Director Joe Dante sees it this way: Decades ago, Universal had the Big Three of monsters in Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolfman.
But Wolfie is the one people can relate to most easily. After all, who can identify with a Transylvanian count or a creature cobbled together from other bodies, Dante asks in an extra on a special-edition DVD of “The Wolf Man.”
The role allowed Lon Chaney Jr. to finally emerge from his father’s long shadow and established the rules of the werewolf game still in effect today. Now, the iconic character has been dusted off and given a monster makeover.
Taglines
1941: “His hideous howl a dirge of death!”
2010: “When the moon is full, the legend comes to life.”
He’s the man
1941: Lon Chaney Jr., born Creighton Chaney, plays Larry Talbot, a nobleman who returns to his family’s castle after 18 years and the accidental death of his brother. When he tries to defend himself against a woodland attack, he is bitten and turned into a werewolf.
2010: Benicio Del Toro, Oscar winner for “Traffic” and nominee for “21 Grams,” most recently played Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Here, he is Lawrence (never Larry) Talbot, a Shakespearean actor who comes home after his only brother vanishes. Trying to defend a boy from certain injury or death, he is bitten and turned into a werewolf.
The monster makeup
1941: Chaney spent a reported six hours having his makeup applied and another three having it removed. Jack Pierce, who headed Universal Pictures’ makeup department in the 1930s and ’40s, used small appliances, a snout and layers of singed yak hair along with rubber gloves and feet and fangs to transform the actor.
2010: Oscar winner Rick Baker and nominee Dave Elsey created the Wolfman look that took three hours to pull off. Their team employed a grab bag of tricks, including werewolf leg extensions along with a prosthetic chin, cragged dentures, a real-hair wig, beard and lots of yak hair and crepe wool.
Daddy dearest
1941: Claude Rains is Sir John Talbot, a prize-winning researcher and formal chap who tries to help Larry by strapping him to a chair and locking the castle windows in an effort to keep him inside when the moon is full.
2010: Sir Anthony Hopkins is Sir John Talbot, a bearded, frosty fellow who apparently has been mooning about since his wife and mother of their two boys died many years earlier.
The woman
1941: Larry first spots the fetching Gwen (Evelyn Ankers) through a high-powered telescope he helps his father install and calibrate. She is at the window of her apartment above her family’s antiques shop, and he charms her, although she is engaged to another man.
2010: Emily Blunt plays Gwen, fiance of Lawrence’s missing brother, Ben. She, too, works in an antiques shop and is drawn to Lawrence. Gwen researches lycanthropy and seeks out an expert, insisting, “I have to save him. Just tell me what to do.”
The Gypsies
1941: Maria Ouspenskaya is Gypsy fortuneteller Maleva and none other than Bela Lugosi is her son, who turns into a wolf and attacks a friend of Gwen’s. Larry beats and kills him with a silver-topped walking stick, but is bitten in the process and doomed.
2010: Geraldine Chaplin is the Gypsy, also Maleva, who foreshadows the news of Lawrence’s curse and stitches up his wound after he is attacked.
Immortal werewolves
1941: Chaney found a role that crossed franchises and genres as he later appeared in “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,” “House of Frankenstein,” “House of Dracula” and “Abbott &Costello Meet Frankenstein.” It never mattered if Larry died in a previous film, he would either be resurrected or simply appear as if nothing had happened.
2010: Don’t bet on it, although success breeds sequels. Del Toro is already an Oscar winner who would seem to have his choice of other roles, and the movie’s R rating could limit its box office. A PG-13 would have brought all those teenage boys into the terrified tent.
Scripps Howard News Service
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