DVR Diary: WHERE EAST IS EAST (1929)

This was the end of the line for Lon Chaney Sr. and director Tod Browning after a legendary run of films during the 1920s. Browning went on to make his sound-film debut later in 1929 with The Thirteenth Chair, which featured Bela Lugosi in a teaser of things to come. For Chaney, you could say Where East is East is the beginning of the end. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer kept its "Man of a Thousand Faces" silent for another year, making him one of the very last major stars to make his speaking debut, perhaps because they were unsure of how to present Chaney as a talking star, and perhaps because the health problems that killed him in 1930 were already apparent. In any event, East is a typical Chaney-Browning production, though creepier in its insinuations than in explicit content. It seemed creepy to me, at least, because I inferred a quasi-incestuous subtext in the close relationship between the white hunter Tiger Haynes (Chaney) and his daughter Toyo (Lupe Velez). Toyo is a grown woman, which makes the father-daughter horseplay at points seem just a bit excessive -- but maybe I'm just reading stuff into a Browning film (Waldemar Young adapted an original story by the director and pulp writer Harry Sinclar Drago) because you're supposed to. Even if you suppress such speculation, there's something creepy about the way Toyo's mother and Tiger's ex, the half-caste Madame de Sylva (Estelle Taylor), becomes Toyo's romantic rival for the affections of Bobby Bailey (Lloyd Hughes), who's come to Laos to buy tigers for his father's circus from Haynes. And because this is a Tod Browning film, Tiger keeps what I take to be an orangutan, though it might be a runt of a gorilla, in his house -- an orangutan with a grudge against de Sylva. That sounds familiar. The Chaney character is going to unleash the ape to kill his wife but something will happen, he'll change his mind and get himself killed, right? Not quite. It looks like Tiger Haynes is done for after locking himself in the room with the ape to keep it from getting loose and attacking the young lovers, but not before the avenging orangutan did what he had to do to the half-caste vamp.

Considering some of the unfilmed ideas Browning had -- he told a doozy to Herman Mankiewicz about Chaney as a violinist/mad scientist grafting women's heads onto gorillas' bodies -- this is fairly mild stuff, though it makes you confident that the Browning-Chaney team could have taken their act into the Pre-Code era with little trouble. There's really no reason for East, a May 1929 release, not to be a talkie except that the studio and/or director and/or star weren't ready just yet. Chaney's scarface makeup wouldn't have gotten in the way of dialogue and he wouldn't have had to attempt a foreign accent for his role. Yet I suppose the Chaney-Browning world worked according to a kind of dream logic, at the slightly unnatural speed of silent action, that would not translate, despite wishful thinking about Chaney as Dracula, to the gravity of sound. They belong to another universe the way the silent clowns did, and as a male star at M-G-M circa 1929, Chaney probably was doomed anyway.

DVR Diary: THE BLACKBIRD (1926)

 

Why does he do it? Not even Tod Browning himself seemed to comprehend why he put Lon Chaney Sr. through such contortions in his movies, or why Chaney did so himself for other directors. A famous anecdote has Browning offering Herman J. Mankiewicz a screenwriting credit if only he can invent a reason why Chaney should in once scene be a soulful street violinist, and in the next be revealed as an obscene vivisectionist performing transplant experiments on women and gorillas. The conversation supposedly inspired Mankiewicz to send his famous telegram to Ben Hecht inviting the latter to make millions writing movies since "your only competition is idiots." If so, that seems slightly unfair to Browning, who probably was more lunatic than idiot and was, in any event, sincerely if naively committed to depicting the unfathomable or, as another of his Chaney films puts it, the unknown. Chaney, known for his makeup skills, had some ability as a contortionist, or at least a pantomime approximation of one. Browning exploited this to the hilt yet struggled to account for it in the quasi-rational terms required by the plot mechanics of melodrama. Compared to the madness of The Unknown, in which Chaney binds his arms to his sides to perform as an armless knife thrower, then has his arms cut off because his beloved despises a man's touch, The Blackbird is almost sane. In this tale of London Chaney is the title character, a Limehouse gangster grown besotted with a French music-hall puppeteer (Renee Adoree). Dan "the Blackbird" discovers a rival in crime and romance in  West End Bertie (Owen Moore), a slick con man who lures swells to Limehouse as a tour guide to lowlife and pleads innocence to conspiracy when the swells are robbed because he's robbed too -- only he gets his stuff and everyone else's back afterward. This triangle occupies most of the film and allows Chaney to be "normal" most of the time. Dan is a genial, charismatic crook so Chaney gets to smile a lot. The Browning factor comes in when Dan wants to lay low. Limehouse believes that the Blackbird has a brother, "the Bishop." Everyone knows this gentle soul, cruelly crippled yet charitable toward all. Mostly paralyzed on one side, the Bishop hobbles around with the aid of a crutch and is often heard arguing with his criminal brother, struggling to get Dan back on the straight and narrow. But Browning isn't out to insult anyone's intelligence. He knows why the audience is here, so he confirms within a few minutes what most expect already: the Blackbird and the Bishop are one and the same. Dan has a trick where he can dislocate his right arm and contort his right leg to assume the Bishop's gnarled posture, thus hiding in plain sight and even helping the law look (in vain) for the wayward Blackbird. But wasn't there an easier way? Doesn't that hurt? Why does he do it?

The real question, no more easy for Browning or Chaney to answer, may be "why do we imagine it?" Maybe show people can't help themselves. Maybe Browning was onto something when his subconscious told him that the mask of benevolence too often was just that. Maybe he saw deformity and grotesquerie slightly differently from his peers. The typical view was that ugliness indicated bad character, that you could tell a criminal by his hard or brutish features. Yet the Bishop is more grotesque than the Blackbird, but is intended by the latter as a false embodiment of good. For Browning, I suspect, Chaney's contortions reflect the ongoing contortions of his character's soul -- not degeneracy but the constant struggle of contradictory impulses. For Chaney himself, they seemed like a necessary ordeal to elicit the right interpretation of each role. Browning would raise these questions of bodies and souls most alarmingly in Freaks, but the tone is necessarily different when your star only pretends -- physically, at least -- to be a freak

As in The Unknown, Chaney's imposture eventually becomes reality. Dan has pulled off a quick change and is hobbling out to receive investigators when one of the latter pushes his way into the Bishop's room, whacking the poor unfortunate with the door. The impact knocks Dan on his back, and that impact, given his weird posture, fractures his back. "Now I'm a real cripple!" he moans in agony to his last confidant, his former flame Limehouse Polly. At this point, O. Henry or Al Feldstein would pause, their point having been made. Browning goes further. To a point, The Blackbird has been a parody of Chaney's own attempts to milk his contortions for pathos, to make his antiheroes misunderstood misfits. The Bishop would be an object of pathos if he saintliness wasn't just the Blackbird's cynical disguise. Yet I'll be damned if they don't play for pathos at the very end after all, as Dan lies literally broken. It's nothing so hokey as Dan acquiring his alter ego's holiness, but as Polly tries to quiet his agony our hardened criminal becomes something like a pathetic child. He knows that if the coppers see the Bishop howling in pain they'll know that he ain't been crippled before. She comes up with the obvious solution: go to sleep. Easier said than done given his pain, but she exerts a kind of hypnotic power on him, calming him as he murmurs proudly about fooling the law one more time. He never wakes up. It could almost pass for a martyrdom, if only because that was Chaney's specialty. He got to play plain old tough guys sometimes, but as we remember him today the ordeal was his performance art, his method. Browning's probably weren't the only fantasies inspired by his cinematic suffering; a generation of pulp fiction, for starters, tells the tale. It's the dark side of the pathos silent cinema audiences craved so much, and sometimes more horrible than the movie horrors that followed. Chaney's films often remain disturbing because retain that incomprehensible element -- not just why he does such strange things, but why they were even imagined, much less embraced by the public. He and Browning are emissaries from a past that is our own yet may as well be an alien world in some respects. That's a little scary in its own right.

THE PENALTY (1920)

What would you do if some bumbling young doctor amputated your legs when you were a child? You know he screwed up because his mentor says so in your delirious presence. The old man could tell from a contusion on the base of your skull that you didn't need to lose your legs. It probably sounds to you like a profound misdiagnosis, but what if the elder doctor decides to cover up for his protege and tells your parents that the amputations were necessary, and that they should stop listening to your raving to the contrary?

Apparently the novelist Gouverneur Morris would have become a master criminal, because that's what he had his victim do in his book The Penalty. One hopes that Morris went into more detail (i.e., any) about this rise to power than directors Wallace Worsley and his writers did in the film version, given the automatic, er, handicap a legless young man must have in such a venture. Sure, he may develop the upper body and arm strength of a rabid chimpanzee, but most folks are still going to be able to run away from him after pausing long enough to taunt him for his nom de crime -- "Blizzard." But we haven't yet reckoned about Blizzard's trump card, for Morris has imagined him as a master mind, a charismatic big thinker who just has a power over people. Worsley at least helps us suspend disbelief by casting Lon Chaney as Morris's crippled master.

Chaney was just coming off his breakthrough performance in The Miracle Man, in which his big scene was to contort himself into the shape of a fake cripple and pantomime a miraculous cure. If that film made him a star, The Penalty established his basic persona for the rest of his too-short career. It anticipates Hunchback of Notre Dame (also directed by Worsley) by making Chaney a physical grotesque who becomes a spiritual grotesque due to his rejection by society. It anticipates Phantom of the Opera by giving the grotesque something of the soul of an artist. Blizzard is a brute who controls San Francisco's dance halls and sweatshops and can have people killed at will, but he enjoys playing the piano -- with help from a woman working the foot pedals -- and jumps, metaphorically speaking, at the opportunity to serve as an artist's model for a bust of Satan, showing what we're meant to see as genuine art appreciation in the process. He's a man of gigantic mirths and melancholies, allowing Chaney to run his emotive gamut, and a man of gigantic madness, also, in an all too literal, clinical sense.

This is the kind of boss we all dread, pulling our hair and dropping people who gripe down a trap door. Or is that the kind of boss we all want to be?

The story of the film is that Blizzard's up to something and the police don't know what, except that he's suddenly put his dance-hall girls to work making hats. The force's "most daring operative," a woman named Rose, goes undercover despite her boss's reservations, becoming Blizzard's pedal-pushing paramour while hoping to find out his master plan. She discovers that he's got an arsenal of weapons stored in underground tunnels before he figures out her ruse. But when he calls her in for a piano session, intending to confront her with the evidence of her treachery, her skill on the pedals moves the artist in him to spare her. "I can murder anything but music," he sighs. These two make some kind of music together, because Rose in turn grows reluctant to rat him out, finally embracing him as her Master. Lon Chaney, mind you. Legless. Gangster and potential mass murderer. Apparently an irresistible charisma comes with the master mind toolkit.

Blizzard can't kill Rose because she's doing such a good job servicing his instrument down there.

So what is Blizzard planning? The hats, you see, are going to be the uniform for a small army of "disgruntled foreigners" ("Reds," in fact) that his minions have been forming. On December 2, if I remember his calendar correctly, he's going to set off a bomb in San Francisco. That will signal his men to start shooting cops wherever they find them. This done, they're to converge in the suburbs to draw out the remaining police force. They are only a distraction from the main plan. Anticipating the plot of Die Hard With a Vengeance by 75 years, Blizzard means to sow chaos throughout the city so the central business district (Wall Street in the novel) will be wide open for his men to loot it. As anticipatory flashforwards reveal, he means to lead his army in person, on foot.

Blizzard's apocalypse

What is Blizzard planning? Ever since childhood, he's nursed a grudge against Dr. Ferris, the idiot who took his legs. He's seen Ferris rise to the top of his profession. In the present he sees an opportunity for vengeance when Ferris's daughter Barbara proves to be the sculptor of the Satan bust. Blizzard has the hots for her (that artistic soul of his, again), so she won't be the object of his revenge. Instead, it'll be her boyfriend, Dr. Allen, Ferris's protege and a bit of an ass who's impatient for Barbara to quit this silly art business and be his wife. Before the uprising, Blizzard intends to trap Ferris and force him to perform a legs transplant, removing Allen's limbs for Blizzard's own use. The master criminal is sure it'll work because he's studied Ferris's leg-transplant experiments on apes. And that takes care of how The Penalty anticipates all of Chaney's future work with Todd Browning.

Did I mention that Blizzard is just a little bit insane? Naturally, Ferris figures that out as well. He also realizes that the master criminal is shockingly lacking in survival skills. Blizzard does realize that Ferris is going to have to put him under for this operation, right? Sure, no problem, and you see an expression on Ferris's face that tells you that Blizzard is a dead man.

But I hadn't reckoned upon the Hippocratic Oath, and Blizzard wakes up in bed, still legless but with a bandage on his head. It turns out that Ferris's snap diagnosis of insanity reminded him of that contusion at the base of Li'l Blizzard's skull way back when. With the intuitive genius that cost Blizzard his legs in the first case, Ferris realizes that this contusion is the cause of Blizzard's madness. A little snip, snip, and Blizzard wakes as if from a terrible dream in which he was a demon guilty of hideous crimes. Spiritually guilty, that is, for Ferris assures us that the contusion means that no court will hold poor Blizzard responsible for any of his criminal acts. He is free to go straight, marry Rose (despite her finally ratting him out when she heard of his plan to marry Barbara), improve his wardrobe and play the piano to his heart's content. Very nice -- but isn't this film called The Penalty? Well,...

(Book note: In his new biography of Irving Thalberg Mark A. Viera credits his subject with evolving a star-making formula for Chaney in which the actor is "redeemed in the last reel (p.71). Since Thalberg wasn't at Goldwyn when The Penalty was made, I guess that's yet another way in which this picture anticipates the rest of Chaney's career.)

The supplemental materials on the Kino DVD are designed to prove that the original novel was probably more insane than the finished film. I'll take their word for it, but in all fairness the utter lunacy of this story is what makes it entertaining. Worsley directs in a stark, efficient fashion and knows enough to stand back and let Chaney work.

Lon Sr. is arguably the first cult movie actor and should be the patron saint of them all. Exaggeration is the measure of his absolute commitment to any role. He strives to be an object of terror and an object of pathos simultaneously in his most famous films. Since he's meant to be grotesque, there's no point to subtlety, so Chaney usually wears his (often black) heart on his sleeve, or on one of his many faces. What I sometimes say about later over-the-top actors is literally true of him: he is the special effect of his movies. In The Penalty that means harnessing his legs and fitting his knees into stumps and using his arm strength to climb up a bookshelf in his lair to spy on his hatmakers. It means being both ugly enough and charismatic enough to make himself believable as a model for Satan. It means turning on a dime from cold, killing rage to aesthetic melancholy to the tune of a pantomime piano. Neither now nor in 1920 does anyone watch this movie for a true portrait of crime or a plausible scenario for mass terror. You watch to see Chaney do his thing, and he makes it worth your while. And because he isn't under makeup here, The Penalty, rather than Hunchback or Phantom or the chimerical London After Midnight, may be Chaney's definitive film.