When William Jacobs wrote the short story The Monkey’s Paw in 1902, could he have realised what sort of afterlife it would have? It’s been adapted dozens of times, even more if you count productions that don’t use its original title. This 1948 version is a short and atmospheric rendition of Jacobs’s story, changing the names and some of the details but keeping the central idea intact – a monkey’s paw that will grant three wishes to anyone who is holding it, but which brings a belt of bad luck along with the granting of the wish.
For a film that’s only just over an hour long, you might marvel at how much narrative scaffolding director and co-writer Norman Lee have erected around the original story. Frames within frames, backstory, flashbacks and whatnot, when at its simplest this is a story of a nice family called the Trelawnes. Mother (Megs Jenkins) is a housewife, comfortable and wise. Dad (Milton Rosmer) is a secret gambler. Young Tom (Eric Micklewood) is an ambitious man looking forward to marrying his fiancée Beryl (Brenda Hogan) and with a passion for motorbikes – cheeky innuendo here when we’re never quite sure if Tom is referencing the bike or Beryl when he talks about opening her up along the back straight and so on.
Into this happy if not entirely settled family comes a cheeky, fly dealer (Sydney Tafler) – we’ve met him already in one of several superfluous bits of scene-setting – who has a monkey’s paw to sell. This prompts a reverie from family friend Kelly (Michael Martin Harvey), a blarneying Irishman who in an extended flashback relates the story of his previous life as a burglar in Ireland, where he eavesdropped on a husband, his wife and her lover who had come into possession of the monkey’s paw… and what havoc that caused.
Digression over, back to the Trelawnes who have taken the wrong lesson from Kelly’s story and are hoping to benefit financially from the wishes the paw confers – dad’s gambling debts, Tom’s coveted bike – and yet somehow duck the bad luck that comes with it. Can they do that? What do you think?
Considering that the original story is all about the supernatural, it’s bizarre how much director and adapter Lee leans into it as a family drama. This is very nicely done, it must be said, with the dependable Jenkins giving another of her abundantly warm performances (see the classic The History of Mr Polly for much more of the same), and Harvey also particularly effective as sly, garrulous old Kelly. That said, to an extent everyone here is a type.
All the ongoing domesticity is puzzling, as if everyone had forgotten what the story was about. But then suddenly everything snaps together in the last act, when all the lights go out in the house and a thunderstorm sweeps in to add a roaring, flashing background to events most sinister.
This is a B movie, a second feature, and a British one at that. Not much money has been spent, and yet it works up a really grim and portentous atmosphere in these final scenes, with stark and dramatic lighting and performances that edge into the “dark and stormy night” mood.
It’s not the first screen adaptation of The Monkey’s Paw, which done as a short in 1915, or even the best known, which is probably the Wish You Were Here section of Freddie Francis’s 1972 horror anthology Tales from the Crypt. But it has a charm of its own, and its odd, ramshackle storytelling style is refreshing in its own bewildering way.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
