Wolf Blood: A Tale of the Forest

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Movie
German title Wolf blood
Original title Wolf Blood: A Tale of the Forest
Country of production United States
original language English subtitles
Publishing year 1925
length 6 files, 1775 meters, at 22 fps approx. 70 minutes
Rod
Director George Chesebro and Bruce Mitchell
script Cliff Hill
production Ryan bros.
camera R. Leslie Selander
occupation

Wolf Blood: A Tale of the Forest is an American silent film drama directed by George Chesebro and Bruce Mitchell for the independent Ryan Brothers Productions in 1925 from a manuscript by Cliff Hill . Chesebro also starred as Dick Bannister.

action

Dick Bannister is the new foreman of the Ford Logging Company , a Canadian logging company, at a time when the fierce competition between them and the mighty Consolidated Lumber Company had turned into a bloody private war. His boss, Miss Edith Ford, comes to the lumberjack camp for an inspection, accompanied by her bridegroom, a doctor. Dick is attacked by his rivals and left for dead. His blood loss is so great that a blood transfer is necessary. But there is no volunteer who would donate blood to him. Therefore, the surgeon takes a wolf as a donor. After the operation, Dick haunts dreams of running with a pack of ghostly wolves and the lumberjacks of the competition being killed by wolves. Soon the word of these dreams spread around the camp until most of the loggers believe that Dick was a werewolf . Bannister wants to throw himself off a cliff, but is saved by Edith.

background

In the literature, the film is often referred to as the first lycanthropy film in America. At best, it can be considered the earliest surviving film of its kind, as there was a relevant film called The Werewolf as early as 1913 , which was destroyed by fire in the mid-1920s.

Cliff Hill wrote the manuscript as “Dr. CA Hill ". It was edited for the film by Bennett Cohen. The photography was done by R. Leslie Selander , who later became a well-known cameraman for westerns. The film was awarded by the Lee-Bradford Corporation and premiered on December 16, 1925 in America. There he was sometimes called Wolfsblood .

reception

The contemporary reviews in newspapers and magazines unanimously praised the art of acting in Wolf Blood and also agreed that the subject matter treated was disconcerting. “Probably one of the strangest stories ever filmed,” wrote a British paper after the film's premiere, and almost all other reviews also used words like “startling” and “unique” to describe what they saw.

There is no transformation scene in Wolf Blood . Unlike their German or Scandinavian competitors, the American films shied away from the appearance of "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" (1931) to include the supernatural in their portrayal. Rather, American scripts tended to explain the seemingly supernatural through human intervention, misunderstanding, or mental breakdown. That is also the case here.

The medical topic of blood transfer seems to have enjoyed a certain topicality in German films since the time of the First World War . As early as 1915, Deutsche Bioskop produced a film with Paul Wegener in which the blood transferred from a criminal turns the recipient into a criminal as well. Around 1920, films with titles such as Madame X and the 'Black Hand' , Demon Blood and Poisoned Blood were made, in which negative character traits are also transferred through a transfusion with the blood.

literature

  • Susan E. Lederer: Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in 20th Century America. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-516150-2 , pp. 55, 66, 211, 224.
  • Jonathan Rigby: American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema . Reynolds & Hearn Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-1-905287-25-3 , p. 49.
  • Kelly Robinson: Wolf Blood (1925): The Earliest Surviving Werewolf Film. at blogspot.de , October 1, 2015.
  • Heribert Schiedel: On the power of the blood myth. In: migrazine.at , January 2014.
  • Jule Selbo: Film Genre for the Screenwriter. Revised edition. Routledge Publishing, 2014, ISBN 978-1-317-69568-4 , p. 138.
  • Bryan Senn: The Werewolf Filmography: 300+ Movies. McFarland Verlag, 2017, ISBN 978-0-7864-7910-8 , pp. 10f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Description in The Universal Weekly vol. 3 no.24, Dec. 1913.
  2. ↑ also "Les" Selander, 1900–1979, a biography in English at IMDb
  3. ↑ cf. IMDb / release info
  4. ↑ Contemporary newspaper and magazine reviews praised the strong acting, and they agreed on something else, too: the strangeness of the subject matter. “Probably one of the strangest stories ever filmed,” wrote a UK newspaper after the film's release, and nearly every other review uses words like “startling” and “unique”, quoted from: Kelly Robinson, Oct. 1, 2015.
  5. ↑ Before the release of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, American films generally shied away from inserting the sincerely supernatural into their narratives, unlike their German and Scandinavian counterparts. American plots had a tendency to explain away the seemingly supernatural with human agency, misunderstanding, or mental breakdown, and the trend is no different here. see. the_revenant_review.com
  6. ↑ “Die Rache des Blutes”, D 1915, cf. GECD # 31990
  7. ↑ Directed by Fred Sauer , with Aenderly Lebius , cf. Jean-Paul Goergen, PDF online
  8. ↑ 1st of 2 parts, directed by Fred Sauer, with Aenderly Lebius, cf. filmportal.de
  9. ↑ 2nd part of “Demon Blood”, also directed by Fred Sauer, with Aenderly Lebius, cf. filmportal.de
  10. ↑ In Carl Theodor Dreyer's fantastic sound film “ Vampyr - The Dream of Allan Gray ” from 1930, there is a blood transfusion through which the girl Léonie ( Sybille Schmitz ), who has been bitten by the vampire , is to be saved.