As darn near the only thing I can do today, we saw Cry of the Werewolf (1944), a Nina Foch vehicle in which an aged researcher working on werewolves amongst the Romany stumbles across important information concerning the Princess of werewolves, and is murdered for his troubles in New Orleans. He is found hours after his son returns from research as a chemist in DC, and helps his father’s research assistant begin examining his partially destroyed notes.
Meanwhile, the police get involved, and this is the point where the movie departs the sidewalk for more elevated thoroughfares: as the detective talks on the phone, the door behind him slowly opens. Oh, is the monster going to get him? Is a henchcreature going to leap on him all unawares?
No, he’s ready with a gun – “Come out of there!” he shouts, and we’re genuinely surprised as a trope is overturned. How nice! Even better, the surprises continue; a gun, casually shown in a drawer, is suddenly useful when a werewolf is ready to attack – wait, where did it go? The Princess werewolf is … sad that she must kill the blundering janitor? These and several other unexpected twists in the plot (one even had us exclaiming as we watched) served to elevate the movie from mere horror flick to something a bit more interesting to watch, which helped as, honestly, none of the characters were particularly distinguished1. The cinematography was excellent, although a dark basement was suspiciously non-dark in the light of a single match, and the dialog was merely adequate.
Its merits discussed, in the end it still falls flat and fails to crawl from the great well of standard horror flicks, for the simple reason that no particular theme stands clear in the end. The virtuous lady is rescued, the beast is slain, the bodies are cleaned up – but what light has the movie cast upon our own great moral problems? None that I can see, and, so while the plot enraptures us with people making unexpected decisions or tropes not troping as expected, in the end we don’t feel like we’ve learned anything important. And so the movie, like any story with similar failings, does not become part of the great moral landscape of American culture.
