Director: Tod Browning
Cast: Lon Chaney, Owen Moore, Renée Adorée, Doris Lloyd
Have I Seen it Before: Never.
Did I Like It: Two things are immediately striking me as fundamentally wrongheaded about the film*.
First, its plot is far too convoluted, so much so that I think the material would still produce headaches in… well, me… if it were produced as a talkie. There’s the handicapped saint, his no-account criminal of a brother (Chaney, in both roles), and then another criminal running around. It seems like they all love the same French girl, and the police are singularly unable to tell any of the three of them apart, until the plot basically resolves itself.
More importantly, however, is my deep belief that Chaney was fundamentally miscast in the role, or his abilities were fundamentally underused. This man with a thousand faces really has one face here, but we are supposed to believe that Chaney simply contorting his lim is tapping into some kind of grand cinematic magic…
When it isn’t. There isn’t two roles. I feel okay spoiling a 100-year-old film, but the dual role is a ruse, and the whole affair—if you’ll let me go back to complaining about the plot—ends with Chaney’s character having prettended to be crippled so much that he is now actually afflicted, and so severely, that he will die within minutes.
All I’m saying is that if Chaney could have been at least the man of two faces, I might have been able to sit in the theater and marvel how they pulled off such a feat in the early days of cinema. The film couldn’t offer even that much.
*I’m still enough of a neophyte at film criticism, that I feel gunshy dismissing a film I didn’t quite enjoy, simply because it was made by talent I have enjoyed elsewhere (Browning, Chaney). Both of them are long since dead, so I can’t imagine my dim enthusiasm will somehow discourage them from doing better next time.