Decades before current day special effects technicians turned film actors into superheroes, vampires and other outlandish characters, one Hollywood actor defined what it meant to be versatile: Lon Chaney. This documentary, shown on Turner Classic Movies in 2000, goes over the life, triumphs, and difficulties of this silver screen legend. Chaney (Born Leonidas Chaney) was born on April 1st, 1883 in the small town of Colorado Springs. His parents were both deaf and incapable of speaking, and one of his relatives founded a school for educating mutes, which is still there now. While he had a depressing and silent childhood, this was the ideal environment for Lon to become proficient with the skills he would use so deftly as an adult, and he learned to communicate with body language and his face instead of his voice. By the early 1900s, Chaney began performing in vaudeville and met a teenage singer named Cleva Creighton, with whom he had a son, Lon Chaney Jr. After both moving to California, new problems arouse with Cleva over her disinterest in looking after their son, which led to the two breaking up. Cleva tried killing herself by drinking mercury, but only succeeded in permanently damaging her voice. The resulting scandal ensured Chaney couldn't continue to work on the stage any longer, and he decided to go into film. Chaney went on to portray characters in dozens of silent films all throughout the 1910s, and more often than not played one that loves a girl who loves someone else. Aside from how well he was able to alter his looks, what Chaney did better than arguably any other actor was get you to pity him. You really do feel devastated when he is humiliated, killed or forced to endure some other unpleasant thing in his movies. Early in the 1920s, Chaney starred in The Penalty, a forgotten classic nowadays that was harshly attacked at the time due to its rather brutal nature. Chaney plays a legless gangster named Blizzard whose legs were cut off as a boy by the father of a girl he likes. For the film, Chaney plays the part of a double amputee by walking on his knees while they're placed into leather containers. He had to fold his legs backwards into a large jacket he was wearing so the audience couldn't see them, and the back portion of the jacket was enlarged for this purpose. In an adaptation of Oliver Twist, Chaney worked opposite the young child star Jackie Coogan, later to find much more fame as the eccentric Uncle Fester on The Addams Family. Shortly after this, Chaney had his breakout roles in Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which he played the deformed title character (using his most ambitious makeup yet), and Phantom of the Opera, where he played a mysterious, ghostly entity lurking in the underground halls of a theater. Chaney also played clowns sometimes in his movies, which turned out to be some of his most memorable and tragic portrayals. He Who Gets Slapped and Laugh Clown Laugh (the latter featuring a young Loretta Young) were the prime examples. Later that decade, Chaney played a part that I personally love even though it has nothing to do with the horror roles that were his bread and butter. Tell It to the Marines from 1926 has Chaney play a no-nonsense marine corps sergeant who, in spite of being hard on the recruits underneath him, has a heart of gold. People (and even the USMC itself) liked it so much they made Chaney an honorary marine, as he accurately portrayed most members of the service. The next year, Chaney starred in a strange movie, even by his standards, and one of my personal favorites. The Unknown features Chaney as an armless circus performer who is in love with a girl played by the novice actress Lucille LeSueur (whose name by now was Joan Crawford). She likes Chaney's character over the strongman who always tries to hit on her because she feels intimidated by his big arms, and since Chaney has none, she wants him instead. Later on, Chaney gets into a fight with another performer and accidentally reveals that he is not armless, and the girl now knows about it. To gain her affection back, Chaney has a surgeon cut off his arms for real, only to discover the girl is no longer afraid of the strongman's presence. The mental breakdown Chaney suffers after he learns this is one of the most powerful silent film moments, and there's no way you can't feel bad for him. Soon, Chaney would go on to star in London After Midnight. It is a lost film; a fate that sadly befell most things Chaney was in. Reports on what exactly it was about are unclear, but it took place in London and Chaney's character had a truly terrifying look, with small wires holding his eyes and upper corners of his mouth open. Chaney would go on to star in a few other non-horror related films towards the end of the decade, with Thunder (another lost film) being his last silent one. When sound in movies came, Chaney was hesitant to get involved with them, thinking the reveal of his voice would destroy any magic his portrayals had built up of him. His first sound movie (and also his last) was a remake of a previous one he did, The Unholy Three. Not even 2 months after it was released, he died from lung cancer, apparently picked up from pneumonia he got in Wisconsin while working on Thunder. At Chaney's funeral, the eulogy was delivered by a chaplain from a nearby marine base. No one is sure why, but his crypt doesn't have a name. This is a great documentary. Narrated by Kenneth Branagh (someone I consider basically the modern Laurence Olivier), it offers everything you'd want to know about Lon's career, and how he went on to be one of the best silent film actors when executives thought he wasn't worth anything. TCM has a habit of putting together really good documentaries on things and people important to the development of early films, and I liked the one they made on Joan Crawford which came out around the same time as this. Whether he was starring in a horror movie or not, Chaney was able to propel himself to the top of early cinema and stood there for years.
Review of Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces
