Lon Chaney: The Man of a Thousand Faces

1919 · Tod Browning

Before the appliances. Stoop Connors is a walk, a stare, and a hand on Priscilla Dean's arm, and Browning already knows what to do with all three. The print is battered. Watch what Chaney does with his shoulders when the scene is not his.

1920 · Wallace Worsley

Blizzard's legs strapped behind him in a leather harness, and Chaney walked on his knees through the picture. A crime boss who wants the doctor's daughter and a graft. The harness is the film. Watch him at the piano, with a woman working the pedals for him. The pain is not acted.

1921 · Tod Browning

Two faces in one film: Black Mike, who wants Molly back in the racket, and Ah Wing, who talks her father down. No hump, just a change of walk and a change of eyes. Watch the last gunfight in the apartment. Both Chaneys are in it, and one of them shoots the other.

1921 · Wallace Worsley

No limp, no hump, a face across a table. A secret society draws cards for a killing, and Chaney's Farallone draws the one that means love and murder at once. Worsley keeps the ritual rooms dim and the eyes lit. The useful test, early.

1923 · Wallace Worsley

The hump was plaster, about twenty pounds, and the face took three and a half hours in Room 5. Thalberg pushed Laemmle to the budget; Chaney said it was the part he wanted. Watch the eyes after Esmeralda gives him water. The makeup stops hiding them.

1923 · Lambert Hillyer

A crippled crook sent to a quiet town to set up a banker, and the 1906 earthquake for a third act. Another harness, another walk. The film made twice its cost beside the Hunchback. Watch how the crutches become the character's argument before the earthquake settles it.

1924 · Victor Sjöström

The one without a monster kit. A scientist whose work and wife are stolen becomes a clown whose act is being slapped while the house laughs. Sjöström, just off the boat from Sweden, shoots the circus as a machine for shame. Chaney does it with the face. The first film under the MGM lion.

1925 · Rupert Julian

Wire, cotton, paint, a raised brow, and a man who holds still while the mask comes off. Chaney designed the face and then had the sense to let it be seen once. The Bal Masqué is in color. The unmasking is why anyone still books it, and he knew that when he built it.

1925 · Tod Browning

Echo in a dress. A ventriloquist as a bird-shop granny, a strongman, and Harry Earles in a pram. Their biggest hit together, and the only picture he remade with sound, swearing five of the voices were his. Watch the granny's hands. The disguise is a performance of harmlessness.

1926 · George W. Hill

No disguise. Sergeant O'Hara drills a slacker and loses the nurse to him, and Chaney does it with a jaw and a stance. The Marines made him an honorary member; MGM put it on the poster. This is the test the collection proposes, and he passes it.

1927 · Tod Browning

Alonzo hides his arms because of a thumb, then gives them away for a woman who has stopped minding hands. Chaney throws knives with his feet and lights a cigarette the same way. The last reel is a man learning what he paid for. He plays it without asking for anything.

1928 · Herbert Brenon

A clown who raises a girl and then cannot stop loving her, and the smile is painted on because that is the job. Loretta Young at fifteen, and Chaney asked for her. No heavy appliances. Watch the doctor's office, where he cannot stop crying and calls it his act.

1928 · Tod Browning

Dead-Legs in an African trading post, dragging himself through a swamp for eighteen years toward a revenge he has misread. Chaney below waist height for the whole picture. The jungle is the lot. The cruelty is a house and a lie about a mother. When the facts arrive, they are worse.

1929 · Tod Browning

The last of ten with Browning and the penultimate silent. Tiger Haynes is a trapper marked by the work, and for once the scars are honest and the man is decent. Estelle Taylor brings the venom. A gorilla for the finish. Within a year he was dead of throat cancer.