Man of a Thousand Faces
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Movie Reviews of Man of a Thousand Faces
Movie Review: Lon Chaney
Summary: 5 Stars
James Cagney did a remarkable job in capturing Lon's early life and everything that made him one of the great silent film actors!Movie Review: man of a thousand faces
Summary: 5 Stars
THe man of a thousand faces is an excellent movie that I could not purchase in Australia,Movie Review: "Say, Pop! There's a great new joke going around school. "Don't step on that spider. It might be Lon Chaney.""
Summary: 4 Stars
James Cagney delivers a strong performance in the intermittently-accurate screen biography of Lon Chaney Sr. - the MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES. Universal released the film in 1957 as part of their Silver Jubilee celebration. Chaney had been one of Universal's greatest silent stars, earning fame for his unforgettable gallery of characters - everything from the tormented Quasimodo of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", to the terrifying "Phantom of the Opera" - yet his private life contained more drama than any of his film roles.
Born to deaf-mute parents (Nolan Leary and Celia Lovsky), Lon Chaney grows up with exceptional skills in the art of pantomime and performance. Soon landing a job with the successful Kolb and Dill vaudeville show, Lon marries singer Cleva (Dorothy Malone), but keeps his parents' affliction a secret from his bride. When Lon brings Cleva home to meet the family over Christmas, her disgust is readily apparent. Fearing that their eventual baby will inherit the family's deafness, Cleva spirals into paranoia, creating a rift in their marriage and driving Lon to despair. Little Creighton (soon to be Lon Jr.) is born healthy, yet Cleva can't be satisfied. Suspecting that Lon is carrying on with Hazel (Jane Greer), one of the showgirls from the vaudeville show, Cleva takes off with ambitions to become a nightclub singer, a career which Lon soon crushes. After swallowing a bottle of acid during Lon's act onstage, Cleva's showbiz dream comes to a crashing end, Creighton is removed into state custody; and Lon moves to Los Angeles, where he'll launch his incredible film career...
Whilst it glosses over many facts from Chaney's life, MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES still presents a reasonable fascimile of the personal demons that shaped and molded one of the cinema's greatest silent stars. As it had also done in "Yankee Doodle Dandy", James Cagney's early musical training came in good stead in his performance as Chaney. His clowning and pantomiming in the early vaudeville scenes is truly something to see; however the later recreations from "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and especially "Phantom of the Opera" border on cartoonish.
Riding high on the success of her Academy Award-winning role as the outrageous nympho Marylee in "Written on the Wind", Dorothy Malone supplies the story's early histrionics as Cleva, Chaney's troubled first wife. Knashing her teeth and looking stunning in Bill Thomas's costumes, Malone's performance is truly amongst her best. On the flipside, Jane Greer quietly underplays her role of Hazel, the woman who gives Lon and his son their first stable home. Greer's career is known primarily for her incredible gallery of noir heroines (in such films as "Out of the Past", and my personal favourite, "The Big Steal"). MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES isn't one of her better films, but she gives out a lovely, warm glow as the antithesis to Malone's scene-chewing hijinks.
Fans of Chaney will instantly know where fact leaves off and fiction begins, but MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES is still an entertaining and dramatic remembrance of one of the most influential figures of the early cinema.
Movie Review: A commentary track would have been nice
Summary: 4 Stars
As Cagney films go, it's great. As a Chaney biopic, it's good. I'm not entirely comfortable with the casting of Cagney as Chaney (the raw power of Chaney's make-up is lost) but given the time it was made there's no one else I could think of that could have portrayed him any better. The problem lies in the depiction of Chaney's wife, Cleva. Lon and Cleva's heated disagreements did eventually lead to divorce but I've looked through bio material and found nothing that reveals her as self-centered, callous, and prejudice against Lon's deaf mute parents. There is little doubt of her mental stability, attempting public suicide, for example. Dorothy Malone does a fine job as Cleva but the question is in the production itself. It's unusual to see a slick piece of cinema portray a real life character with such a lack of empathy. Later in the film her character is redeemed a bit but she still comes out as the bad guy. As I stated earlier, this is one film that really needs a good commentary track but the disc is sadly lacking extras. A Chaney Scholar and a member of the family (great grandson Ron Chaney for example) would have been ideal. The quality of the print is excellent though. The film pretty much sticks to the facts but a less dramatized account of Chaney's career can be found in TCM's "Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces", a document included in the film set "TCM Archives: The Lon Chaney Collection". It would be interesting to know what Lon Chaney Jr. thought of this film.
One final thought: A glaring omission stands out. There is no mention of Chaney's collaboration with director Todd Browning, the man behind some of Chaney most memorable and lasting performances. This dynamic duo may have been the first of its kind and echoed in the seventies with partnerships such as Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese.
Movie Review: Power, Pain & Cagney
Summary: 4 Stars
MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES is ostensibly a bio about famed horror actor Lon Chaney, but it delivers more about the acting dedication of James Cagney to his craft. The film is impossibly melodramatic & even corny. So why the 4 stars? I love it anyway!
At the center of the story is Lon Chaney (of course) whose parents were both deaf & mute. He grew up feeling not shame, but a whole lot of anger & pain, mostly inflicted by ignorant outsiders. So what does he do? He marries a woman who has a phobia about "abnormalities" & who spends her entire pregnancy completely wigged out that her baby will be born deaf. Dorothy Malone plays the wife. A B-List actress, Malone at least plays a self-destructive character which seems to have been her main acting schtick, so she's not too bad.
The other actors are less than stellar as well, but James Cagney trumps them all. He conveys what must have been true about Chaney, that he was absolutely driven by both talent & inner demons. I've seen Chaney in the silent version of THE UNHOLY 3 and the "talking" version as well. His presence is powerful, but you can see a lot of pain in his face. Despite all its flaws, thanks to Cagney, MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES conveys the power and the pain.
NOTE: According to the film Chaney was diagnosed with throat cancer during the making of THE UNHOLY 3 & was rendered unable to speak before he died. A very sad & uncanny irony.