Silent Film Sources - Reviews

Presented by B.P. Schulberg. Photographed by Harry Perry. 

Directed by Tom Forman. Adapted by Eve Unsell & Hope Loring. 

Chaney plays Yen Sin, the canny survivor of a deadly squall off an unidentified (British?) coast. The storm has been responsible for the deaths of many sailors and fishermen in Urkey, a small fishing village. This includes Dan Gibbs, the abusive husband of Sympathy Gibbs (Marguerite De La Motte). 

Yen Sin admires the area's dreamy beauty, so he establishes a laundry business among the hostile villagers. Keeping a low profile, the "heathen" outsider is regularly insulted but tolerated. He even makes allies of Sympathy and her admirer, Minister Malden (Harrison Ford). Yen Sin is a good sport about the frustrated missionary's attempts to convert him to Christianity. 

After Malden marries Sympathy, a blackmailing letter arrives with Dan Gibbs' signature. It threatens a reappearance by Gibbs, unless $500 blackmail is paid. Malden is distraught and becomes estranged from his wife, newborn child and congregation. This leads to a community crisis. Things come to a head at Yen Sin's death bed with Chaney's pariah manipulating all parties. 

In a bid for racial tolerance, the scenario uses the biblical injunction to not judge others -- to cast not the first stone. It suggests that belonging to a non-white race is an embarrassment, if not actually a sin. The humor and tenderness of Chaney's performance, as well as his ability to connect directly with an audience, undermine the film's patronizing tone and seriously racist title cards. 

Chaney uses searching fingertips, beseeching eyes and a sense of melancholy to express Yen Sin's lonesomeness. He also walks with a hunchback, both to disguise his height and to convey a life of manual labor. The story's unrestrained pathos are cut with Chaney's humor. I've never seen such a warm, likable performance from him. His ethnic makeup is less extensive and less authentic than as Ah Wing in the previous year's Outside the Law. This permits greater expressiveness. It also gives viewers uncomfortable with Chinese heroes a sort of half-western one. 

Western actors playing sympathetic non-western characters tend to idealize them. Richard Barthelmess' heroic Cheng Huan in Broken Blossoms (1919) was so gentle as to appear effeminate. Chaney doesn't do that, but he's more than a little unreal in Shadows. He gives a mythologizing performance, halfway between human being and kindly fantasy creature. Bending over an ironing board in front of a brilliantly lit window, he looks like an illustration in a Victorian children's book. Both character and performance may owe something to Dick Barthelmess, but Chaney's Yen Sin also plays like an twinkly early ancestor of Yoda from the Star Wars films. 

Lovers of silent lyricism should appreciate the idealized coasting setting. The cinematographer Harry Perry (Oscar winner for Howard Hughes' Hell's Angel's) and director Tom Forman create an idyllic Never-Neverland with exquisite lighting, design and tableaux. Its beauty is reminiscent of Maurice Tourneur's films. 

The downside includes unsubtle performances by Chaney's co-stars and the decision to allow Yen Sin to renounce his original faith. But this does little harm to Chaney's beautiful performance. 

Shadows was shot under the title Ching Ching Chinaman and produced by B.P. Schulberg's Preferred Pictures. Due to exhibitor hostility with a Chinese hero, Shadows was distributed to independent theaters. It performed well, according to Chaney biographer Michael Blake and acquired a champion in the critic and playwright, Robert E. Sherwood who included the film in his book, "The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-23." 

The video version, available from Kino on Video, offers a 1979 organ score by Gaylord Carter. (Review © 1998 Christopher Clotworthy)