Film / Cry of the Werewolf

A She-Wolf will kill to protect her secrets.

Cry of the Werewolf is 1944 Columbia Pictures horror/ murder mystery movie directed by Henry Levin, starring Stephen Crane, Osa Massen, and Nina Foch.

In New Orleans is a museum of occult oddities- including vampires, voodoo, and werewolves- that was formerly a house belonging to the LaTour family. The curator of the museum, Dr. Charles Morris, is preparing to publish a book on Marie LaTour, a werewolf who murdered her husband and then disappeared; his son Bob Morris (Crane) is on a flight from DC to New Orleans to help with the project, so he sends the Transylvanian-born museum secretary Elsa Chauvet (Massen), who is also Bob's girlfriend, to pick him up at the airport. The museum janitor, Jan Spavero, is secretly The Renfield for Marie's descendant, a gypsy princess (who is also a werewolf) named Celeste (Foch), and notifies her about the impending publication one evening after the last tour of the day. Celeste takes objection, and decides to terminate the curator with extreme prejudice. During the last tour of the next day, Celeste sneaks in and hides in a secret chamber hidden behind a secret passage next to the fireplace in the parlor room where Marie LaTour had murdered her husband. When Dr. Morris goes into the chamber to do some more after-hours research, Celeste loudly mauls him off-screen, with only the tour guide overhearing.

The police are called in and Charles Morris's body is recovered, then Bob and Elsa collaborate with the police to help find the killer. Celeste, meanwhile, tries to cover her tracks, kill off loose ends, and sabotage the investigation as much as she can.

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This movie contains examples of the following:

• Achievements in Ignorance: During the climax of the movie, Bob Morris and the police officers accidentally blunder across Marie LaTour's grave, which was in a hidden crypt in the secret chamber. Unlike the late Dr. Charles Morris, they don't recognize the importance of it, as they're too busy searching the house for a werewolf to care about it.
  Detective: " We're looking for a live gypsy, not a dead one!"
• Affably Evil: Celeste is almost always soft-spoken and polite with both her minions (unless they screw up, in which case she kills them) and the protagonists.
• Alpha Bitch: Despite Celeste being a fairly literal example, surprisingly downplayed; she is usually Affably Evil, and only gets overtly aggressive when in her wolf form, angry at a minion failing her, when cornered, or trying to hypnotize a woman into shooting her own love interest.
• Arc Words: "Daughter of the Werewolf". Celeste uses this in an affirmation of her identity after killing Jan for his incompetence and getting the police on her trail, and later says it to Elsa, who she plans on turning into another werewolf. This was apparently going to be a Title Drop if the movie had been titled Daughter of the Werewolf instead of Cry of the Werewolf.
• Axe-Crazy: The tour guide invokes this trope in his expository tour, arguing that werewolves are worse than vampires because only a psychopath would willingly turn into a wolf to kill people.
• Badass Bookworm: Bob Morris is a museum curator's son and a scholar of the occult, who helps resolve his father's murder and can go toe-to-toe with an angry werewolf in the climax, a feat that very few horror protagonists can boast of.
• Berserk Button: Don't publish anything about the LaTour family, or Celeste will respond with lethal force.
  • Just don't breach a werewolf's privacy in general, even if the werewolf is your wife, or they will maul you to death (as Marie LaTour's husband found out the hard way).
• Betty and Veronica: Invoked by Celeste, who presents herself to Bob as an exotic Veronica in relation to Elsa's Betty, to not only drive a wedge between Bob and Elsa, but to throw suspicion off of herself.
• Big Bad: Celeste, a werewolf gypsy princess obsessed with keeping her family's secrets from being exposed.
• Bloodless Carnage: Surprisingly downplayed for a Hays-Code-era movie. Despite actual deaths being given a Gory Discretion Shot, drops of blood are shown on the ground and characters are shown lightly bleeding (including Celeste's bleeding arm/forepaw in the final battle).
  • Played its straightest during the introductory flashback, and the immediate aftermath of Marie LaTour murdering her husband- the body is said to be mangled and mutilated, but is clearly still intact on-screen.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Elsa is hypnotized by Celeste into giving a false confession, but the Police see right through it. Celeste also uses the hypnosis to make Elsa hold Bob at gunpoint, but Celeste is unable to convince Elsa to shoot him, which Bob exploits. This hypnosis also causes Elsa to feel the pain from Celeste's injuries in the final fight..
• The Butler Did It: Subverted. Jan Spavero, museum janitor, is Celeste's minion and her mole at the museum, and is the police's second suspect (they had previously ruled out Elsa via fingerprint examination), but he's innocent of murdering Charles Morris (though he did attempt to kill a police officer) and is done in by his boss after getting his fingerprints on the crime scene and drawing suspicion to her.
• The Cavalry: An entire squad of police officers shows up to assist the protagonists in the final fight, and dispatch the werewolf with well-aimed pistol shots.
• Chekhov's Lecture: With the exception of the Vampire lore (which foreshadows that the werewolf has a minion but is otherwise a Red Herring), everything in the expository museum tour becomes relevant to the plot, especially the talk of werewolfery and Marie LaTour murdering her husband.
• Cop Killer: Narrowly averted when Jan Spavero pulls out a pocket knife to stab a police officer who walked in on his destruction of the burnt notes, only for the officer to retrieve a cat who was in the room without ever noticing Jan.
• Courtroom Antic: Played for Drama- Celeste is questioned about her people's Freaky Funeral Forms, when her foster-mother, seated in the audience, suddenly faints before Celeste can answer. The Judge immediately calls a recess.
• Covers Always Lie: Almost all of the movie posters are innacurate to one degree or another. The most accurate poster, which shows Celeste casually menacing the protagonists with a wolf shadow in the background behind her (which provides the page image), depicts her as a blonde when she was an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette in the film. Conversely, Elsa is a blonde in the film but a brunette in the poster.
  • The movie's thumbnail on Tubi is a generic image of a woman in a Victorian (or Antebellum Southern) gown flanked by a pair of wolves. Celeste is the only active werewolf in the entire movie (the other one, Marie, being a Posthumous Character), and this movie is presumably set in the present (the 1940s), and both the expository flashback and the portrait in the museum show Marie LaTour in an Edwardian-era gown.
• Dark Action Girl: Celeste, as the Big Bad, does all but one of the murders herself.
  • Her ancestor, Marie LaTour, also counts, since she murdered her husband as a werewolf and then ran away to join a tribe of Gypsies.
• Destroy the Evidence: Celeste throws Dr. Charles Morris's notes on Marie LaTour into the fireplace and starts a fire to burn them. Bob then subverts this by using forensic techniques to reconstruct the burnt notes. Double-Subverted when Jan Spavero then destroys the notes. Unfortunately for him, he leaves his handprint on the wall in doing so, resulting in Celeste mauling him to death for his incompetence.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Marie LaTour murdered her husband because he had followed her Human-to-Werewolf Footprints right up to her.
• The Dreaded: Werewolves. Many of the people who know about werewolves, including Elsa (who grew up in Transylvania), are so afraid that they refuse to discuss them even in private. The museum tour guide even outright states in the museum tour that werewolves are scarier than vampires, because vampires are victims of a curse and must feed on the blood of the living, whereas only an Axe-Crazy person would willingly turn into a wolf to kill people. Considering how ruthless and effective Celeste is throughout the movie, that reputation is well-deserved.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: For Werewolf Works as a whole. As it premiered only three years after The Wolf Man (1941), this movie notably does not have many of the typical pop-culture werewolf attributes like transmission by bite, forced transformation on the night of the full moon, Alternate Identity Amnesia, or a weakness to silver bullets. Celeste also acts like a Sorcerous Overlord in addition to being a werewolf, with lycanthropy as just one of her many weapons ( hypnotism being one of them). Lampshaded when a Genre Savvy police officer asks to requisition some silver bullets (that ultimately aren't needed).
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Celeste has this appearance, courtesy of Nina Foch.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: The cat in the museum acts visibly nervous when Celeste sneaks in to murder the curator, and curls up in a corner and hisses when Jan attempts to murder a police officer, only for the cat to be drawn out and foil the murder attempt.
• Exit, Pursued by a Bear: Jan Spavero's death is presented this way, as a form of Gory Discretion Shot. His body is later mentioned as being in the morgue.
• Fainting: Celeste's foster-mother faints so that she doesn't answer the question about Marie LaTour joining the tribe.
• Fatal Family Photo: Downplayed in that the photo itself is never shown, but the night he is murdered, Dr. Charles Morris has a conversation with Elsa about Bob while holding the photo, which also has this effect.
• Femme Fatale: Celeste definitely acts like one. Aside from being a werewolf, she also holds a position of authority, dresses in a tasteful but exotic manner, attempts to seduce Bob Morris to drive a wedge between him and Elsa, and uses hypnosis to turn Elsa into a minion who gives false confessions during the final battle.
• Forensic Drama: Much of Bob Morris's subplot has him forensically reconstructing his father's notes to see if they could point at any suspect. By the time Jan destroys them, he's already narrowed down the possible suspects to "female, but not Elsa" (Elsa's fingerprints not matching the fingerprints on the crime scene, and Jan Spavero's suspicious death makes Celeste look suspect enough to be questioned in court.
• Freaky Funeral Forms: The local Gypsies have been having only one funeral per year, a mass funeral where all of the bodies of those who died since the previous funeral are buried at once, since at least the time when Marie LaTour had joined up with them (whether or not they'd done so before is a question left unanswered due to someone Fainting during a hearing). Bob Morris avails this opportunity to examine the body of Jan Spavero, only for Celeste to turn into a werewolf and chase him through the morgue basement.
• Genre Savvy: One of the Police Officers participating in the final manhunt for the werewolf asks to requisition some silver bullets ( which aren't needed), and another protests against going by himself to fix the power.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Dr. Charles Morris being mauled by a werewolf happens entirely offscreen- though other people hear the death and report it to the police. Jan Spavero is later given an Exit, Pursued by a Bear and is then mentioned as being dead. Neither The Hays Code nor the special effects of the time would have allowed an on-screen werewolf mauling.
  • Averted for Celeste, who is shown being shot by the police, and is then given a lingering shot of her corpse's reversion to human form in front of the police.
• Gun Struggle: Bob has to wrestle a gun out of a Brainwashed and Crazy Elsa's hand to resolve Celeste urging her to shoot him. Celeste then retaliates by turning into a wolf and attacking him.
• Hollywood Satanism: Voodoo is depicted this way, with secret temples and violent occult rituals, and practiced by Gypsies and Celeste's monologue to Elsa during the hypnosis heavily suggests that this trope is the default religion of werewolves (Hollywood Voodoo is also mentioned in passing as being practiced by people in the Caribbean during the museum tour).
• Hot Gypsy Woman: Celeste, the local gypsy princess (who is also a werewolf). This is accentuated by how she usually dresses in bodiced and petticoated dresses that resemble Hungarian folk costume. Downplayed in that Celeste is not a full-blooded gypsy but instead descended from a French-American werewolf who had joined the tribe some years prior.
• Human-to-Werewolf Footprints: The reason why Marie LaTour murdered her husband. He found some wolf prints entering the house, and followed him right up to her. She promptly mauled him to death before running away.
• Implied Death Threat: Celeste gives Dr. Morris a Voodoo Doll as one of these the evening before she murders him. He doesn't recognize it as this trope, but Elsa does.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • The Museum Curator is killed off-screen by the werewolf.
  • Jan Spavero is last seen alive chased by an angry werewolf, and is then mentioned to be dead.
  • Averted for Celeste, who is the only character whose death is shown on-screen.
• Leave No Witnesses: Celeste having this policy results in Jan's death.
• Lecture as Exposition: The museum tour guide's tour gives the exposition about vampires, voodoo, and werewolves.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: Initially defied by a Genre Savvy police officer during the climax, but then played straight when the cops fain out to search for the werewolf. Fortunately for them, Celeste was too busy attacking Bob to maul any of them, so they can converge and act as The Cavalry.
• Magic Pants: Whatever clothes a werewolf is wearing when they turn into a wolf spontaneously disappear during the transformation, only to reappear when they revert back. The bodiced and petticoated dress that Celeste was wearing right before the final battle reappears on her corpse when it shifts back from wolf to human at the end of the movie.
• Match Cut: When werewolf transformations aren't off-screen, these are used to show a werewolf instantaneously transforming. There are three such match cuts in the entire film: once in silhouette ( when Celeste mauls Jan Spavero after he got his fingerprints on the crime scene), and twice on-screen ( when Celeste transforms in the climax to attack Bob Morris, and then when her corpse changes back after she is shot).
• Matriarchy: The Gypsies being Matriarchal is mentioned off-hand to Elsa in dialogue, and also implied by the two named authority figures in the tribe shown in the film (Celeste and her foster-mother) both being female.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's left open as to whether the tour guide's symptoms of mumbling and unfocus are the result of simple shock at seeing Dr. Charles Morris's brutalized corpse or Celeste having hypnotized him into not seeing her at the crime scene.
• The Mole: Jan Spavero's primary duty as Celeste's minion is to spy on the museum under the guise of a simple janitor, and sabotage the investigation as much as he can. His incompetence in this role ends up getting him killed.
• More Deadly Than the Male: Both of the werewolves in this movie (Marie and her descendant Celeste) are female, both are utterly ruthless, and both are willing and able to kill people to guard their secrets.
• Mr. Exposition: The museum tour guide at the beginning of the movie (for the benefit of the audience), Elsa Chauvet (for the benefit of Bob Morris regarding occult lore), and Bob Morris himself (for the benefit of the police) all fulfill this role at various times.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Celeste hears of Dr. Charles Morris attempting to publish a book about Marie LaTour and immediately jumps straight to plotting murder. Presumably just filing a cease-and-desist lawsuit would have saved her a lot of grief ( and the lives of herself and her minion Jan), but being a werewolf probably made her too Axe-Crazy.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Downplayed severely- the only time Celeste ever regrets killing someone is after mauling her failed minion Jan after he was incriminated, but she quickly gets over it after getting a pep talk and affirming her own identity. Every other time, she remorselessly hunts and attempts to kill her prey without hesitation.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Celeste's mauling Jan Spavero for his leaving evidence points the police in her direction, because her victim was a suspect in a murder investigation.
• No Ontological Inertia: Celeste reverts back from werewolf to human after she's shot and killed.
• No-Sell: The Police don't buy Elsa's false confession, seeing how obviously hypnotized she is.
• Occult Detective: Downplayed. The only overtly supernatural character in the movie is the murderer, a werewolf who is also capable of hypnotizing people, while Bob Morris, who is help solving the case, is well-versed in supernatural lore but doesn't have any magic himself.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The tour guide when he hears Charles Morris being mauled to death by a werewolf in a hidden room.
  • Jan Spavero when Celeste decides he's no longer useful and chases him out of the movie before mauling him to death.
  • Celeste (and the Gypsies in the audience) during the courtroom hearing, when Bob Morris casually brings up the fact that Marie LaTour had joined up with them after murdering her husband. One of them even faints so that Celeste doesn't have to answer the question.
  • Bob Morris when he's suddenly being chased through the basement of a morgue by a werewolf.
  • Elsa when she's suddenly cornered by an angry Celeste, who wants to turn her into a werewolf like herself.
  • The police officers investigating the secret chamber in the museum, when they hear a wolf howl and realize a werewolf is in the building with them.
  • Bob Morris when a brainwashed Elsa points a gun at him, while Celeste is urging her to shoot him, followed immediately after when Celeste turns into a werewolf right in front of him and tries to kill him herself.
• Our Vampires Are Different: A Vampire skeleton is on display in the LaTour museum, with a stake through its ribcage where the heart would be. Vampire lore is apparently pretty much the standard post-Dracula lore, but vampires aren't relevant to the movie and aren't mentioned again.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Werewolves in this setting are people who use magic for Voluntary Shapeshifting into the form of a wolf, and retain their human minds and intellect in wolf form, and this magic can be taught (Celeste, the main werewolf of the film, is also a hypnotist, and attempts to brainwash another woman into becoming a werewolf herself). The transformation is apparently instantaneous and conveniently stows away the werewolf's clothes. While they are stronger than baseline humans or wolves, a sufficiently strong human can go toe-to-toe with them, and they can be killed with regular bullets, and any injuries they suffer as a wolf are carried over into human form (or vice versa).
  • The museum tour guide also describes werewolves as being The Dreaded even in comparison to vampires, since only someone who is Axe-Crazy would willingly turn into a wolf and attack people.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Two deaths set off the plot:
  • The first was when Marie LaTour murdered her husband in the backstory, resulting in the mansion being deserted and later converted into a museum.
  • The second is when Celeste murders Dr. Charles Morris after she catches wind of him planning on publishing sensitive information about her family, which in turn causes Bob and Elsa to start investigating.
• Police Are Useless: Averted. The Police act as The Cavalry in the final fight, and are surprisingly Genre Savvy for Horror movie cops.
• Politically-Active Princess: Downplayed in that Celeste being a "Princess" is largely honorific, but she is the leader of her band of Gypsies and the protector of their customs.
• Posthumous Character: Marie LaTour only ever appears via the expository flashback and the portrait of her in the room where she murdered her husband, and is mentioned to be deceased in Celeste's dialogue.
• Put Down Your Gun and Step Away: Right before the final battle, Elsa has a gun and is in the room with Celeste and Bob, Celeste urging her to shoot him and Bob urging her to put the gun down. Bob manages to wrestle the gun out of Elsa's hands, and then Celeste turns into a werewolf and attacks him.
• The Renfield: A rare example of a werewolf having a Renfield rather than a Vampire- Jan Spavero, the janitor at the museum, is Celeste's eyes and ears in the museum. When he leaves his fingerprint on the crime scene, Celeste has his service to her terminated with extreme prejudice and mauls him to death.
• Reverse Whodunnit: The murderer is introduced early in the movie, and spends the rest of her subplot trying to cover her tracks, while the protagonists are simultaneously trying to solve the murder case.
• Synchronization: When Celeste hypnotizes Elsa, the later becomes able to feel the pain from the gunshot wounds the former suffers.
• Sorcerous Overlord: Despite being a werewolf, Celeste acts as much like this trope as she does a typical movie werewolf. She is versed in the dark arts, uses minions, and attempts to hypnotize a protagonist into doing her bidding.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Marie LaTour is a Posthumous Character who only appears once by flashback and twice by portrait, and yet her murdering her husband is the whole reason the movie happens in the first place.
• Speak of the Devil: Spoken word-for-word by the coroner when Celeste and the other Gypsies arrive before the funeral, right as he was talking with Bob Morris about Jan Spavero's corpse.
• Stock Sound Effect: Downplayed, since this movie uses actual recorded wolf howls rather than generic large animal noises for werewolves.
• Stopped Clock: In the room where Marie LaTour murdered her husband, the clock was stopped at the exact moment of the murder. Celeste turns the clock back on when she hypnotizes Elsa.
• Suspect Existence Failure: Jan Spavero being named a suspect for the murder of Dr. Charles Morris is what prompts Celeste to maul him to death, so as to avoid incriminating herself.
• Terrifying Pet Store Rat: Unlike most werewolf movies prior to the 1980s, trained tame wolves were used to portray werewolves rather than furry make-up on the actor. For the final fight, the wolf was swapped out for a German Shepherd, presumably to avoid injuring either the actor or the animal.
• Till Murder Do Us Part: Marie LaTour murdered her husband in the backstory, because he followed her tracks into her private drawing room.
• Voodoo Doll: The museum has one in its collection. Celeste sends the curator a second one as an Implied Death Threat that he doesn't recognize as such. She also plants a third on Bob Morris to drive a wedge between him and Elsa, knowing she'd be suspicious.
• You Have Failed Me: Celeste kills of her main minion, Jan Spavero, for this reason.

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