If you ever wondered whether 'the Hammond mystery' was "Why didn't Nicholas Hammond do more Spider-Man?" then you're wrong: it's actually the title of a novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish - a writer that many fans of phantasie may have forgotten but who published many a short story and novel about such diverse topics as the Holy Grail and Arabian Nights-style high adventure before she turned her hand to horror (more specifically, the subject of lycanthropy) with 1922's The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension.
Coming from Twentieth Century Fox, a studio that never joined in the Universal horror boom unlike Columbia and Paramount (in fact, as Famous Players-Lasky went on to become Paramount, they could be argued to have begun the tradition of the American horror feature film with the 1920 John Barrymore-starring Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) due to head honcho Daryl F. Zanuck's aversion to the genre - wait, does that make this a Fox werewolf? A werefox? ZOMG, is there a kitsune is this? Squeee! - the 1942 film adaptation of Kerruish's novel has much of the lavish production value one might expect.
Released on a double bill with the Harry Lachman-directed Dr Renault's Secret (a J. Carroll Naish-starring remake of the 1927 silent The Wizard, itself an adaptation of the novel Balaoo by Phantom of the Opera scribe Gaston Leroux, concerning a Moreau-style mad scientist using surgery to transform a gorilla into a sentient ape man), the film opens with a great composite matte shot showing us stately Hammond Hall - "one of the oldest houses in England" - standing atop the cliffs over the dark moonlight-dappled ocean. Cutting to the interior, we get an excellently-executed shot as, from a single camera position, we slowly receive information as to the inside of the house via a forty-five second sequence of pans and zooms (windows, a suit of armour, the Hammond family crest above the roaring fireplace, the hand of a supine woman dangling in the firelight over the side of a couch, a sleeping bloodhound curled on the rug) that puts the "one shot" boasts of modern stuff like the CW's Arrow to shame in its artfulness - an opening shot that screenwriter Michael Jacoby would use again for famed Poverty Row director William "One Shot" Beaudine in 1946's The Face of Marble.
Our sleeping heroine is soon revealed to be Helga Hammond (the lovely Heather Angel, whose career spanned from playing Beryl Stapleton in the 1939 classic Basil Rathbone rendition of The Hound of the Baskervilles to lending her dulcet tones to the eponymous character's older sister in Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland, via a number of entries in the ongoing Bulldog Drummond series). Helga rouses herself and converses with the family butler Walton (the stalwart Halliwell Hobbes, who had played the role of Danvers Carew in the classic Rouben Mamoulian version Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ["Indecent! It isn't done!"] and would go on to play other retainers in Universal's Sherlock Holmes Faces Death [one of the better Rathbone/Bruce entries, based on Conan Doyle's 'The Musgrave Ritual'] and The Invisible Man's Revenge), and they both begin to fret that Helga's brother Oliver is outside in the dark on such a night. Telephoning local medic Dr Jeff Colbert (Yorkshire actor Bramwell Fletcher, who so memorably laughed hysterically as Imhotep went out for his "little walk" in 1932's The Mummy), whom Oliver had been visiting, they find that they've just missed him and that he's making his way home via the coastal path: the "rocky lane" of the baleful family legend.
Dashing out into the night in a carriage to intercept her sibling, Helga braves the terrifying howls that fill the dank air to find not only Oliver (John Howard, Heather Angel's co-star as Sapper's Bulldog Drummond himself in seven pictures about the titular adventurer), wounded and unconscious from some animal's attack, but also his dog - turn asunder and broken by the mysterious beast - and local girl Kate O' Malley similarly slain. Back at Hammond Hall, the injured Oliver cannot remember what happened, only that he was on the lane at night when he felt all about him some monstrous presence that "came rushing in" before he blacked out. Scotland Yard sends in the inimitable duo of investigators Robert 'Bob' Curtis (James Ellison, who would go on to play Wesley Rand in 1943's Jacques Tourneur-helmed Val Lewton spooker I Walked with a Zombie) and his eccentric comic relief sidekick Cornelia 'Christie' Christopher (played by real-life eccentric monocle-sporter Heather Thatcher).
As the pair of dogged sleuths - who really could have spun off into their own series of supernatural investigations, with their likeably quirky Holmes/Watson or even monochrome proto-Mulder/Scully relationship - investigate the strange circumstances surrounding the Hammonds and their ancient curse which dates back to their ancestor Sir Reginald Hammond (whose statue stands in the family crypt alongside the effigy of some weird lupine creature), they begin to unravel a hex dating back as far as the Crusades of Richard I and rumours of the Hammonds having sold their souls to Satan. Aided by Christy's unerring sense of spooky intuition (or "supercalaphegalus", as Curtis calls it in almost Poppinsian style) they discover that - far from being the victim of a physical assault by the monster - Oliver is himself the victim of the Hammond's lycanthropic malediction: his feelings of darkening terror when out at night were in fact the transformation coming over him before he rent asunder his own hound and young Kate O' Malley. When night falls once again and Oliver's animal instinct takes hold of him once again and leads the werewolf to prey upon his beloved sister in an incestuous fashion, the beast must surely die...
Okay, it isn't Universal's The Wolf Man, but The Undying Monster is a fascinating little piece that's very well directed by John Brahm and thoroughly deserves further inspection from all connoisseurs of the supernatural whether they're wisecracking monocle wearers or not.
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