Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Best Actor Of 1927-28: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)

Earning the nickname "The Man of a Thousand Faces" with his skill as an actor and as a makeup artist, Lon Chaney had a gift for making the grotesque look real then imbuing his creations with a humanity that reaches right off the screen. Better known for his roles in the silent versions of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and The Phantom Of The Opera, Chaney's performance in the tragic love story Laugh, Clown, Laugh may very well be the best of his career and is my choice for the best performance by actor for the year 1927-28.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh is the story of Tito Beppi, an aging circus performer who raises an abandoned child as his own only to find to his horror and his shame that when she grows to young womanhood he is falling hopelessly in love with her. Tito wrestles with feelings of guilt and, despite his enormous professional success, falls into a deep depression. The girl (played by a fourteen year old Loretta Young a full twenty years before she won an Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter) is unaware of Tito's feelings and complicates matters by falling in love with a close friend of her stepfather.

That by the end of the film the three participants of this unhappy love triangle are motivated by genuine affection and self- sacrificing concern for one another makes the tragic denouement all the more poignant.

Norma Desmond claimed silent stars acted with their faces—Lon Chaney really did. He had to. Often he was buried under layers of make-up and prosthetics and with the limitations of silent film that robbed him of a voice and a soundtrack to cue a mood, he was reduced to telling stories with his eyes. That he was able to convey deeply-felt transformations of character with little more than a look is a testament to his hard work and talent.

Here, Chaney moves from portraying the energy and contentment of a consummate professional in love with his work to the tears and self-loathing of a man in love with the girl he has raised as a daughter and is somehow able to make this troubled and troubling character sympathetic. It was the sort of delicate task he accomplished on film many times.

Years later, Loretta Young said of Chaney, who took great pains to help her with her first starring role, "I shall be beholden to that sensitive, sweet man until I die."

The same year Laugh, Clown, Laugh arrived in theaters, Chaney also starred in London After Midnight, a highly-regarded vampire thriller that may have been an even better showcase for Chaney's talent. Unfortunately, London After Midnight was destroyed in a fire at an MGM warehouse in 1967, an all-too-common end for many Silent Era films.

In 2002, film historian Rick Schmidlin produced a truncated form of London After Midnight for Turner Classic Movies from a series of still photographs and the film's screenplay. I've seen this version and while it's almost impossible to judge the movie itself from what's left, nothing I saw dissuaded me from my opinion that Chaney's work was the best of 1927-28.


After Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Chaney made one sound picture, a commercially-successful remake of one of his silent classics, The Unholy Three, and was slated to star in a number of other sound movies, including Tod Browning's classic Dracula and the Oscar-winning prison drama, The Big House. Shortly after his sound debut, however, he died of cancer. He was only 47.

Over the course of a film career that spanned eighteen years and 161 movies, Chaney developed into one of the greatest actors of the Silent Era. In addition to his film appearances, Chaney also directed six movies. In 1957, James Cagney starred in a movie about Chaney's life, appropriately named Man Of A Thousand Faces.

After Chaney's death, his son, Lon Chaney, Jr., carried on the acting tradition and appeared in nearly 200 movies and television shows, including a starring role in the 1939 classic Of Mice And Men.

A Side Note: It's easy to forget that before Hollywood began to censor itself in mid-1934 with the enforcement of the Production Code, movies were often as explicit and frank as anything we're accustomed to seeing now. In Laugh, Clown, Laugh, there's a scene where an aristocrat (Nils Asther) kneels to remove Loretta Young's stocking and kiss her bare foot, a scene of raw sensuality that helps explain both why he is obsessed with the girl and why she finds him simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.

I was reminded of scenes in other pre-Code movies I've seen recently—Clara Bow flashing her bare breasts in Wings, a woman breast-feeding a baby in The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, and Joan Blondell's tendency to strip down to her bra and panties in practically everything she starred in—scenes which serve as proof for those who need it that baby boomers didn't invent sex at Woodstock.

As I will eventually cover, the Production Code would soon forbid scenes such as those in Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Films from the pre-Code era would be bowdlerized or buried and, in either case, forgotten. It would take a later generation to reintroduce explicit imagery into the movies and then congratulate itself for inventing what had already been perfected—art, and its Siamese twin, exploitation.

18 comments:

mm said...

Fuck!

Mister Parker said...

I'll take that as a compliment for the quality of my honeyed prose rather than a veiled reference to Country Joe McDonald at the aforementioned Woodstock festival.

Unless it's a general exhortation of some kind ...

Oh, I'm so confused!

L. F. Chaney said...

Very nice! I'm flattered.

Thank you,

L. C.

P.S. I'm confused also. Isn't that some sort of British acronym? No doubt, it was written by a Shakespearean stage actor who envies my popularity.

Mister Parker said...

Welcome, Mr. Chaney. It's always nice when a recipient of a Katie stops by to pick up the award in person.

One of the most pleasurable aspects of watching silent movies for this blog has been seeing just how good an actor Lon Chaney really was. He's rightly remembered for the remarkable transformations he made for each role, but those roles would have been quickly forgotten if he hadn't also had a gift for turning those characters back into human beings.

A fine actor. I can't recommend his work enough.

Douglas Fairbanks said...

Fuck Lon Chaney. He couldn't carry my saddlebags!


Just kidding, Lon; I loved your work in That Devil, Bateese!

Hard to believe we were born within a couple of months and a couple of miles from each other, and I got all that talent.

And pussy!

Mythical Monkey said...

I hope you're not feeling too left out there Doug -- I'll write about you in a bit of detail next week after we get to Mary Pickford ...

L. F. Chaney said...
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L. F. Chaney said...

Mr. Parker, what do you mean, was?

And Doug, the only thing you were good for was waving your poker around — WAVING! You couldn't act your way out of a paper bag. And, if it weren't for Mary, you'd be snatching ladies' purses, instead of bunking with and marrying 'em.

Mister Parker said...

Hmm. I can see why you guys never made a movie together ...

Lupner said...

Just a brief interruption the Doug F.-Lon C. exchange to say I beLIEVE that the only Lon C. performance I've had the pleasure to see, to date, has been 'Phantom of the Opera' (kind of hard to know with the Man of A Thousand Faces thing goin' on) -- but he is one of those actors whose films I've always planned to explore more. Especially after reading this (yet another) fascinating essay. Will really have to join Netflix again -- can one get many silent films via Netflix, btw?

And for the record, found his son's performances in the couple 'Werewolf' films I saw repeatedly as a kid most poignant. His was the only of the classic old film monster characters (along w/Dracula and Frankenstein) that actually scared the bejesus outta me -- so that I could feel sadness for the man in human form says a lot.

Mister Parker said...

Hey, lupner -- how are you doing? Missed you ...

As soon as you started wondering about Lon Chaney on dvd, I had to look it up. There are several -- The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom Of The Opera (1925, plus a 1929 re-issued version, which I think has a score), a 3-disc set called TCM Archives: The Lon Chaney Collection that has Laugh, Clown, Laugh; The Ace Of Hearts and The Unknown. And there at least a couple more out there, Shadows and The Shock. I admit, I don't have any of his stuff on dvd -- I've been taping him (and everybody else) off Turner Classic Movies for years, which might explain why I have something like 1600 movies in the basement ...

I just knew that collection would come in handy one day.

There must be a couple here you might want to add to your Netflix queue ...

lupner said...

Thank you, Mister Parker!

Mister Parker said...

You are welcome!

Douglas Fairbanks said...

Would you two get a room?

Lon and I are busy here.

Listen, you makeup-reliying, stupid-voiced buffoon -- I may have shagged 'em and bagged 'em, but once I did I knew how to make it mean something.

I don't see anyone discussing you and your "United Dress-Up-In-Pancake" STudios 90 years down the road.

So why don't you take your "poker" comments and go poke yourself.

And while we're at it -- YOUR SON was the one with all the talent!!!


Nyaa nyaa nyaaaaah

Douglas Fairbanks said...

My performance on Turner Classic Movies tonight is super. Just super.

Lon Chaney can kiss my ass.

L. F. Chaney said...
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L. F. Chaney said...

Doug, you idiotic hormone in tights, you don't see anyone discussing me because you can't see past the end of your pointed beak which, along with the rest of your fat head, is stuck so far up your own behind that NO ONE could kiss it!

What are you trying to do? Sweep out your sigmoid colon with that cheesy-looking whisk broom you call a mustache???

Michael Powers said...

I agree with Burt Lancaster that the best performance by an actor ever recorded on film remains Chaney's in "The Unknown," a 1927 movie in which Chaney portrayed Alonzo the Armless carnival knife thrower, slinging knives with his feet at scantily clad 19-year-old Joan Crawford. I think this one's even more intense than "Laugh, Clown, Laugh" by powers of magnitude, and there certainly hasn't been anything remotely like it since. The only way it could ever be remade would be to digitally insert Chaney himself; no other actor would want to be compared to Chaney in this one.