Tonight I did not watch a cheesy science fiction movie, although I promise to make it up to you in the near future, perhaps even tomorrow. What I did watch instead was pretty interesting, a silent film from 1927 called "The Unknown" starring Lon Chaney and a young Joan Crawford. Lon Chaney (or Lon Chaney Sr. to differentiate him from his son, Lon Chaney Jr.) was known as The Man Of A Thousand Faces, for his ability to create memorable characters through the use of makeup and prosthetics, which he applied himself. He was his own makeup man, and a very talented one at that. He was also known as The King Of Horror, because before there was Boris Karloff as "Frankenstein" or Bela Lugosi as "Dracula", there was Lon Chaney as "The Phantom Of The Opera" and as "Quasimodo" in "The Hunchback Of Notre Dame". He played many other roles, too. IMDB lists 162 credits, quite a few considering that Cheney only lived to be 47 years old. Some of those movies were horror and many more may not have been, but almost all of them were silent. Cheney only made one sound picture before he died in 1930. And he was the first Horror Star.
I have only gotten into silent films in the last ten years or so, and have only become a lasting fan since about 2014. Now I love Silents (capital S), my favorites being in the German Expressionist Horror genre. I haven't seen a lot of Silent Movies, I'd guess somewhere around 25 (and I promise to build that number), but I have seen epics like "Ben Hur" and Fritz Lang's "Dr. Mabuse : Der Spieler" and "Die Nibelungen", and quite a few others. Maybe I should raise my estimate to about 35 films, but no matter.
The thing is, or was, that I had never seen any Lon Chaney films. I've seen Lon Jr. in a ton of stuff, and he's always been the Lon Chaney that I knew, as "The Wolfman" or in the "Inner Sanctum" movies. Lon Jr. was great, too, but I had never seen his Dad, who was said to be The King. I mean, I've seen film clips of "Phantom" or "Hunchback", and stills from many of his famous roles, which I would not be able to name, but I know the faces.
But what happened was, since it is October and we are closing in on Halloween, my favorite holiday, I was in need of horror movies to watch. I am always on the lookout for unseen films of any genre, and last week I found "Spider Baby" starring Lon Jr. That film was such a blast that I looked for more Jr. but couldn't find any movies with him that I hadn't seen. So then I thought, "what about his Dad"? And that led me to "The Lon Chaney Collection", discovered in the library database. The two dvd set arrived today at Northridge Libe and I watched "The Unknown" this evening. It was my first Lon Chaney movie ever, and I can see why he is held in such high regard. He has such an expressive face, an unusual face, rugged yet vulnerable, with deep dark eyes that can express mania or go shiny while holding back tears, all in the same scene.
In "The Unknown", he plays Alonzo, an armless knife-thrower in a traveling circus. He is in love with Joan Crawford, the daughter of the circus owner. She acts as his target in the knife-throwing act (which he does with his feet), and this is a different Joan Crawford than you are accustomed to seeing, because she is only 21 here and she looks more natural and less sculpted than she would later appear when she became a star. In fact I did not recognise her and was unaware it was she until I looked up the credits later on.
Alonzo has no arms, and he loves Joan, his beautiful target, who has come to detest men because, in her words, "they all want to paw me". She confides in Alonzo and trusts him because he has no "paws", no hands or arms. He mistakes her sharing for something more, but she doesn't love him, which begins to drive him mad. Wanting to remain close to her, Alonzo then sets Joan up with the circus strongman, certain that he will "put his paws" all over her, and one more rival will be eliminated.
But the strongman has a sensitive soul, and Alonzo's plan backfires. Joan Crawford falls for the strongman's heart, and then his muscles too. He has kept his hands off her until she was ready, and now they are to be married. Alonzo is crushed, and Lon Chaney plays this to the hilt. You cannot take your eyes off him in these scenes. Remember that in silents, the face had to tell the story. There was no dialogue. Boy, could Lon Chaney use his face.
Now, something is up with Alonzo the knife-thrower, besides the fact that he is obsessed with Joan Crawford, and that he has tried to trick her into rejecting the circus strongman.
That is all I will say. It's a short film, listed on IMDB at 63 minutes but the version I saw was only 50 minutes long. Perhaps footage was lost over the years. Though short, it is a complete story, and gives you a crash course in the greatness of Lon Chaney, and also of director Tod Browning, who went on to make "Dracula" four years later, just after Chaney died. Browning and James Whale were the great artistic visionaries of early horror cinema. Their work for Universal in creating an atmosphere and establishing Horror as a franchise will never be surpassed.
But yeah, Lon Chaney. It took performers of great expression to make cinema catch on with the public. Imagine if movies, this new technique of moving pictures, had come out with amateur actors or stories that were not well written or produced or art directed. The motion picture industry would never have gotten off the ground. So it was performers from the stage who made it happen, actors like Cheney and Crawford, who was also a dancer, who had already been performing in front of live audiences before they learned how to act in front of a camera. The history of cinema is an interesting subject, and it is fun to go back and watch the actors who laid the foundation for what became the art form of the 20th Century.
Two Thumbs Up for "The Unknown" which I think could be considered a Horror Film, weird as it is.
I have a couple more Lon Chaneys to come.
This aft, I did get up to O'Melveny for a nice hike. Nothing fancy, just the usual trail.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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