Nurse Price and David Kessler enjoy a tender moment
before things get hairy
Last night, for the first time in a very long time, I watched An American Werewolf in London (written and directed by John Landis, 1981). And whilst it is neither as funny nor as frightening as many once found it to be, I don't begrudge this comic horror the critical and commercial success it enjoyed at the time, or the cult status it has since attained amongst cinephiles [1].
For whilst it's not a great film, it is an enjoyable film to watch, with a strong lead performance from David Naughton as David Kessler, the unfortunate American backpacker attacked by a werewolf whilst trekking by moonlight across the Yorkshire Moors [2] with his buddy Jack Goodman (played by Griffin Dunne).
The film also stars Jenny Agutter, as nurse Alex Price, who falls in love with David whilst looking after him in the intensive care unit of the London hospital in which she works. And, as male readers of a certain age will know, Jenny Agutter is the sexiest and most beautiful English actress ever to have graced the screen. It's always a pleasure to see her and my only regret is that it was David, not Alex, who wakes up naked in the wolf enclosure at London Zoo.
Still, you can't have everything you might wish for in a movie, and Landis does offer some erotic compensation in the form of Linzi Drew as Brenda Bristols in the film-within-a-film entitled See You Next Wednesday - a soft-porn movie showing in the seedy Soho cinema that David finds himself in towards the end of the movie [3].
Now, whilst Linzi Drew is no Mary Millington, she did have a successful (and varied) career in the UK sex industry during the 1980s, working as a stripper, glamour model, and porn star. She also landed minor roles in a number of other mainstream movies apart from American Werewolf (Ken Russell was something of a fan).
In sum: there's more than enough good things in An American Werewolf in London to justify spending another 97 minutes of your life staring at a screen - and I haven't even mentioned the demonic Nazi stormtroopers that appear in a terrifying dream sequence that the Chapman brothers would've been proud of, or how the film is crucially tied to the question of Jewish identity and feelings of cultural estrangement ... [4]
Notes
[1] An American Werewolf in London was released in August 1981 and grossed
$30 million at the US box office and $62 million
worldwide (against a budget of $5.8 million). Whilst not every critic loved it - Roger Ebert, for example, found it curiously unfinished - most wrote positive reviews, finding it not just funny and frightening, but an intelligent film also. Particular praise was reserved for Rick Baker's makeup effects used in the transformation scene.
[2] Filming took place in Feb/March, because director John Landis wanted to ensure bad weather. But it took place on location in Wales, not Yorkshire.
[3] In an interview with Jason Solomons for The Guardan in 2009,
Landis says that the title of the porno film was "in the best smutty
British tradition", but that really doesn't make any sense (to me at
least); was he perhaps thinking of the euphemistic backronym for the
word cunt - See You Next Tuesday? Possibly. But it should be noted that
the line See You Next Wednesday (usually referring to a fictional
film) is a recurring gag in most of his films and that he probably
picked it up from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where it is spoken by Frank Poole's father.
[4] There are numerous essays and articles discussing the Jewish aspect of the film: see for example Joshua Rothkopf's 'How "American Werewolf in London" Transformed Horror-Comedy', in Rolling Stone (19 August 2016). According to the author, the film is an allegory of exoticised Jewishness (made monstrous). Click here to read the piece online. For an equally interesting piece by Esther Saks entitled 'What's So Jewish About Werewolves?', and published in the offbeat online Jewish arts and culture magazine Jewcy (31 Oct 2017), click here.
Bonus: to watch the official film trailer on YouTube, click here.
