Silent Film Sources - Reviews

Executive Producer, Dan Clark.

Lon Chaney Consultant Michael F. Blake. 

Biographical Consultants, Jon Mirsalis, Takashi Teshigawara.

Creative Consultants, Felicia Feaster, David Shepard.

Narrated by Ronald Gordon.

Additional Music Performed by Robert Israel and the Biograph Quartet.

(c) 1995 Kino International Corp. All Rights Reserved. 

He was able to hot-wire an audience to the distress of his complex discontented characters.  Yet Chaney was not an emotional actor.  He didn't personally go through a character's travails.  Chaney used a pantomime that was quite objectively determined to express an emotion and share it with an audience.  A good example comes early in Kino's documentary.  In a clip from The Scarlet Car, Chaney uses sunken shoulders, palsied movements and a furrowed brow to convey the frailty and clouded mind of a mentally confused old man.

The actor constantly found himself in roles using physical deformity as a metaphor for emotional disfigurement.  His physically dissembling con man in The Miracle Man inspired a stream of such roles that continued until his death.  Behind the Mask includes clips or stills of legless or armless Chaneys from Flesh and Blood, The Shock, The Blackbird, The Penalty, West of Zanzibar and The Unknown.  His disfigurements of the much-maimed star were dwelt on lovingly, as if they were things of beauty.

You could always count on Chaney's characters to be emotionally and sexually disenfranchised.  He was a sort of martyred patron saint for lovelorn schmoes.  The masochistic nature of virtually all his star vehicles seems to have been a key ingredient in their success.

Behind the Mask shows clips from such Universal films as The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Outside the Law, The Oubliette and The Shock, as well as several independent productions (Nomads of the North, Flesh and Blood and The Light of Faith).  But his MGM films are not included.  Such key titles as The Unknown, Tell It to the Marines and Laugh Clown Laugh are represented only by stills.  Instead, we keep returning to a couple of non-classics, The Shock and Flesh and Blood over and over again to represent the points made in Bret Wood's excellent narration.  Either because they were unavailable, too expensive or not a part of Kino's package, some of the best films Chaney ever made don't make it here.

The two surviving scenes included from Chaney's breakthrough film, The Miracle Man go some way toward making up for this.  The healing scene is a tantalizing peek at what looks like an exceptional lost film.  It makes you long to see other films by George Loane Tucker.

Behind the Mask's second half details Chaney's closely-guarded personal life.  This includes home movies shot by his friend, William Dunphy showing the Chaneys cutting up and socializing.  Production of the two big guns in Kino on Video's Chaney series, The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, take up the rest of the running time.

It's a shame that his notorious MGM melodramas couldn't be seen here.  But Behind the Mask is well produced and very thoughtfully written.  It tells you exactly why, for better or worse, Lon Chaney was a star. 

In addition to the 65 minute Behind the Mask, the Kino on Video tape also includes the complete By the Sun's Rays, a 1914 Universal one-reeler featuring Chaney, Murdock MacQuarrie and Agnes Vernon. (Review © 1998 Christopher Clotworthy)