CRY OF THE WEREWOLF

US, 1944, 63 minutes, Black-and-white.
Nina Foch, Stephen Crane, Osa Massen, Blanche Yurka, Barton Mac Lane, John Abbott.
Directed by Henry Levin.

This is a brief horror film from Columbia Studios, a variation on the Wolf Man theme so popular at Universal with Lon Chaney Jr. This time the werewolf is a woman.

The film opens with tourists at a museum in New Orleans, with John Abbott as a guide explaining vampires, voodoo and werewolves. The museum was formally a house of a woman who savaged her husband and disappeared.

Her daughter lives in the Gypsy camp, all from Romania, outside the city. She comes to the museum to kill the manager who is investigating the origins of the werewolves and to destroy his manuscripts. In a secret passage in the Museum, she does.

The son of the director of the museum arrives, a scientist, sceptical about werewolves. The director’s assistant is in love with the son but turns out to be the sister of the chief werewolf and at times is possessed by her. There are scenes in the Gypsy camp with Blanch Yurka as the guiding Gypsy for the werewolf.

The guide discovers the body and is mentally disturbed. The police come in, very sceptical, but getting all kind of evidence of wolf hair under the nails of the murdered man, a woman’s fingerprints on the door inside the secret passage, and eventually a confrontation between the werewolf and the son of the manager.

Nina Foch, at the beginning of her career, plays Celeste, the werewolf.

Not so well-known, but an interesting variation on the theme.