In spite of its title, this likeable yet very cheap and underdeveloped film is more a psychological thriller than a proper horror movie. She-Wolf of London is mild gothic nonsense that retains entertainment value thanks to a couple of good performances and a script and production that skirt the edges of sufficiency. She-Wolf represents the era when the genre of Universal Horror, virtually exhausted after fifteen years of increasingly opportunistic and unimaginative productions, seems to taken some cues from Val Lewton’s successful template of a purely atmospheric, psychologically and symbolically aware approach to the genre. She-Wolf transfers the blueprint of Cat People (1941) and The Leopard Man (1943) to a period setting close to that of the studio’s equally tatty cycle of Sherlock Holmes movies: another film amongst Universal’s final handful of dark chillers was The Spider Woman Strikes Back, spun off from an instalment of that series. The similarity is exacerbated by including Dennis Hoey as a Scotland Yard detective, albeit one not quite as thick as his Inspector Lestrade. The Horror genre was beginning a long plunge into unpopularity that would last until the late ‘50s, and She-Wolf, whilst produced with the usual studio polish (the photography by Maury Gertsman is distinguished), signals how that decline manifested in plunging budgets and barely sufficient productions. Like Don Siegel’s The Verdict and Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase from the same period, if not in a league with either, this also could be seen as a bridging point between the homelier charms of pre-war melodrama and the reflexes of film noir.
That perhaps is why the supernatural, once invoked, gives way to a purely human villain and motives. June Lockhart is Phyllis Allenby, a young heiress who believes she’s also the progeny of a line cursed by lycanthropy. Sara Haden is her formidable, quietly deadly housekeeper-cum-guardian, Martha Winthrop, who’s so determined to keep her hands on the estate and see her own daughter Carol (Jan Wiley) married to June’s fiancée, wealthy lawyer Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), that she’s attempting to reinforce June’s delusions. She takes this to the extent of murdering sundry children and policemen in the guise of the she-wolf, lurking in the amusingly wild-looking neighbouring park that’s supposed to be in suburban London, and planting evidence about June’s bedroom, including smearing blood on her fingers when sleeping, to convince her she’s prone to amnesiac night prowling.
Director Jean Yarbrough had worked his way up from making films for the likes of PRC and Monogram with Horror films by this time, beginning his association with the genre with the amusing no-budget wonder The Devil Bat (1941), and the set-bound atmospherics he provides are enjoyable when indulged, which sadly isn’t much. Lanfield attempts to track the she-wolf’s prowling, whilst the white-draped femme fatale emerges from the haze for lightning attacks that are slightly jarring for their mixture of implied brutality and dreamy visualisation. One scene, in which Winthrop
Lockhart’s quivering recollection of dreams of a pagan past, in which she was an unleashed beast, and Haden’s strong performance, retain a vague power suggestive of hothouse emotionalism and animalistic savagery lurking beneath the Victorian civility, with an interesting edge of feminine psychopathy based in social anxiety: Haden’s motives are rooted in her experiences at the bottom of the social heap thanks to making an imprudent marriage, and her actions, then, are definable as social climbing run amok. So short and modest as a generic quickie that it barely makes an impression initially, and certainly a long way from truly understanding, never mind living up to, the Lewton aesthetic, it’s still a fun relic from the twilight of the Universal house of ghouls.
