The Unknown (1927)

Originally posted to Facebook on 6/15/2018

The Unknown was our seventh film from 1927, and our fourth starring Lon Chaney. It co-starred a very young Joan Crawford, and was directed by Todd Browning, later famous for directing Dracula and Freaks. After the relatively normal Tell It to the Marines (from 1926), Chaney again plays a bizarre protagonist in a film obsessed with disfigurement, revenge, and humiliation -- playing his role with characteristic charisma, serious but also vigorous. In this case he plays a supposedly armless circus performer who throws knives with his feet. In reality, though, he is not armless, and has somehow concealed that from the rest of the troupe, including Joan Crawford, with whom he is in love. She does not reciprocate, and in fact ends up falling in love with another circus performer played by Norman Kerry. Crawford holds up her corner of the love triangle well enough, though nothing about her performance particularly prefigured her subsequent long and successful career. She was, like almost every other actor in Chaney's movies, overshadowed by the man himself -- and in fact she later credited Chaney as an influence on her acting.

The plot takes a few bizarre twists that I won't spoil, but it is in keeping with Chaney's earlier movies in that it is surprisingly dark, and would probably be rated PG-13 even today. But the darkness is quite unlike, for instance, the dark cynicism of the German films we've seen, which usually at least gestured in the direction of having some sort of intellectual pedigree. Chaney's films are much more visceral, and make no apologies for showing the grotesque or fetishistic, and do so without suggesting that we are actually watching an allegory about the modern world, or anything so high-minded.

This film is a little pulpier and less polished than his other three films, and probably the least well-made, but they are all in the same neighborhood, quality-wise. The Unknown would probably appeal to the same audiences entertained by 1920's The Penalty or 1924's He Who Gets Slapped. I think Tell It to the Marines showed that he easily could have portrayed normal roles as well, had that been his desire, and perhaps had he lived we would have seen him in more of those types of parts. He died only three years later, though, at the age of 47, so it is impossible to know what he would have achieved (or not) in the sound era (outside of 1930's The Unholy Three, his only talkie), or under the Hays code.

Next week we'll see our eighth film from 1927, Chicago, which comes from the same source material as the stage and screen musical of the same name. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

Tell It to the Marines (1926)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/25/2018

Tell It to the Marines was our fifth film from 1926, and our third starring Lon Chaney. He co-stars with William Haines -- Chaney playing a Marine drill sergeant and Haines playing a young recruit. The obligatory scenes of training camp and difficult postings are present, though overall the film paints a rather rosy picture of Marine life. The female lead is a Navy nurse played by Eleanor Boardman, who is the focus of a sort of a love triangle. Chaney, refreshingly, has enough self-awareness to see that he is a generation older than her, and his attraction is relatively friendly and platonic. This is by far the most normal character we've seen Chaney play, though he is as charismatic as always. Haines, maybe surprisingly, is able to hold his own, and their interplay is the strongest feature of the movie. Haines also tries to impress Boardman, and takes her on a date where he keeps her much longer than promised, and refuses to drive her home, and is otherwise generally obnoxious. Of course she is publicly furious with him, but the movie decides that she in fact likes him after all. This is not necessarily an impossible development, but the movie seems to think it altogether natural -- which sadly is only the first of several errors of judgment. The second is telegraphed by the credits, which list Warner Oland as "Chinese Bandit Leader." Oland, of course, was a Swede who later played Charlie Chan in a series of movies throughout the thirties. But even before that moment could unfold, Chaney and Haines ship out, and are stationed on an island, presumably in the Pacific. There Haines meets and becomes involved with Carmel Myers (whom we'd earlier seen in Ben-Hur as an Egyptian who attempted to seduce Ramon Navarro), appearing in darkening makeup as an islander. These scenes are even worse than the later scenes with Oland, which themselves are not so great.

The frustrating thing about this film is that it has some very strong sequences with Chaney and Haines that are weighed down by the flaws described above. Chaney is at times a boss, a mentor, a rival, and a friend to Haines -- and Haines matches Chaney with a well-calibrated initial irreverence that eventually matures into a certain amount of depth. In the end it is too flawed to recommend, but it certainly has some of the pieces of a good movie.

Our film next week is Faust, our sixth from 1926, and our third directed by F.W. Murnau. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

Originally posted to Facebook on 10/24/2017

Our fifth and final film from 1924 was He Who Gets Slapped, our second film starring Lon Chaney, and our fifth directed by Victor Sjöström, who had relocated to Hollywood since 1921's The Phantom Carriage. This is also the first film in which we've seen John Gilbert or Norma Shearer.

The premise of the film is that Chaney is a scientist, and his patron, Baron Regnard, conspires with Chaney's wife to take credit for his work, publicly slapping him when he confronts the Baron. Chaney then returns home, where his wife reveals her part in the plot, and slaps him as well. The film then jumps forward, and in the intervening time Chaney has become a circus clown, where he has developed a starring act in which he gets slapped repeatedly by other clowns to mass acclaim -- a bizarre development not just because of its fetishistic aspect, but also because of the vertiginous mid-career shift between research scientist and circus clown.

John Gilbert and Norma Shearer are stunt riders, apparently one of the rare non-clown positions in this particular circus. There is a slight love triangle, in that Chaney is in love with Shearer, but he recognizes that she loves Gilbert, who is closer to her in age, and, crucially, isn't a clown with severe and masochistic psychological problems. When the Baron reappears, however, and begins to pursue Shearer, it provokes in Chaney both a protective instinct, and also a desire for revenge. This revenge motive recalls the previous film in which we saw Lon Chaney, 1920's The Penalty, as does his acting style, which is forceful and charismatic in both films, though not exactly naturalistic in either (an approach that would have been difficult in full clown make-up in any case.)

And it is this performance that, I think, makes this more of a Lon Chaney film than a Victor Sjöström film. Sjöström's assured hand is still visible, but the over-the-top luridness feels much more like The Penalty than any of Sjöström's earlier films.

Next week we being 1925 with our first Russian film, a film I've been intending to watch since I saw The Untouchables more than a quarter-century ago: Battleship Potemkin. Additionally, since we are starting 1925, I've added our planned films for 1926. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT

The Penalty (1920)

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/26/2017

The Penalty was our third film from 1920, and the first we’ve seen starring Lon Chaney. He plays a man who, as a boy, had his legs mistakenly amputated by a surgeon after a traffic accident, and who grows up to be a mob boss who plots revenge. It is every bit as lurid and manipulative as it sounds. Lon Chaney played the part by tying his legs tightly behind him, and could only work for ten minutes at a stretch because of the pain. He of course went on to more famous silent roles, including The Phantom of the Opera, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but this is the first entire movie of his I’ve seen, and it is immediately apparent why he was a star. He theatrically and athletically waddles and climbs from place to place, declaiming his various plans, and dominates almost every scene that he’s in. By contrast, the scenes depicting the proto-FBI organization that is attempting to bring him down take place in a static undistinguished office, and look as if they could possibly have been shot in a single day. This organization assigns a woman agent played by Ethel Terry to infiltrate his criminal organization and find out why he has assigned a large chunk of his criminal organization to the task of making hats, itself a clearly diabolical activity. This movie is not quite as eccentric as last week’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but compared to almost any other film we have seen recently, it is quite idiosyncratic. It probably most resembles the French serials Fantomas and Judex, but those had a significantly lighter tone. This movie is not entirely serious, but it has an intensity (sometimes verging on camp) that those movies lacked.

Next week we’ll see our fourth film from 1920, which, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, is a well-known early German silent: The Golem. I am a little apprehensive about watching an inter-war German film focusing on medieval Jewry, but am fully braced for it. Our list of planned films is, as always, here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT