Overlooked Movies: The Company of Woves

 

"Little girls, this seems to say never stop upon the way, never trust a stranger friend no-one knows where it may end. As you're pretty so be wise wolves may lurk in every guise, now as then, 'tis simple truth sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth."

This weeks movie of the week is, The Company of Wolves.

This movie is in fact a magical bag full of symbolic folklore about werewolves, or, rather, their sexual connotation. Grandmother Angela Lansbury tells her granddaughter Sarah Patterson strange, disturbing tales about innocent maidens falling in love with handsome, heavily eyebrowed strangers with a smouldering look in their eyes; about sudden disappearances of spouses when the moon is round & the wolves are howling in the woods; about babies found inside stork eggs, in a stork nest high up a tree; etc., etc. Of course the story of Little Red Ridinghood is also  present, with a very handsome he-wolf.(And of course this he-wolf consumes Grandmother, but 'consumes' Little Red Ridinghood). All the stories are somehow reducable to loss of innocence, and fear of/hunger for (a newly acquired sense of) sexuality; their Freudian character is mirrored in their dreamlike shapes. This movie is not really a horror movie; it's more a multiple tale about growing up into adolescence.


Fun Quotes:
Granny: Your only sister, all alone in the wood, and nobody there to save her. Poor little lamb. Rosaleen: Why couldn't she save herself?

Granny: A wolf may be more than he seems, the worst kind of wolves are hairy on the inside and when they bite you they drag you with them to Hell.

Granny: Never stray from the path,once you stray from the path you are lost forever. Never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.

A gory scene if you can stand to watch it...


Short but sweet. A great movie if you can find it, I understand however that the DVD is edited.
Becca

My Company of Wolves Wallpaper: