Lon Chaney: Losing Yourself
When Charles Laughton ended his stupendous run of character parts in films of the 1930s by playing Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), he found a painfully innocent agony within that role, especially when Quasimodo is whipped in a public square. Lon Chaney also played Quasimodo in a silent film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame from 1923, and he doesn’t seem to believe in the innocence that Laughton stands up for. Half blind and deaf and burdened with a large hump on his back, Chaney’s Quasimodo is physically agile in a way that Laughton could never be, and he sneers at the townspeople who scorn him, sticking out his tongue at them. The agony of his Quasimodo is served straight with no chaser, and no larger point to be made. If Laughton gets further in the role and moves it to an abstract plane, Chaney is far more realistic. He does not sentimentalize, and his presence is harsh, unsparing.
They called Chaney The Man of a Thousand Faces, but so many of those faces were twisted, sneering, deformed, pulled back, pulled down, contorted. He was obsessed with amputation, impairment, ugliness. And when his face was unadorned by his beloved make-up, it knew that a particularly nasty trick of fate was coming. In Lon Chaney movies, nasty tricks of fate come with such regularity that you begin to doubt if anything good has ever happened or ever will happen to anyone. Could he have been romantic, charming, appealing? Or did he not have any faces for that, or any belief in such things? He was a one-man rebuke to the Jazz Age, a tough medicine to counteract all that whoopee and bootleg gin.
Chaney was born Leonidas Frank Chaney in Colorado in 1883. Both of his parents were deaf. “I could talk on my fingers, but as I grew older, I found it unnecessary,” Chaney said. “We conversed with our faces, with our eyes.” And so Chaney became adept at the art of pantomime out of necessity. When he was twenty, Chaney started working in theater and vaudeville acts, and he married a singer named Cleva Creighton in 1906. After the birth of their son Creighton Chaney, who later took on the professional name Lon Chaney, Jr., Chaney and his wife were separated for long periods and their relationship began to deteriorate. In April of 1913, Creighton went to the Majestic Theater in Los Angeles, where Chaney was managing a show, and attempted suicide by swallowing mercuric chloride. Though she lived, her singing voice was ruined. This supposedly caused a scandal in theater circles, and Chaney was forced to look for work in motion pictures to make his living.
He made many films during the 1910s, most of which are lost. His roles in these movies were usually small, and so his trusty make-up kit allowed him to play several bit parts in one film. In one of the few surviving movies from this period, By the Sun’s Rays (1914), Chaney plays a thieving clerk, and he’s darkly handsome in a dangerous sort of way. At one point, he shows his already mature gestural mastery when he reaches out for a girl’s shoulder and then thinks better of it, pulling away—few actors use their hands in the graceful and poetic way that Chaney does. Your eye goes right to him in all the frames of this short film, and the danger signs in his face come a cropper when he tries to rape the girl he had wanted to touch earlier. The attempted rape is quite violent, as if it’s really happening, and it shows how gifted Chaney was when it came to making physical events come alive on screen.
Chaney married his second wife Hazel Hastings in 1915. Based on surviving home movies, where Chaney is very physically affectionate and even silly with her, they seem to have had a happy home life. Surely he felt some residual guilt over the end of his first marriage, but if he did, Chaney put it behind him in life and used it for his work. “Between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney,” he once claimed, but this statement might have been meant to keep publicity at bay and to aid the air of mystery he wanted to cultivate about himself.
Clearly he felt things very deeply indeed. What makes Chaney the first really important American film actor is the fathoms-deep depth and power of his concentration in extreme close-ups. There were times in his career when he mugged a bit, moving his face and widening his eyes too much, but there were many show-stopping close-ups studded throughout all of his films where he offered us such powerfully centered and detailed feelings that the experience of a single Chaney close-up can feel like seeing a whole life lived before your eyes, from birth to death, with all of the hope, love, hate and despair in between.
Chaney first worked with his best partner in crime, Tod Browning, on a film called The Wicked Darling (1919), but it was The Miracle Man (1919), where he played a con man pretending to be a cripple, that first brought him to the world’s attention. (That film is now lost.) In Nomads of the North (1920), Chaney actually smiles sometimes, a peculiar sight, but all possible smiles would die away in what must count as the first major surviving Chaney film, The Penalty (1920), where he played Blizzard, an embittered gangster whose legs had been needlessly amputated below the knee when he was a young boy. To play this part, Chaney’s knees were placed in wooden buckets and his lower legs tied up in back of him. Studio doctors urged him not to use this method, but Chaney ignored them and endured the resulting pain and let that pain flood into his brutally angry performance. There was reportedly a scene tacked on to the end of the film that showed Chaney walking so that brutalized audiences would know that he was not actually an amputee, but it has not survived, and of course there’s no way of providing any comfort to anyone after they have seen a Chaney film, which came to mean blood-and-guts melodrama and twists of fate that feel like turns of the screw.
Browning used Chaney in a dual role for Outside the Law (1920), where he plays both a Frisco gangster and a Chinese servant. He’s billed up front in both roles, so that the audience can appreciate his virtuosity as a selling point, and in the very violent and exciting conclusion of this early gangster film, Chaney’s Chinese character actually gets to shoot his gangster character, an amusing bit of business to illuminate his divided self, or selves.
He worked again for his second-best director, Wallace Worsley, who helmed The Penalty and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, on the marvelously tight and atmospheric The Ace of Hearts (1921), which concerns a shadowy underground group that kills those it dislikes. As a character evocatively named Farallone, Chaney holds the camera with his sad stillness, his taciturn aggrievement. In one memorable scene, Farallone is a figure of surpassing loneliness as he stands outside a window in a heavy rain—the next morning, a dog cautiously befriends him, and he embraces the dog tenderly. Close to the end of the film, alas, Chaney succumbs to a brief fit of bad acting with some jerky, clumsy, unfelt gestures of agitation, a vestige of hollow stage playing from this period. It only lasts fifteen to twenty seconds, and it cannot discount that scene in the rain or the rest of this nearly Fritz Lang-like picture.
The real disfigurement of bad old-fashioned theater acting threatens Chaney’s film work periodically but always briefly, just as such fleeting bad habits are noticeable in the work of his female counterpart of this time in American cinema, Lillian Gish. Chaney and Gish are of course very different temperamentally, for she is an artist who feels hope whereas he has no hope at all, but what they brought to the screen was intense and still modern concentration. (Imagine Chaney and Gish together in a movie in a two-shot. Who would win?)
Chaney was stuck in some poor films in the early 1920s, stinkers like The Light in the Dark (1922) and The Trap (1922), and he gives hammy performances in them to match the claptrap of their plots, but as Fagin in Oliver Twist (1922), Chaney doesn’t traffic in stereotype. He makes Fagin seem human, his fingers always pitifully reaching and reaching for security, and he really is unrecognizable under his make-up—if you didn’t know it was Chaney from his billing, you might think that this was another actor. He makes his eyes small and he’s all bent over, and his movements are elaborately cautious and contained. Very few actors actually manage to “disappear” into a role, but that’s what Chaney does in Oliver Twist.
After the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Chaney’s horizons widened, and he signed with MGM for their first feature, Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924). This was the first real start of the Chaney As Unrequited Lover formula that would run through most of the rest of his work (he had done a dry run for it in a minor film, Flesh and Blood {1922}, where he literally has a sad violin that he plays on his shoulder). As a betrayed scientist who self-destructively decides to become a circus clown, Chaney pines for the unresponsive Norma Shearer in He Who Gets Slapped just as he will pine later for Joan Crawford in The Unknown (1927) and Loretta Young in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928).
He would have his revenge on these uninterested MGM beauties in his best-known film, The Phantom of the Opera (1925), where he terrorizes his beloved Christine (Mary Philbin) after she pulls off his mask and reveals a startled skull where a face should be—the impact of this famous image comes from the visual of a skull with seemingly human feelings. “Feast your eyes, glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!” he cries, grabbing Christine by the hair and forcing her to look, the same thing that Chaney would do with his repelled yet enthralled audience. His grip is unbreakably strong, and we are made to look and we are also forced to consider what outer ugliness has to do with inner ugliness. Chaney offers no easy answers.
He is a wearer of masks himself, and in The Phantom of the Opera, the elaborate make-up really is half the battle on an acting level. The make-up is the art here, the sign, the signal, and Chaney himself seems to disappear into a fiend from our worst nightmares. But this fiend is, or was, a person, too. At the end, Chaney’s Phantom gleefully offers himself up to an angry mob, a psychologically acute choice that illuminates his own darkest thoughts about life.
Chaney enjoyed playing a gruff but likable Marine sergeant in Tell It to the Marines (1926), but it was with Browning that he did his finest late work. The Unknown is their psychosexual masterpiece, an unbridled and truly sick story set in old Madrid where Chaney has his arms amputated to please the girl he adores, Joan Crawford, only to find out that his sacrifice has been in vain. The Unknown has the air of an obscure confession from the sub-conscious of both Browning and Chaney, and it’s filled with emotional moments, as when Chaney approaches Crawford after his operation and Browning gives him an extreme close-up where his face is loving and even boyish. But there’s macabre humor, too, as when a distressed Chaney holds his head with a foot exactly as he would have if he had been holding his head with a hand. The young Crawford already commands the camera, and she is easily his most challenging screen partner.
Browning showcased Chaney at his best in West of Zanzibar (1928), a sweaty bit of pulp where he once again gets crippled and once again suffers a mean twist of fate. His last film and only talkie, The Unholy Three (1930), was a remake of an earlier movie with Browning, and in it Chaney offers a variety of voices to go along with a few different impersonations. He died of throat cancer soon after shooting the film, thus depriving us of all the work he might have done in the 1930s and ‘40s (he was only forty-seven when he died). But most of his work of the 1910s is gone, too, as if it had never been made, and a few silents from his prime 1920s period, like Browning’s London After Midnight (1927), are also missing. We should be grateful we have as much of Chaney left as we do.
Some people just feel things much more deeply than others do, and that extremity of feeling can turn grotesque, even ugly. The miracle of Chaney was that he was able to feel as much as he did and offer his twisted findings to us in a collection of extreme close-ups that are so focused and contained that they transmit the most private inner workings of a profound artist whose impact on the cinema was both singular and pioneering.
by Dan Callahan