And here's to you, Mrs Robinson.
That title I've given this piece is a bit Smiths, isn't it? May as well get some Simon and Garfunkel in there too.
And so I woke in the early hours of the 26th of October to discover that the last Famous Monster of Filmland had departed this earthly plane at a grand century. June Lockhart may be better known to many for her motherly roles in the likes of Lassie and of course for the iconic role of Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space, but to us horror fans and monster kids she was - and remains forever, of course, such is the immortality of the celluloid ribbon of dreams that is cinema - the titular heroine of the 1946 Universal horror film She-Wolf of London.
Of the pantheon of the Universal Monsters Lon Chaney Senior left us first at the age of just 47 in 1930, Bela Lugosi proved Bauhaus right at 73 in 1956, Boris Karloff aged 81 in 1969, Lon Chaney Junior was 67 when he went away in 1973 and John Carradine 82 in 1988. Most recently and until now the most elderly / long-lasting was the Black Lagoon's Gill-Man Ricou Browning who reached 93 before going in 2023. June Lockhart's death truly closes that chapter.
Born on the 25th of June 1925 and leaving us on the 23rd of October 2025 at just under one hundred years and four months, Ms Lockhart was only twenty years old when She-Wolf was shot in December 1945. She would later hazily and self-deprecatingly recall of the film "If I'm remembering right, I was just submitted for it by my agent. I did it - and I was not very good in it. But the following year I was the hot young ingenue on Broadway in a wonderful comedy. So I guess what I needed was a good direction." Which I feel it's fair to say she did. Whatever the film's flaws, the direction from Jean Yarbrough (helmer of five Abbott and Costello entries [sadly none of the 'meet the monsters' dark entries, but Here Come the Co-Eds did co-star Lon Chaney Junior and Martha O'Driscoll who would make penultimate monster rally House of Dracula the same year] as well as genre entries The Devil Bat, King of the Zombies, Rondo Hatton's Creeper duology House of Horrors and The Brute Man, the unrelated The Creeper, the Bowery Boys' Meet Frankenstein knockoff Master Minds and ending his cinema career with the bathetic thud of Hillbillys in a Haunted House) isn't one of them, bringing quite a bit of atmosphere to a latter-day entry in the Universal cycle that many seem to disregard due it's "cheat" ending which is to be fair more Scooby-Doo than horror and perhaps calls Lockhart's status as Last Monster Standing into question. Phyllis Allenby may turn out not to be yer genuine lycanthrope like Wilfred Glendon and Larry Talbot, but she still counts as far as I'm concerned.
It does feel odd to be writing a post on this blog that isn't a review of something, and normally of course the obvious thing to do would be to rewatch and review She-Wolf of London properly as a tribute but seeing as a) I'm already in the middle of about five not so easy pieces to complete (how and why I constantly let myself get into these situations I don't know) and b) I was already planning on a marathon runthrough series of reviews of the Universal Monsters movies for next year (so at my current forever stymied rate of progress expect them sometime around the Space Year 2035 or thereabouts) I thought I'd say a little something to mark her passing. It would have felt odd to do nothing to mark the occasion, and I'm not going to try to pretend this is the greatest panegyric in the history of the world - this is just my little tribute. There we are: as well as The Smiths and Simon and Garfunkel, we've added Tenacious D to the musical roster. Quite the festival we've got going here.
God bless you, please, Mrs Robinson.
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