English Botanist Wilfred Glendon finds the rare flowering plant he seeks in Tibet, but not before he is bitten by a feral monster-man. Back at his greenhouse lab outside London, he wows his guests with exotic (and utterly fantastic) plant specimens, but is having trouble getting new blooms to form from his imported Tibetan buds, which legend has it only open under the rays of the full moon. Already neglected, his wife Lisa becomes further estranged when Wilfred acts oddly, even more reclusive than normal. A doctor Yogami has appeared to tell him that the flowers are the only antidote for 'WereWolfry', and that he'll be 'transvected' every night of the full moon to seek a murder victim. When this turns out to be true, Wilfrid leaves home, and attempts to have himself confined in rented rooms and even a tower keep back at his wife's country estate. But his efforts are to no avail: Neither locked doors nor barred windows can keep him from going on the prowl.
At the Rialto.
The Rialto Theatre, which began its career as a picture house on the night of April 22, 1916, by showing Douglas Fairbanks's "The Good Bad Man," is bidding farewell to Times Square this week with a nerve-jangling exhibit called "The Werewolf of London." The theatre will be demolished after the last screening of the picture next Wednesday night, but a new Rialto will be erected on the site and open its doors to the public some time in October.
"The Werewolf of London," a Universal picture featuring Henry Hull, is credited to a story by Robert Harris, but it goes back further than that. It goes, in fact, back to Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and permits Mr. Hull to be transformed, before the startled eyes of the audience, from a frock-coated botanist into a fanged apeman with homicidal tendencies and a wolf's howl swelling in his throat.
This charming bit of lycanthropy follows the botanist's expedition into a Tibetan valley in quest of a strange flower, the "mariphasa," which takes its life from the moon. Ignoring native warnings that demons inhabit the valley, Dr. Glendon presses on. After many months he finds the flower, but is attacked and clawed by a howling monster before he stuns him and escapes with the prized mariphasa. Later, in London, he hears from a strange Dr. Yogami that two werewolves are at loose in the city. Only the blooming mariphasa can serve as an antidote to keep the werewolves from killing those they love best at the full of the moon, Dr. Yogami tells the botanist.
Glendon scoffs at the story and refuses to part with his mariphasa. Then, one night, his fingers turn into claws, his arms are furred, his brow recedes, his teeth protrude. It is, in fact, Mr. Hull's cue to stand up and cry, "I'm a werewolf and it's my night to howl!"
In the vein of "The Invisible Man," the picture races along in its presentation of the tragic spectacle of a man who realizes in his moments of sanity that he may be driven to the murder of his wife and others "whom he loves best."
Designed solely to amaze and horrify, the film goes about its task with commendable thoroughness, sparing no grisly detail and springing from scene to scene with even greater ease than that oft attributed to the daring young aerialist. Granting that the central idea has been used before, the picture still rates the attention of action-and-horror enthusiasts. It is a fitting valedictory for the old Rialto, which has become melodrama's citadel among Times Square's picture houses.
NY Times, May 10, 1935
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