Mon 22 Feb 2021
A Horror Movie Review by David Vineyard: THE UNDYING MONSTER (1942).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[9] Comments
THE UNDYING MONSTER. 20th Century Fox, 1942. James Ellison, Heather Angel, John Howard, Bramwell Fletcher, Heather Thatcher, Aubrey Mather, Halliwell Hobbes. Screenplay by Lillie Hayward and Michael Jacoby, based on the novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish (Heath Cranton, UK, hardcover, 1922. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1936). Directed by John Brahm.
This is a B-movie. Don’t get confused because it is well done, it’s a B by a director, John Brahm, who was about to breakout into a brief A career (The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Brasher Doubloon) before eventually ending up directing television. What he does here is to bring an A sensibility and skills to a B film for all its B trappings and cast.
The novel, by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, is among other things, one of the best werewolf novels ever written. Admittedly that isn’t a very wide area, there’s Dumas’s The Wolf Leader, Stevenson’s updated Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Guy Endore’s Werewolf of Paris, and in modern times, a handful of books by Poul Anderson, Stephen King, Robert McKinnon, Gary Brander, and Richard Jacoma, but for all their popularity in film, there are relatively few literary werewolves worth noting.
I guess they are too hairy and smelly to be as sexy as vampires.
The novel is somewhat more serious and better than the film, though the basic story is the same. John Hammond is the scion of cursed family haunted by a monster that takes the life of the oldest born. He brings in a friend to help and it is discovered an ancient Viking curse turns the Hammond men into ravening beasts at a certain age. Much of the novel is uncovering that curse and then finding a way to reverse it before it is too late.
It is an excellent supernatural novel that comes close to actually making werewolves halfway believable and is full of invention and ideas. Of its kind it is a small and distinguished classic.
The film keeps the central idea, but loses much of what makes the novel a classic of its kind.
Yet in its own way the movie, B as it is, is a minor classic too, standing comfortably only just behind The Wolfman and The Werewolf of London despite its cheaper production values.
John Howard (Paramount’s Bulldog Drummond) is John Hammond, scion of the Hammond family, and “victim†of the family curse when his little dog is killed by something in the dark on a foggy night. Not much later there is a human death and Scotland Yard is brought in.
Inspector Craig (Aubrey Mather) thinks this is the perfect case for scientific detective Robert Curtis (James Ellison who had a relatively brief career as a minor leading man and cowboy star) and his female assistant Christy (Heather Thatcher), who is a bit on the screwball side and something of a suffragette (the period is Pre-WW I), who is dispatched to Hammond manor to lay the beast, or the murderer, whichever it may be.
Largely set-bound, Brahm does a good job with dark and light and fog to keep everything swirling around all the fuzzy edges. There is a claustrophobic feel to the film of something awful in the shadows that is well contrasted with Ellison’s bright scientific mind trying to shine light in all those dark corners, even if that light may reveal something science isn’t ready for
This film is as close as you get in the period to “Sherlock Holmes Meets the Wolfman.â€
Things aren’t easy either, Hammond’s beautiful sister (Heather Angel) is endangered, butler Halliwell Hobbes is hiding something, and Dr. Bramwell Fletcher is downright suspicious — is he just jealous of Curtis attraction to Heather Angel, or is there something more going on? He is certainly hiding something.
He knows something.
And why is he poisoning John Hammond?
It’s a fast moving movie, and builds to a fine finish on the cliffs with the mystery of the Hammond curse laid at last, very nearly finally for Curtis.
In some ways the most interesting character in the film is Heather Thatcher’s Christy, Watson to Curtis Holmes. She is a modern mature woman, not a helpless young thing, and she has some actual skills though she is in part comic relief. For once though you can actually see why Curtis might have her around. She isn’t just there to point a gun at the bad guy after Curtis exposes him or look good around the office.
This is no masterpiece. Younger viewers may not have as much patience with it as those of us who grew up on B films.
I would still like to see a more faithful adaptation of the Kerruish novel, but this is damn good on its own and hold up fairly well.
For now you can catch it on YouTube, and it is actually worth a look.
February 22nd, 2021 at 5:10 pm
For another view of the film, Dan Stumpf reviewed it here on this blog quite some time ago now:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=20732
And here’s the link to the YouTube video, for as long as it stays up:
February 22nd, 2021 at 5:33 pm
Heather Angel, indeed a beauty; from Hitchcock’s ‘Lifeboat’. In real life married to some other actor of note, but I can’t immediately recall who or why.
February 22nd, 2021 at 6:16 pm
Heather Angel played the second female lead to Randolph Scott in Last of the Mohicans, the top girls part, Binnie Barnes, and terrific film. She was in support of Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in Suspicion, also Lifeboat, as above, for Htichcock.
Heather was married three times: Ralph Forbes, Henry Wilcoxon and director Robert Sinclair, who was mainly active in theatre. In 1970, some idiot who no doubt in our current climate would be fashionable, broke into their Greenwich Village apartment and stabbed him to death.
February 22nd, 2021 at 7:56 pm
My mistake, Sinclair’s murder occurred in Montecito not Greenwich Village.
February 22nd, 2021 at 9:35 pm
Great info there. Ralph Forbes, yes indeed. His entire family were English actors. But it was really Wilcoxon I was thinking of.
Heather made out better than did Loretta Young. Heather got Henry while Loretta only got the haft!
February 22nd, 2021 at 11:29 pm
As far as Werewolf literature goes, James Blish’s story “And There Shall Be No Darkness” (1950 — filmed in ’74 as THE BEAST MUST DIE) is a favorite of mine.
February 23rd, 2021 at 3:46 pm
Wilcoxon is a distant cousin on my mother’s side of the family.
Dan, agree on the Blish story, and someone, I can’t recall who, did a pretty good story about a modern descendant of Zorro who is a justice seeking werewolf, but compared to vampires they don’t get anywhere near as much ink, though someone once pointed out all Jekyll and Hyde variations are werewolf stories and to some extent so is THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES.
There is an interesting one by Max Brand I reviewed on here sometime back called “Werewolf”, a surprisingly good mix of classic Western and Werewolf tales.
I’ve always looked on Clark’s TRACK OF THE CAT as a sort of were animal story if not wolf, and of course I left off the finest book about were creatures ever written, Williamson’s DARKER THAN YOU THINK.
February 23rd, 2021 at 3:58 pm
I remember taking Williamson’s DARKER THAN YOU THINK up to the checkout counter at the local library when I was maybe 13, and the librarian looking at me and asking are you sure you want that one? I nodded, took it and read it cover to cover that night.
February 23rd, 2021 at 5:52 pm
Geoffrey Household has a tiny little ‘werewolf’ short-story. Knit together with his usual theme of hunting and hunters.