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Rating:  -
...only that, believe it or not, Lon Chaney in Germany is a complete unknown to today's audiences.
Whenever I mention the name to people around me (even true movie buffs) I am confronted with complete ignorance...Lon, who???
It is a shame that this great actor never found the recognition in this country, where during the silent era real motion picture history was written. Just imagine, how a collaboration between true artists such as Chaney and for instance Fritz Lang could have looked like!
But I guess this is just wishful thinking...
Let's instead enjoy this package we have here. Despite offering a mixed bag (with The Ace of Hearts for me providing a rather lame start), this box set contains two really exciting displays of Chaney's unbelievable talent. Laugh, Clown, Laugh is a deeply romantic story with Chaney acting as the too old and hence unwanted lover of a young artist. A movie that despite its rather simple plot but at the same time due to Chaney's amazing acting qualities offers a truly touching story, that if brought to the screen today would still find its audience.
The Unknown, the last and without any doubt the best movie of the three, offers a story that even under today's standards (and I am talking bizarre and blood stained movies such as Saw and alike) should thrill genre fans. For it proves that despite its bizarre if not sadistic contents the ACTING makes for a great movie experience. Chaney alone carries the twisted plot about a sideshow artist become cripple for his love of his life, just to find out that loves goes in a very different way...so, if you are into the cinema of the bizarre, and the cinema of great acting performances, you better sink your teeth into this one!
Rating:  -
TCM have produced a great set of rare Lon Chaney silent films which will appeal to the Chaney fan and anyone interested in the history of the American film. The set consists of 3 films which were "lost" for many years, so it is great they are now available to view.
Michael Blake is the author of 3 books on Chaney and provides detailed commentaries on each film. Blake has clearly devoted his life to Chaney's legacy and his commentaries go way beyond what is seen on the screen. Accordingly, they are very interesting but possibly jaundiced about the films' appeal 80 years later.
The earliest film, from 1921, is "Ace of Hearts" a static and melodramatic story of a vigilante group who draw cards to select who will commit murder. The print is fairly poor and the film suffers from a snail pace and overacting.
The second film is "The Unknown", released in 1927. The film, we are told, is possibly the best of the partnership of the director Tod Browning with Chaney. The story is bizarre, the powerful story of a circus performer who cuts off his arms to win the girl. Joan Crawford, in a very early role, plays the object of Chaney's love. The film follows the common theme of unrequited love which appeared in many of Chaney's films. As well as observing Chaney's art, the film has excellent photography and Crawford is very different to the pretentious star she became, suggesting more talent than she subsequently showed. She also displays a rawness which is probably much closer to who she was before she became THE Joan Crawford.
The final film is "Laugh Clown Laugh", apparantly Chaney's own favourite of all his films. Once again, the film's theme is unrequited love with Chaney as a clown who makes the public laugh while he is heartbroken inside. This time, the object of his affection is the virginal and teenage Loretta Young and she displays the purity of emotion which was in all of her best performances pre 1935 long before the artificial later Loretta.
There is also a reconstruction of an early version of the vampyr legend, 'London after Midnight". This is a highly desired lost film but on the evidence of a few interviewees who saw the original film, the script and the stills, it looks like it might have been extremely melodramatic. While the reconstruction has been done lovingly, the result is static and rather boring, which is to be expected, I suppose.
Both "Laugh Clown Laugh" and "The Unknown" are missing scenes but what remains preserves Chaney at the height of his powers. They demonstrate that, in fact, his reputation as a horror star is misleading. He was a character actor who changed his appearance to suit the role in the same way as Charles Laughton and Paul Muni did much later. His talent for pathos is outstanding.
Possibly the best features of the DVD set are the marvellous documentary about Chaney and the short films about the competitions which TCM ran to locate new scores for the films. The DVD set is excellent value.
Rating: -
I bought this set right away in October 2003. It has been over three years since this set was released. It includes great performances by Lon Chaney Sr. WHEN are we going to get a second collection? I personally would love to see "The Unholy Three," both the 1925 silent version and the 1930 talkie version released as part of a second collection, and also "West of Zanzibar," and maybe "The Road To Mandalay." This great performer deserves another release of his best and I for one will show up for my DVD collection the day it is released!
Rating: -
Contained in this wonderful collection are the films 'The Ace of Hearts' (1921), 'The Unknown' (1927), and 'Laugh, Clown, Laugh' (1928), together with an awesome documentary about Lon's life and career (with ample film clips), a 40-minute stills and intertitle recreation of 'London After Midnight' (1927), audio commentaries by Michael Blake, Lon Chaney's definitive biographer, photo galleries, introductions to the films by TCM host Robert Osbourne, and a featurette on the composers who have won TCM's now-annual Young Film Composers contest. Two of those silents that were selected to have new scores written for them by the winners were 'The Ace of Hearts' and 'Laugh, Clown, Laugh.'
'The Ace of Hearts' was the first of Lon's films I ever saw, and even though it's not really the height of greatness, it did make me into a big fan. The origins and purpose of this secret society which Lon belongs to are never really explained (we just have a vague idea of their purpose), and the plot was also a bit of a mystery. However, as curious and under-par though this film might be, Lon totally steals the show. He just *looked* like an actor, and lived up to all of the great things I'd heard about what a wonderful actor he was. I was really impressed by his body language and facial expressions, and how he just inspired such sympathy in the audience, wanting him to be the one to get the girl (the beautiful Leatrice Joy) and to have a happy ending.
'The Unknown' is bizarre, to say the least. It was directed by Tod Browning, his favorite director, who did a lot of macabre disturbing unconventional pictures like this. It also seems as though there's some footage missing from this one, at only about 50 minutes long, added to the fact that it was only available in murky 9.5 mm black market copies until 1968, when it was discovered, along with some other films, in France, in cans labeled "l'inconnu" (i.e., "unknown"). What remains is really good, however. Alonzo is a supposedly armless knife thrower in love with his beautiful assistant Nanon (Joan Crawford), who is afraid and distrustful of men with arms. We're never really told just why she's so afraid of a man who could put his arms around her, but one suspects that she was raped or abused in the past. However, as we come to find out, Alonzo does have his arms, only he's hiding them so that Nanon will love and trust him. He's also hiding them because he has double thumbs, and the police are looking for him for some crimes he's committed, knowing only that it was a man with the same condition. Things take a turn for the worst when Nanon sees him from the back strangling her father (though luckily she doesn't see his face), and the life-altering decision Alonzo makes is not only incredibly disturbing, unthinkable, and creepy, but also leaves the door open for the handsome strong man in their travelling circus, Malabar (Norman Kerry), to move in on Nanon, who has always pushed away his romantic overtures. When Alonzo comes back to the circus after taking care of his bizarre business, things get even creepier. Once again Lon makes you feel sympathy for this strange character, someone you'd ordinarily feel repulsed and horrified by.
'Laugh, Clown, Laugh' is a truly touching and heartbreaking film, and came out in the last really great year for silents, by which time the artform had truly reached its peak and been beautifully perfected. It is rather disturbing how Lon's character, Tito the clown, develops romantic feelings for Simonetta (Loretta Young) when she becomes a young woman, even though he and his partner Simon have been raising her as practically their own daughter since they found her abandoned when she was just a toddler, but you get the feeling that deep down he realises how wrong and foolish these feelings are, not only because she's like a daughter to him, but also because he's an older man, and doesn't have anything to promise her the way her much younger and more handsome suitor Count Luigi (Nils Asther) does. A famous story about the filming of this movie is that the director, Herbert Brenon, was often quite rude and mean to Loretta Young, who was just a teenager at the time and barely starting her career. However, he was always civil to her whenever Lon was around, and after he picked up on this, he was with her constantly, even when they were shooting scenes he didn't appear in, guiding, directing, and mentoring her, and protecting her from the abusive director.
The stills recreation of 'London After Midnight' is alright, but doesn't really deliver a big punch due to the lack of actual film footage that might speed the story along better or make it seem more compelling and interesting. If only there had been even some surviving footage to pad out the stills with, as in the recreations of 'The Young Rajah' and the four-hour version of 'Greed.' This film has long been among the holy grail of missing silents, ever since the last known surviving print was destroyed by a vault fire at MGM in 1967. However, people who saw it in its original run and even as "recently" as the Fifties or Sixties have usually been quoted as saying that it wasn't all that great, and that the people so desperate to find it would probably feel the same way if they had had a chance to see it. Perhaps this is a classic case of something being elevated to high status due to the reputations of Chaney and Browning and the fact that it's lost and no longer able to be judged on its true merits. As sad as it is that an overwhelming amount of silents were lost, both within their own lifetimes and in the ensuing decades, not all lost films were great works of art that modern-day people would be really impressed by and enamoured of. Just like with modern-day movies, most silents too were just fun lightweight date movies or something for a rainy day, not epic timeless classic masterpieces or movies that are so good you want to watch them over and over again.
Overall, this is a great collection. Lon was great in every film he was in, even lacklustre efforts. His mere presence could elevate something that would have appeared only ordinary or even bad had some other actor been in it. His growing up with Deaf-mute parents played a big part in how he was so skilled at pantomimic acting, in making the viewer feel sympathy and empathy with characters whom they ordinarily would have walked on by or spat on in disgust or fear, and the stories about how he had keen empathy in real life for people who were different are also legendary. This small sampling of films is compelling proof of just why he was one of the 20th century's greatest male film actors.
Rating: -
Let me just go on record of saying that the closest equivalent to Lon Chaney that we have working today is Robert DeNiro. Think about it - Chaney went to extraordinary lengths to achieve authenticity (60 pound hump on his back to play Quasimodo, wires to pull his face back in the Phantom's death's-head grin, DeNiro gains weight for Raging Bull, etc), Chaney had a tough, strong, solid physical presence that lends his every appearance a weight and reality that most other actors lack, he often played the darker side of human nature but did so with sensivity, realism, and pathos, and Chaney was a hard working professional, a non-nonsense person who was dedicated to his craft. I've associated Chaneyt and DeNiro in my head for a long time now and have never read or heard that comparrison, so I figured I would hereby make a public positing of that comparrison. By the way, these films are great, essential silent movies that any true film buff MUST see.
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