get out of Hammer’s figurative back-yard.
One can’t go wrong by concentrating on Oliver Reed, and on Roy Ashton’s supreme werewolf. The snarling Ollie hobbles along as if his wolf feet were hurting like hell inside his leather boots. Those qualities, and some scenes with Catherine Feller and Yvonne Romain, maintain The Curse of the Werewolf’s status as one of the top early Hammers.
“You’re tearing me apart!” Wonderful, Glenn, just wonderful.