Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: The Wolf Man (Universal, 1941)

[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]The first big takeaway from this movie is what an unlikely movie star Lon Chaney Jr. was. He is a large, beefy sort in The Wolf Man, towering over everyone else he spends time with. His character, Larry Talbot, carries himself in a way that makes him completely unsympathetic to modern audiences. Within the first ten minutes, he: - Operates a telescope to spy on the woman across the street (Gwen Conliffe, played by Evelyn Ankers. Ankers got like 8th billing in the film and is indisputably the co-star). - Asks her out for a date, getting told no three times but showing up anyway - Is a difficult customer in Gwen's store, to the point where I would have called security in her shoes, and NOT because Larry Talbot was the Wolf Man, this well before that - Attempts to pursue Gwen when told she has a fiancé. All Larry really had to do was wait a few years and eighty percent of the eligible men in America would be getting their balls blown off by Nazis, but Christ, Larry didn't take no for an answer. - Lords over his dad, played by Claud Rains, and you can make the argument that Rains looks no more than five years older than Chaney Jr. I was going to make a comment about how Larry, not the Wolf Man, was the real monster, but the behavior you all showed in the original attempt at this thread made it obviously known that the users of Caltrops are a greater horror than anything in this flick. WHAT I LIKED: Although it's 43 minutes before the Wolf Man appears, there are two aspects to it that are undeniably great: 1) Chaney's makeup as the Wolf Man is FANTASTIC. It's been 100 years and nobody has improved upon it. I've seen the Wolf Man movies with Nicholson and del Toro, and they don't look as good as Chaney does here. 2) When he's running around as a werewolf, he's beating the other actors up. There are no quick cuts or Jason Bourne-like editing. If there are stunt men, they are wrestling around like the conflict was real. When the Wolf Man fights his dad, this is exactly how sons looked when they reached 40 and decided they could take the old man out by the (in this movie) heavily-populated graveyard. It's great. For all the weird character decisions this movie made with the protagonist, the action scenes were genuine and I loved them. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey![/quote]