Trivia / The Wolf Man (1941)

• Cast the Runner-Up: Bela Lugosi actively campaigned for the lead role and ended up playing a minor supporting role.
• The Danza: Bela Lugosi plays Bela the Gypsy.
• Fake Brit: Americans Lon Chaney Jr. (Larry Talbot), Warren William (Dr. Lloyd), and Ralph Bellamy (Col. Montford) play British characters, but don't bother with putting on British accents. At least Larry's accent is justified in that he spent 18 years in America, but not the others.
• Hostility on the Set: Evelyn Ankers had difficulty working with Lon Chaney Jr., who was peeved over her having been given his dressing room (as punishment for vandalizing studio property while drunk). Chaney would constantly antagonize her, nicknaming her "Shankers" and playing juvenile practical jokes such as sneaking up in full makeup to scare her.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The Wolfman battled a bear in one scene but unfortunately the bear ran away during filming. What few scenes were filmed were put into the theatrical trailer.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: Evelyn Ankers suffered a bad scare when a 600-pound bear (his sequence in the film was later cut) escaped its trainer and chased the actress up a ladder where she was pulled to safety by an electrician.
• Reality Subtext: The script was influenced by writer Curt Siodmak's experiences in Nazi Germany. Siodmak had been living a normal life in Germany only to have it thrown into chaos and himself on the run when the Nazis took control, just as Larry Talbot finds his normal life thrown into chaos and himself on the run once he is turned into a werewolf. Also, the Wolf Man himself can be seen as a metaphor for the Nazis: an otherwise good man who is transformed into a vicious killing animal who knows who his next victim will be when he sees the symbol of a pentagram (i.e., a star) on them.
• Recycled Set: The church scenes were shot on the old The Hunchback of Notre Dame set where Chaney's father, Lon Chaney Sr., had played Quasimodo in 1923.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Universal originally wanted Boris Karloff to star in the title role.
  • The original idea for the movie was to keep things much more mysterious, implying that Larry Talbot's lycanthropy was all in his head and never showing him clearly as the Wolf Man. But studio heads felt that you couldn't have a monster movie without a monster, so they made him into a visible werewolf. This might have been for the best, as the werewolf transformation scenes are amazing.
  • In the first version of the script, Larry was not the prodigal son of Sir John Talbot, nor related to him in any way. He was an American engineer who comes to fix Sir John's telescope, and ends up getting trapped in the werewolf curse.
• Working Title: Destiny, which had been the preliminary title of a number of Universal films that decade (including Son of Dracula).

---