She-Wolf of London (1946)

Director: Jean Yarbrough
Writers: George Bricker, based on an original story by Dwight V. Babcock
Stars: Don Porter, June Lockhart, Sara Haden, Jan Wiley and Lloyd Corrigan

Index: 2025 Centennials.

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I’m able to wish someone a happy one hundredth birthday while I remember their life and work through a centennial review.

June Lockhart didn’t have a huge career in the movies, being better known on television, but she started early and kept on going, so the span from her first to last movie is over eighty years and counting, from an uncredited role in A Christmas Carol in 1938 to a voice role in 2019 in Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm.

Given that her father, the Academy Award-nominated actor Gene Lockhart, kicked off his professional career on stage in 1897 at the age of six, their shared output stretches into three different centuries. Her daughter Anne, who’s a prolific voice actor, landed her first credit in 1958 and is also still working, with almost one hundred episodes of Chicago Fire to her name.

I chose She-Wolf of London to remember June Lockhart’s life and work partly because it’s a Universal horror that I haven’t seen but partly because she was unusually top billed, at least if we look at the poster; on screen, Don Porter is listed first for no reason I can think of except that he was male. As the title suggests, this is a movie all about women so that billing is odd.

I’d say that Lockhart also plays the She-Wolf of London, but we’re kept in suspense there as it could be that her character, Phyllis Allenby, merely believes she does. After all, she wakes with mud on her slippers and, literally, blood on her hands, while the newspaper talks about murders in a nearby park, throats ripped out as if by a beast. How could she not connect it with the Allenby Curse that werewolf blood is running in her veins?

To our jaded eyes in 2025, the mystery isn’t a particularly deep one and merely writing out a synopsis is enough to give it away. However, it might have been a little deeper back in 1946, though not to anyone who saw Gaslight only a couple of years earlier (or indeed the original 1944 British feature it remade or the 1940 play that that was based on). Of course, if you have never seen any of those, you may know which psychiatric term sprang from them all, which is enough on its own to count as a spoiler.

Phyllis is a lovely young lady from a storied family who lives with her aunt and cousin in a gorgeous mansion in London. All are female, a state of affairs commented on by visiting cops, who are shocked to realise that there’s no man of the house to protect them.

Now, there soon might be, because Phyllis is to be married to Barry Lanfield, a deep-voiced and confident barrister. When they overhear a couple of policemen talking at the scene of the latest murder, they’ve just raced their horses to determine which of them will decide when their wedding date will be. Barry is keen for it to be next week, while Phyllis officially wants next December but loses deliberately so it can be next week after all.

It’s telling that even in a moment when the rare male character wins out in this film, it’s only because a woman let him. All of the most headstrong and dominant characters here are women, Barry serving as the closest we get to a male equivalent. After him, Det. Latham has to be the most prominent male character and he’s an idiot, holding on to a werewolf theory for the killings even as his boss, Insp. Pierce, isn’t having any of it. Lloyd Corrigan plays him using his regular persona of the time that’s on show in no end of other movies.

Phyllis Allenby is the lady of the house, the last in the Allenby line, but her Aunt Martha is in charge of it and Sara Haden plays her with a precise and severe demeanour that any gothic requires in someone. Her daughter, Carol, is a ray of light by comparison, in the lovely form of Jan Wiley, a couple of films before The Brute Man and a couple more before she retired.

The cast is fleshed out by Eily Malyon as the aging but still capable housekeeper, Hannah, a role originally intended for Una O’Connor; and Martin Kosleck as Carol’s love interest, Dwight Severn, a starving artist who her mother hates because she plans her to marry into money.

If you haven’t figured out who the She-Wolf of London is from that, then maybe this will be a shocker for you in many ways. To eyes more familiar with the era, it’s no surprise at all, but it’s still a treat because Universal could make films like this in their sleep and they’d still be enjoyable. The atmosphere is precisely right.

I couldn’t help enjoying the heck out of this, even as I acknowledged how clichéd the story was, how skimpy the cast and how simple the setups, especially in the park at night with bee smoke serving as fog and a couple of London bobbies to talk up the horror.

It probably felt like a step up for Lockhart at the time, because she’d been adding up credits in films for almost a decade without getting a lot more than small parts in big pictures, such as All This, and Heaven Too, Sergeant York or Meet Me in St. Louis. More often, she got small parts in small pictures, which was even worse.

However, two important films for her came almost at once: Son of Lassie in 1945, then She-Wolf of London a year later. The former was one of the most prominent roles she’d had but also one that led her into the later TV show, Lassie. The latter was a lead role, important whatever the movie happened to be and it led to more. She has explained: “I did it and I was not very good in it, but the following year I was the hot ingenue on Broadway in a wonderful comedy.”

That was For Love or Money, which brought a Tony Award for Outstanding Performance by a Newcomer. Suddenly, she was a name in her own right, rather than just the daughter of her actress parents who had played her parents in her debut film, A Christmas Carol.

She debuted on television in 1949, in a set of live plays and quickly found it more rewarding than film. By the late fifties, she was guesting on a string of western shows when she landed the role of Ruth Martin in Lassie, which gifted her with six years of work and one nomination for a Primetime Emmy. She was also a lead on Petticoat Junction and Lost in Space, the remake of which counting as her most recent credit, as the voice of Alpha Control in 2021.

Outside the industry, she regularly attended White House press briefings over six decades with a lifetime press pass; played a mean game of Scrabble; and embraced rock music, taking her Lost in Space kids to the Whisky a-Go-Go and hiring Hour Glass for a Halloween party, before they became the Allman Brothers Band.

Happy birthday, June Lockhart!