by Michael Ferguson

  "Nobody is ever sorry for a man who is sorry for himself."

-LonChaney

The Man of A Thousand Faces is slowly being patched together from the "man of a thousand fragments." Lon Chaney made 156 films (that we know of) during his career in Hollywood, but like vast quantities of our silent film heritage, there are many missing pieces. Committing their product to celluloid on a volatile silver nitrate stock, the early film industry betrayed an unfortunate lack of business acumen, as Hollywood could not foresee the long-term worth of motion picture entertainments. Over the past decade and a half, film historians have been scrambling to save, transfer, refurbish, and locate a wealth of images caught in chemical self-immolation; a heritage quite literally going up in smoke andcrumbling to pieces.

Many of Lon Chaney's famed faces are among those thought lost in this cultural tragedy. His wolverine-fanged vampire outfitted in lacy wings and beaver hat in LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927) remains one of the most sought after prizes of the feared vanished.

Lon Chaney was not, strictly speaking, a horror film star. Actually, the term hadn't even yet been coined in the American press and wouldn't be until after Chaney's death. He was first and foremost a character actor of such imposing and physical accomplishment that he at long last attained movie star status. In fact, his biggest box-office, success was playing sans make-up, as the rough-exteriored SergeantO'Hara in TELL IT TO THE MARINES (1927), a precursor to AN OFFICER AND AGENTLEMAN.

Of course, he also brought to the screen a miraculous box of make-up tricks of the stage that allowed him to change his face and body into a staggering array of man, woman and beast. Without it, Lon was a decidedly homely man and even the most flattering portrait of him would find the uninitiated incredulous at the notion that here was one of Hollywood's biggest stars.

The story of Chaney's difficult childhood is now legendary (and was even popularized in MGM's reverent bio MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES - 1957)and will provide endless psychosocial fodder for those looking to discover why he immersed himself in so many portraits of anguish and physical pain.

He was born Leonidas Chaney on April Fool's Day, 1882, to deaf and dumb parents living in Colorado Springs. By age 12, he was withdrawn from school to care for his bedridden mother, suffering from inflammatory rheumatism. His older brother John had a small traveling theatre group and Lon joined in quite early, despite his father's reproach.

A period of working as a tradesman gave way to Lon's joining the Columbia Musical Comedy Repertory Company at age 23, where he met 16-year old singer Cleva Creighton. They were married three months after Cleva gave birth to a son they would give her surname, Creighton (later, of course, Lon Chaney, Jr.). Touring throughout the country, including a stint in Chicago as a theatre manager, Lon could barely make ends meet and his relationship with Cleva soured. She had achieved a level of success surpassing his own, thus jealousies surfaced and her increasing alcohol intake didn't help. Their growing animosities culminated in her melodramatic suicide attempt in 1914, when she downed a vial of bichloride of mercury backstage during one of the shows.

Lon successfully divorced her and retained custody of Creighton.

Cleva's irrational act would ruin more than just her life with Lon. The poison had effectively damaged her vocal chords and her career was finished. Lon would always tell his son that his real mother had died.

Years later, when the boy discovered the truth, a rift developed between son and father.

Chaney was now situated in Hollywood and had been appearing in some Universal comedies since 1912. He had also now married Hazel, a chorus girl who-in pointed irony, considering the roles with which Lon would become most famous-had previously been wed to a man with no legs. Unhappy with his wages at Universal after six years of service, in which he would delve into his magic box of make-up and do three or four parts a day, Lon asked for a $50 raise and a five year contract in 1918. Universal said no, so Lon walked. A friendship with western silent star Wm. S. Hart gave him a jump-start as an independent contractor and then came along the role that would misshape his career to come: Frog, the phony cripple, in 1919's THE MIRACLE MAN. The director had passed on five contortionists for the part because none of them could act it. Lon Chaney could, and the dramatic untangling of his twisted legs combined with the painful, then angelic countenance of his "cure," astounded audiences.

The question of whether Chaney was a masochist or in some way derived pleasure out of his sometimes painful physical constraints is one better left to people like two-time Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake. That the actor would endure significant periods of contortioned self-restraint is no mere fabrication, however, as a look at the harnessing of the lower half of his legs to the back of his upper legs to persuade us he had only stumps (in 1920's THE PENALTY) or the impossibly tightwraps he had applied to destroy even the suggestion that there was room in his shirt to "hide" his arms when appearing as an armless knife-thrower (in 1927's THE UNKNOWN) clearly demonstrate.

To Chaney, this was work. Hard work, yes, but he'd havenothing to do with anything less. These physical demands were part of his craft and the perfecting of them meant he'd rise in his trade. Eventually, having amazed audiences and achieved acclaim and even some marketable "notoriety" for his transformations (remember the chant: "Don't step on that spider...it might be Lon Chaney"), the actor enjoyed brainstorming over and meticulously planning his next assignments.

Throughout his career, alternately at MGM and Universal, he essayed a formidable series of unusual characters: Fagin in OLIVER TWIST(1922), a remarkably sympathetic Chinese laundryman in SHADOWS (1922), both mad scientist and missing link in A BLIND BARGAIN (1923), white-eyed Singapore Joe in ROAD TO MANDALAY (1926), a paralyzed Dead Legs Flint (who allows his own daughter to contract syphilis in the jungle, as he doesn't know her true identity) in WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1928), and as the hideously scarred animal trapper "Tiger" Haynes in the last of his twisted and increasingly controversial films with director Tod Browning in WHERE EAST IS EAST(1929).

In 1929, while filming the adventurous THUNDER in Wisconsin, shards of the material being used as artificial snow lodged in Lon's throat and complicated what was already rapidly spreading throat cancer. Having recently triumphed in his first and only talkie, and with rumblings about his playing both Van Helsing and Count Dracula in Universal's proposed version of DRACULA, Lon's health spiraled and on August 6, 1930, hedied of a throat hemorrhage at age 48.

Had Lon Chaney lived, his place in what would become known as the Horror Film would have even been greater. Though wrong for DRACULA and right for FRANKENSTEIN, the field would clearly have been all his, with doubtful the rise to stardom of a Boris Karloff or a Bela Lugosi or, for that matter, a Lon Chaney, Jr. That he is still remembered and identified so exclusively with horror speaks loudly to the depths of wrenching humanity he brought to the crippled, tortured, ugly, and tormented men he played. Men, not monsters.

A collection of seven of Chaney's films from 1920 - 1925 is available through Kino Video, along with a documentary entitled LONCHANEY: BEHIND THE MASK that contains extremely rare clips from as early as 1914 to the only surviving glimpse of his performance as Frog in THE MIRACLE MAN (1919). With a wealth of material yet to be mined, I submit the following list of FIVE CHANEY FILMS definitely worth seeking out:

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923): Though it may be blasphemous to suggest that Lon may have actually gone overboard designing this, one of his most famous make-ups of the grotesque, it is still a spectacle to behold. (I prefer Charles Laughton's make-up and performance.) Chaney followed Hugo's description of Quasimodo almost to the letter and put himself through the tortures of the damned while carrying around 72 pounds of rubber hump. His grasp for pathos may be a bit unsubtle, but his astounding acrobatics on the face of the Notre Dame facade are mightily impressive and his climactic demise painfully felt. So undeniable was the power of his work here, that Universal, which had just five years before told him to take a hike when he asked for $125 a week, offered him a contract at $10,000 a month.

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924): Lon pours on the sentiment and heartache in this classic adaptation from the stage play detailing the peculiar tale of a respected man of science, betrayed by his wife, who escapes the torment of the real world by joining the circus and becoming a clown whose nightly routine is to be slapped and humiliated, finally tearing off his little fabric heart and giving it to the circus beauty with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love. Before the finish, this very same heart will be soaked in blood.

THE UNHOLY THREE (1925/30): The silent version of this crooks triangle, directed by Tod Browning, is the better of the two, but the soundre-make is perhaps of greater interest as it represents Chaney's only soundfilm. In both, the original story's focus on a vengeful midget who masterminds a ring of crime with two of his circus cohorts (one a strongman, the other a ventriloquist) was re-designed with the purpose of making it a starring vehicle for Chaney. Lon's Professor Echo has become the ringleader, operating out of a pet store front, and often dressing as a kindly old lady whose baby is actually the feisty midget. Though openly frightened about the prospect of talking pictures, Chaney pulls off a variety of different voices in the role and gives us an audio glimpse of a silent film actor on the verge of becoming the "man of a thousand voices," too.

THE UNKNOWN (1927): Perhaps the most bizarre of Chaney's association with Tod Browning, Lon plays Alonzo the Armless, a circus performer who throws knives and shoots guns with his feet. In classically perverted Browning style, Alonzo's armlessness is actually a hoax, known only to his midget assistant whose job it is to bind him into a straightjacket. Lon has eyes for fellow performer Joan Crawford, who has coincidentally anall-consuming fear of men pawing at her. Having committed a murder in which Crawford has only seen the killer's hands (one of which comes complete with ananomalous double-thumb), Alonzo decides to both hide his identity and win herover by finding a doctor who will amputate his arms for real. This is Browning's FREAKS of the silent era, complete with a disturbingly ironic finale. (And it would make a great double bill with Jodorowsky's SANTA SANGRE.)

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925): The making of this film was an unhappy experience for the actor: he hated the director, his own deaf and dumb father had begun losing his eyesight at the time, and the original cut was subsequently hacked and re-hacked after test audiences proved fickle about whether they wanted humor or not. The finished product is somewhat a mess. Chaney, however, is exceptionally good. The famed unmasking scene is one of the pinnacle moments in all of screen horror and is such a frightening revelation that the details of the act are sometimes ignored. Chaney's animated skull that flashes open and gapes at us the moment Mary Philbin unmasks him is actually an horrific gasp of pain, not a monster's roar. His unmasking will now reveal the ugliness that cripples him, that threatens to betray his relationship with this beautiful soul, and his turning gaze (markedly out-of-focus) and accusatory finger both blames and condemns her for what will happen thereafter. Aside from the brilliant make-up revealed during the unmasking, Chaney's coup de grace comes in the Phantom's final revelation to the mob he momentarily holds at bay with the threat of a poison gas pellet clenched in his fist; with sarcastic self-sacrifice, he reveals an empty hand.