Flashback: Lon & Tod

Posted Wed, 15 Feb 2006

The work of Lon Chaney and Tod Browning belongs on the same high shelf as that of Poe, Lovecraft, P.K. Dick, Cornell Woolrich, and David Lynch: homegrown explorers of the squirmy stuff lurking just beneath the sunny surfaces of American life. Each of these achievements has a different flavor. The series of silent melodramas showcased in the UCLA series I've written about for the Weekly, were positively Victorian (or should that be continental decadent/romantic?) in their insistence that the mutilation of a body invariably produces a deformed soul. The Penalty, which is set in Africa, is politically incorrect in several other ways, as well.

LON CHANEY/TOD BROWNING: THE UNHOLY TWO Between them, Lon Chaney and Tod Browning made nearly 300 movies, almost all of them in the silent era. And in the eight thrillers they made together, the shape-shifting star of The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and the director of Freaks (1932) created a uniquely twisted form of masochistic romantic melodrama. These movies about twisted bodies and twisted souls — in classic melodrama, the two almost always go together — which will be showcased beginning this weekend at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, were not ghettoized as horror movies or produced on the cheap; they were expensive mainstream star vehicles released by Universal and MGM. Chaney had become a star in silent movies by making his own body an element of visual spectacle, startling audiences with his often grotesque and painful deformations. That process even becomes part of the story in Browning’s The Blackbird (1926), where Chaney plays a dual role as both a brawny, arrogant London criminal mastermind and his crippled “twin brother,” distorting his features and twisting his limbs and all but popping his joints into position in an effort to evade the police. Chaney often devised his own torturous “appliances,” crushing his limbs into a corset to portray an armless knife-thrower in The Unknown (1927), or tying back his legs with leather straps as a double amputee in The Penalty (1920). In his roles for Browning, the suffering the actor endured resonated with the often agonizing psychosexual torments the director seemed to relish inflicting on his characters, who typically were mutilated “beasts” debasing themselves before beauties who could barely conceal their revulsion. In West of Zanzibar (1928), Chaney’s Phroso the Magician is first taunted and then pitched off a balcony by his wife’s lover (Lionel Barrymore), and then, as the paraplegic “Dead Legs,” literally drags his body to Africa and devotes the rest of his life to engineering a revenge that includes selling the lover’s golden-haired daughter into prostitution. Surprisingly often when watching these films, we find ourselves rooting for the “monster,” which in the end is the classic American underdog, bent and twisted into disturbing new shapes. (UCLA Film and Television Archive; Feb. 18-March 12.)

Back around the late '80s, when I was making a fore-doomed attempt to become a screenwriter, one of the things I wrote was a long treatment for an updated remake of Browning’s underrated The Devil Doll (1936), which I had come across late one night between the Hal Worthington ads on local TV. Critics have said that Browning lacked the wit and self-awareness of James Whale, but he had them in this film, which is almost giddy. The all-star team of screenwriters included Browning, Guy Endore (Werewolf of Paris), and Erich Von Stroheim, working from the A. Merritt novel Burn Witch Burn.

Lionel Barrymore wears old-lady drag throughout as a vengeful ex-con who has befriended an Ernst Thesiger clone mad scientist in the can, acquiring in the process the power to shrink people down into lethal five-inch slaves who can creep into the private spaces of his targets---in one memorable scene slithering between the bars of a crib toward a sleeping baby. Creepy, campy, and in Maureen O’Sullivan’s scenes insinuatingly sexy, the film seemed obscure enough to be safe to mess around with.

My version was to be relocated to San Francisco in the swinging ‘60s and decorated in pop art colors; the director in the back of my mind was Joe Dante. Having asked myself a question about the dolls that also occurred to a recent poster on Amazon.com---“But why do their clothes shrink, too?”---I described them stepping out of their now circus-tent-sized duds and walking around naked. One of the naked female dolls stabbed a man in the neck with a hair pin and showered in the arterial spew. No-one else seemed to share my enthusiasm for this idea.