FOR audiences of the 1920s Lon Chaney was the Man of a Thousand Faces, an unlikely star celebrated for his ability to transform his appearance — from, for example, the bent, stocky, simian title character of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1923) to the gaunt, towering figure of “The Phantom of the Opera” (1925), with his bulging eyes and face seemingly stripped of flesh.
But if Chaney had a thousand faces, he, like many great stars, had essentially only one story to tell. In film after film he plays an outcast, exiled because of a physical deformity to live on the margins of society, whose monstrous appearance disguises a great tenderness of feeling. He focuses his yearnings on a beautiful young woman, who remains blind to the depth of his love and the greatness of his soul. Inevitably she discards him in favor of the nearest handsome, callow youth, choosing superficial beauty over wisdom and sensitivity.
Hey, we’ve all been there, and Chaney’s ability to transform this universal human experience of longing and rejection into vivid drama remains as seductive as ever. In his way Chaney was tapping into the same welter of feelings — adolescent, perhaps, but highly potent — that lies beneath the superhero movies of today, with their suggestion that what makes us feel different or unlovable may in fact be our greatest strength. It’s a comforting notion: Maybe what sets us apart is the very thing that makes us better.
Chaney’s characters, however, don’t have the luxury of being able to slip into a pair of tights and, transformed into glamorous figures with rippling muscles, embark on nocturnal crime-fighting missions. They’re stuck with the bodies they have, and in Chaney’s darker films their sense of difference turns bitter and cruel. That’s particularly the case with the films Chaney made with the director Tod Browning, who shared Chaney’s fascination with physical disability but ultimately lacked Chaney’s compassion.
Chaney’s appreciation of difference was a result of direct experience. He was a child of deaf parents who had met at what is now the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind. Browning was a veteran of the carnival and circus sideshow circuit for whom difference was a spectacle, to be consumed and exploited.
In Browning’s most harrowing film, the 1932 “Freaks,” he plays a punishing double game. At first Browning encourages the viewer to identify with the sideshow performers whose lives he documents in detail. But then at the climax, as the “freaks” prepare to avenge themselves on a woman who has betrayed one of their number, he films them as scuttling things, inhuman monsters who emerge from mud and darkness.
Warner Home Video has recently released three Browning-Chaney films as part of its burn-on-demand collection (warnerarchive.com), adding to the generous sampling of Chaney films it already offers. Although Chaney and Browning are both irrevocably identified with horror movies, they in fact, separately or together, made relatively few films in that genre, and in the new batch, “The Blackbird” (1926) is a crime film, and “West of Zanzibar” (1928) and “Where East Is East” (1929) are both psychological dramas with exotic settings.
Chaney’s personality seems to dominate “The Blackbird,” in which he stars as the title character, a London thief who hides his activities behind a second identity as the Bishop, the saintly director of a mission in the Limehouse district. To assume his disguise as the Bishop, who the police believe to be the Blackbird’s disabled brother, Chaney seems to pitch his body into a violent distortion, dislocating a shoulder and twisting his legs together into a knot — a clearly painful process that Browning displays twice in agonizing single takes.
The dual role device allows Chaney to split his usual character in two. It is the Blackbird who falls in love with the French dancer, Fifi (Renée Adorée) who performs in the music hall across from the Bishop’s mission. And it is the Bishop who, representing the Chaney character’s noble, sensitive side, who gallantly sacrifices himself when he finds that Fifi prefers a society jewel thief (Owen Moore) who has reformed under his guidance.
No such spirit of generosity informs “West of Zanzibar,” one of Browning’s most deliriously perverse works. Chaney is Phroso the Great, a vaudeville magician whose beloved wife (Jacqueline Gadsden) leaves him for another man (Lionel Barrymore); the shock is so great that Phroso falls from a balcony, and loses the use of his legs. Later Phroso discovers an infant he believes to be the illegitimate daughter of his wife and her lover. He packs the child off to be systematically debauched in a brothel in Zanzibar, while he retreats to a squalid African village, where he uses his magic to trick the natives into supplying him with ivory. His long-range plan is to present the grown-up girl, now a hard-drinking prostitute (Mary Nolan), to her presumed father, but fate has a surprise in store for Phroso, which Browning gleefully reveals in the final reel.
Revenge on an unfaithful wife is also the theme of “Where East Is East,” which finds Chaney as Tiger Haynes, a wild-animal trapper who operates out of French Indochina, wearing his profession on his face in the form of deep scars. His wife has long since vanished, leaving their daughter, Toyo (grown into Lupe Vélez), in Tiger’s perhaps excessively loving care. When Toyo tells him she has met a wealthy young American, Bobby (Lloyd Hughes), she intends to marry, Tiger’s eyes bulge with envy. Enter the mysterious seductress Madame de Sylva (Estelle Taylor, running off with the picture). Bobby meets her aboard a ship and finds her impossible to resist; subliminally she reminds him of someone he already knows.
“Where East Is East” would prove to be the last of Browning and Chaney’s 10 collaborations (Chaney died a year later of throat cancer), though it’s hard to see how much further they could go with such sordid material. (The climax involves a crazed gorilla — Tiger’s animal alter ego — with implications that are not pleasant to contemplate.) It’s not surprising to learn that audiences preferred George W. Hill’s 1926 “Tell It to the Marines,” the fourth film in Warner’s current Chaney lot. It’s a benign story of a hard-boiled Marine sergeant (Chaney) who softens up long enough to preside over the union of the nurse he secretly loves (Eleanor Boardman) and the raw recruit he turns into a fighting man (William Haines).
With its themes of difference and sacrifice (in one memorable scene Chaney examines his features in a mirror and decides his pet bulldog has a better chance with the nurse than he does), “Tell It to the Marines” actually conforms quite closely to the archetypal Chaney story line. It’s a template that MGM would continue to exploit long after Chaney’s death, and to play the roles that might once have been his, the front office brought over a bulldog from the Paramount lot. Perhaps Lon Chaney’s real successor was not Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi, but Wallace Beery. (Warner Archive Collection, DVDs $17.95 each, not rated)
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
SAFE HOUSE Trying to come in from the cold, a rogue C.I.A. operative (Denzel Washington) holes up in a South African “safe house,” where his keeper is an inexperienced operative (Ryan Reynolds). With Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson, Robert Patrick and Sam Shepard; Daniel Espinosa directed. “ ‘Safe House’ is essentially and very effectively a rollicking smash-and-crash chase movie that happens to be surprisingly well acted,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times in February. (Universal, Blu-ray/DVD combo $34.98, DVD $29.98, R)
JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND Walden Media continues its line of 3-D remakes of Jules Verne novels (after the 2008 “Journey to the Center of the Earth”) with a very loose interpretation of Verne’s 1874 story of a Pacific island with unusual properties. With Dwayne Johnson, Michael Caine, Vanessa Hudgens and Luis Guzman. “Like cars that are involved in crashes, islands explode far more often in the movies than they do in real life,” Neil Genzlinger wrote in The Times in February. (Warner Home Video, Blu-ray 3-D/Blu-ray/DVD combo $44.98; Blu-ray/DVD combo $35.99; DVD $28.98, PG)
JOHN CARTER The live-action debut of Andrew Stanton, the director of the Pixar animated hits “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E,” is an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels about a former Confederate Army captain (Taylor Kitsch) who finds himself transported to Mars, where digital adventure awaits. With Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong, Samantha Morton, Ciaran Hinds and Dominic West. “A bad movie should not look this good,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times in March. (Disney, Blu-ray 3-D/Blu-ray/DVD combo $49.99; Blu-ray/DVD combo $39.99; DVD $29.99, PG-13)
YELLOW SUBMARINE George Dunning’s 1968 animated fantasy based on the Beatles songbook returns in a new high-definition transfer from Apple Corps Ltd. (Capitol, Blu-ray $34.98, DVD $21.98, G)
HONDO This 1953 John Wayne film was one of the last big-budget studio films of the 1950s to be made in 3-D before the boom collapsed. But Paramount has decided to pass up on releasing the newly restored 3-D version in favor of a standard, flat print — a wasted opportunity. Directed by John Farrow, it doesn’t rank with Wayne’s work with John Ford and Howard Hawks during the same period, but it’s still a decent picture, with an explicit antiracist message (Wayne’s character is a “half-breed” scout) that belies the now standard, simplistic readings of Wayne’s career. (Paramount, Blu-ray $24.99, previously issued DVD $12.99, not rated)
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=46bd5d9d2a53a74877674769dc8b8277
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