On The Boulevard: Lon Chaney

There always seems to be a bit of confusion about Lon Chaney. This is because there were two of them, a senior and a junior. Lon Chaney Jr.'s real name was Creighton, but took his father's name in order to carry on the legacy of a man who was taken from us at an early age.

Lon Chaney Sr. was a master of disguise and is still considered one of the greatest character actors of all time. Chaney was a master at humanizing characters that were physically and therefore emotionally deformed. I don't think anyone today could match Chaney for the sole reason that no one today would make most of the movies that Chaney was in.

He had the popular ones which carry over to today like Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Oliver Twist (1922), as well as cult classics like The Unholy Three (silent 1925/sound 1930), West of Zanzibar (1928) and the famous lost film London After Midnight (1927).

In each of these as most of his films Chaney created makeup that created monstrous results and would then find the humanity within the character that allowed the audience to sympathize. He would also use contortion to create physical deformities like his character of The Frog in The Miracle Man (1919) or a body rigging that restricted his movements and help establish Quasimodo's uneven walk.

Chaney would create some of his most interesting characters with the help of filmmaker Tod Browning. Films like The Blackbird (1926), The Road to Mandalay (1926) as well as the before mentioned London After Midnight and West of Zanzibar. Browning is most famous for two films that don't star Chaney though. Dracula (1931) made a star of Bela Lugosi and Browning a director with power and Freaks (1932), which would rip that power away and basically destroy his career.

A film I'd like to point out is The Unknown (1927), that paired Chaney and Browning and is one of the more bizarre love stories in the Chaney cannon. In it Chaney plays Alonzo the Armless, a carnival knife thrower who just happens to be, wait for it...armless. Actually, he's not. He's pretending to be armless to hide from the police since he's a killer. Alonzo falls in love with a hotter than hot Joan Crawford who plays a carnival girl. The circus strongman is also in love with her, but she has a phobia about being touched. This is good news for a guy who has no arms. But, since he does have arms, he has them surgically removed. While he's away recuperating, Crawford overcomes her fears of being touched and falls in love with the strongman. Now Alonzo has no girl and no arms... That's gotta suck. All sorts of drama takes place and Alonzo learns to sacrifice himself for love and redemption. It's a great film with an amazing performance by Chaney and a plot line that is beyond original and could never be done today.

Chaney died at the age of 47 from lung cancer.