Made at a time when American politics was becoming mired in the unfolding Watergate scandal, Milton Moses Ginsberg’s half-hearted political satire suggests that the wolf was no longer at the door of the White House but sitting behind a desk in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, although Ginsberg knows his horror history – he later claimed to have been traumatised by a viewing of The Wolf Man (1941) and the paw prints of George Waggner’s Universal favourite are all over The Werewolf of Washington – as a work of satire it manages to miss its mark to an alarming degree.
White House press secretary Jack Whitter (Dean Stockwell) is on assignment in Hungary when he is bitten by a werewolf. Initially believing it to be the work of Communists, Jack is dismayed to learn from a gypsy woman that he is now cursed to change into a wolf man every full moon. Back in the States, Whittier is assigned to the office of the President (Biff McGuire) where he picks up his affair with the President’s daughter Marion (Jane House) and periodically transforms into a werewolf and commits a string of grisly murders.
The humour is forced, obvious and just plain unfunny. Political satire is a difficult thing to do properly, requiring a light touch that Ginsberg clearly didn’t have. He bulldozes his way through the plot,, firing off feeble gags, nudging his audience when the satirical bits rear their heads but utterly fails to disguise his lack of subtlety, his shaky political nous or indeed the fundamental fact that he shot the film on the most threadbare of budgets. The film’s political stance is never really clear, Ginsberg refraining from taking one side or the other in case half of the audience is alienated. It’s a cowardly approach to satire that has nothing interesting to say about US politics other than that all politicians are a bit crap and that the system doesn’t work. It’s hardly the most original or incisive of observations.
You spend most of the film longing or Ginsberg – a former television documentary maker – to actually get angry about something – anything – but he never does. He just plods through a tiresome series of poorly timed gags as the film wends its weary course to the final shot, of the unseen President howling in the White House as the full moon rises, which you suspect is all Ginsberg had when he started writing and built the rest of the script around it. The nonsense involving Dr Kiss (quite why Ginsberg chose to lampoon Henry Kissinger as a diminutive mad scientist is something only he can answer) was probably a bit silly and embarrassing at the time but today will be utterly baffling to anyone who wasn’t around at the time.
It comes to something when the best joke in the film is a feeble bit of business involving Jack mishearing “pentagram” as “Pentagon” though the scene where Jack is bowling with the President and starts to transform, his fingers getting stuck in the ball, is sort of amusing in a undemanding way. Another scene, where Jack transforms aboard the Presidential helicopter in front of the visiting South Korean prime minister, unseen by a self-absorbed and prattling President had potential but is so badly handled it falls completely flat.
It doesn’t even work as a horror film. It pays lip service to genre history by restaging entire scenes from The Wolf Man but Ginsberg has no real affinity for the genre and the film is as scary as it is funny and incisive. The werewolf make-up by Bob O’Bradovich (a former television make-up artist who later provided make-up for The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), Blood Bath (1975) and the notoriously awful The Incredible Torture Show/Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) is nothing to write home about and the traditional lap-dissolve transformation scenes looked awful even in 1973. For reasons that have never been clear, Ginsberg films the werewolf attacks in that weird jerky slow motion effect that David Cronenberg used on some of his earlier films.
Dean Stockwell heads a largely undistinguished cast and attacks his role with more gusto than it actually deserves. The film was a bitter disappointment for Stockwell who signed on hoping that it would live up to the potential he first saw in the script. Talking to Craig Edwards of Psychotronic Video in 1995 he noted that “The Werewolf of Washington is probably the most disappointing end result of a film that I can remember. The concept of it, and the screenplay for it, had a brilliant edge to it. It was satirical, political, funny, witty and wonderful… [But] it became very clear very quickly on the first day of shooting that [Ginsberg] knew nothing about shooting a movie. So we had a major disaster on our hands.”
The Werewolf of Washington (which perhaps gained an accidental relevance during the Trump presidency though even then it’s not interesting enough to revisit) was Ginsberg’s second and final feature film after the psychological drama Coming Apart (featuring Rip Torn as a psychiatrist who secretly films the women patients he treats). The critical broadside that sunk The Werewolf of Washington when it opened stung Ginsberg badly as he recalled in an interview with John Kelly of The Washington Post in 2018: “It really broke my spirit for a while, to put that much effort into something and get the film you wanted to make with no response. At least with the first film [Coming Apart], half were saying ‘masterpiece’ while the other half were saying, ‘Forget this thing.’ To make two films like this really tires you out. It ruined my career… I had made two films and made no money.” He was so disheartened that he concentrated instead on writing screenplays (none of which were ever filmed) and earned a crust editing documentaries.
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