Impossible to imagine a project like this today, so anaemic a bunch are our contemporary screen actors and so far removed from either gritty reality or the mythic struggles of the old-fashioned showbiz narrative are their lives (although perhaps another art form, like opera, might serve better, as with Mark Anthony Turnage’s forthcoming work on the life of Anna Nicole Smith).
This was 1957, though, and a period where a changing Hollywood liked to look wistfully back at its fast-receding Golden Age and the larger-than-life personalities that had created a dream factory in the Californian hills (Forrest J Ackerman was also insisting that ‘Lon Chaney Shall Not Die’ in the pages of his Famous Monsters of Filmland at the same time; cinematic nostalgia was being born). The silent era in particular was a heroic one both in front of the cameras and behind them, a time when actors were gods and goddesses and producers like wunderkind Irving Thalberg could inspire Scott Fitzgerald (who did his time in the script-mines) to write a novel like The Last Tycoon.
Joseph Pevney’s movie about film’s legendary ‘Mystery Man’ Lon Chaney (superbly played by James Cagney) is simultaneously a typical biopic, selective, streamlined and sometimes sensationalised, and an eye-on-the-Oscars meditation on disability. It unfolds with a satisfying neatness: brought up by his deaf-mute parents, young Lon is singled out and bullied by the other kids for being different. Out of solidarity with mom and pop, he stops speaking and learns to sign – all useful training for a successful career in Vaudeville, where his clowning relies on gesture and mime rather than the spoken word. Things only turn sour when Cleva Creighton (Dorothy Malone), the ambitious young singer he has married, wants to meet the parents before giving birth to LC Jnr. I’ve no idea what degree of prejudice deaf-mutes faced in those days, but when Cleva first claps eyes on them her reaction is pretty much that of Mary Philbin pulling off Chaney’s mask in his 1925 Phantom of the Opera. The film then traces the progress of Lon’s meteoric Hollywood career from extra to star out of the ashes of his marriage – Chaney’s pantomimic talents make him, of course, a natural for silent movies, while his secret pain over his perceived difference will be the driving force behind his art, translating inner contortion into visible deformity.
But by this time we’re an hour in, so a whistlestop tour of some of his more startling make-ups (the ‘crippled’ con artist in The Miracle Man, the legless crime boss Blizzard in The Penalty) and some ambitious recreations of the career-defining roles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Phantom are essentially what we get. The possible subtext of Chaney’s masochistic commitment to extreme and possibly health-damaging make-up jobs of his own creation is somewhat played down, but the film doesn’t let its flawed hero off lightly; and while Cagney can’t match Chaney’s intensity in the recreated movie sequences, he is quite brilliant as Chaney the obsessive control freak who tells his son that his estranged mother is dead and refuses to contemplate Lon Jr.’s desire to follow his father into films (which, of course, he did, if with considerably less spectacular results).
No masterpiece, Pevney’s film is a solid biopic of a fascinating performer, boasting excellent performances all round and providing a nice (if slightly rose-tinted) look at the glory days of Hollywood.
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