The Sunday Intertitle: Inhale It

A helpful instruction re the consumption of Chinese food from the start of THE SHOCK, a one-hundred-year-old crime melodrama starring Lon Chaney.

It is October. Proper Autumn, when the leaves of the soul yellow and crinkle. What better way to welcome the springtime of death than with Lon, Sr, doing what he does best — feigning disability and not getting the girl?

Chaney’s is the cinema of novelty, even if he does repeat himself in the fundamentals mentioned above. So we immediately get that rarity, a semaphore intertitle, tapped out by a Chinese-American confrere’s thumbnail —

Lon replied by Chopstick Telegraphy —

The thumb’s owner is played by Japanese actor-director Tôgô Yamamoto. No “yellowface” in this film.

A Chinatown crime queenpin sends Chaney to a small town to await instructions. While there he falls under the influence of the pastoral setting and a Pollyanna-ish local girl whose intertitles consist entirely of CAT POSTER TEXT.

To drive home the point, the first thing we see in this new location is a kitten clawing at Lon’s disabled ankle, and him smiling at it and NOT kicking it into the bushes. So we know he’s Changed.

If you happen to have watched THE SIGNAL POST on Silent Movie Day you’ll recognise Virginia Valli as Lon’s leading lady.

Catching Valli in a clinch with another guy breaks Lon’s heart in a close-up that’s held for twenty seconds to allow him to show the multiple stages of cardiac fracture.

There don’t seem to be many twenty-second close-ups in modern cinema. BIRTH featured a long take focussing on Nicole Kidman’s face, and this received much comment — it was perceived as ballsy, an unspoken undercurrent of meaning being that when your star is basically a hollow outline packed with botox, dedicating long seconds to her physiognomy takes courage. But Kidman is a great actor in the right role, and minimal movements do her very well.

Of course there’s always SON OF SAUL, which stays close to its central face throughout, which is even braver.

Lambert Hillyer isn’t that much of a director — he’s never heard of camera movement and he shoots every scene starting with a wide established, then going into a closeup, then singles. Not much more to it. But I give him a few points for giving Chaney time to emote. I’ll deduct a few for his failure to repeat the trick when Chaney realises he’s blown up the woman he loves with gelignite. We all know Chaney would have aced that reaction shot.

Deus ex machina — the plot having got fankled beyond all retrieval, Chaney prays for a miracle. If you have ever wondered what a Lon Chaney Miracle would look like, THE SHOCK supplies the answer: the San Francisco earthquake arrives to save the day, the seismological cavalry. The surprise is slightly spoiled by the poster, showing a giant Chaney emoting over a landscape of rubble, and by the film showing us a model shot before anything has happened. A kind of miniature foreshadowing, i guess. Every film set in Frisco should climax this way, regardless of when the action takes place. DIRTY HARRY, MRS DOUBTFIRE, MILK. Even VERTIGO would get a welcome fillip, the earth opening to receive the plummeting Novak.

The resulting rumble, in which everything caves in, falls over, explodes, and catches fire, may not be as spectacular as the civic irruptions of IN OLD SAN FRANCISCO or SAN FRANCISCO or SAN ANDREAS but I enjoyed it very much.

“This is fine.”

The real shock of THE SHOCK is what happens afterwards — I shan’t spoil it. All I’ll say is, in preparation for it, Lon suddenly changes his shade of lipstick.

Lost Houses

The genre that seems to have suffered the greatest ratio of casualties-to-survivors seems to me to be the spooky old dark house horror comedy. Above, we get a glimpse of what we’re missing vis-a-vis Benjamin Christensen’s THE HAUNTED HOUSE, of which only a few images and the Vitaphone sound-on-disc soundtrack are known to survive.

Christensen’s Hollywood movies are mostly not too exciting, in my opinion, even when he worked with Chaney, but SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN, his third spookhouse movie, is a hallucinatory masterpiece, largely jettisoning plot in favour of a parade of grotesque images. You can really see that this is the maker of HAXAN.

7 FOOTPRINTS does survive, but has been very hard to see.

Christensen also made THE HOUSE OF HORROR, a part-talkie, all-lost. Confusingly, it has almost the same cast as HAUNTED HOUSE but is a different film. Cornell Woolrich wrote titles for HH and dialogue for HOH.

This all leads to LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, possibly (for some odd reason) the most famous lost film. It’s a spooky Scooby Doo mystery.

I had assumed that THE CAT AND THE CANARY was the progenitor of all this, and it probably did set the late 20s cycle in motion, but wait! When Bob Hope’s remake was a hit, he was then starred immediately in THE GHOST BREAKERS, a remake of a 1914 Cecil B. DeMille (and Oscar Apfel) comic thriller, THE GHOST BREAKER singular.

Starring drunken sexy Jesus himself, HB Warner, the film is now, predictably, lost.

But wait and ah-hah! The film was remade in 1922…

Willie Best’s “comedy negro” act in the Bob Hope version did not originate the strong element of racial discomfort, it would seem, although at least Best was an actual Person of Colour, said colour not being the product of a can of shoe polish. But we need never worry too much about this, as the 1922 film is ALSO lost.

THE TERROR, an early Warners talkie from Roy Del Ruth, based on an Edgar Wallace shocker, sounds REALLY appetising. The traditional cowardly hero is Edward Everett Horton, which ought to get your pulse pounding. Contemporary reviews praised the mobile camera, suggesting that this is the exception among 1928 talks. The pics look atmospheric as hell.

Relax. It’s a lost film.

The sequel, RETURN OF THE TERROR, has a less exciting cast and less exciting stills. It appears to survive — but nobody has thought to make it available. Given the market for thirties horror movies, this suggests it’s either not in good nick or not a good film. But who knows? Somebody has decided not to let us see for ourselves.

The first remake of THE CAT AND THE CANARY, THE CAT CREEPS of 1930, is also (you guess it) lost. Apart from this footage:

I took the re-edited clips from a short call BOO! and cut them back into what seems to be their original form. From which we can see that it seems to have been a pretty faithful adaptation.

Fortunately for film history, Universal was in the habit of making films in multiple languages, so just as there’s a Spanish-language DRACULA, there’s a Spanish-language CAT CREEPS, LA VOLUNTAD DEL MUERTO, with Lupita Tovar, who was also in the Spanish DRACULA.

This movie would partially make up for CAT CREEPS being missing, except that it is also missing.

The silent version of THE GORILLA is lost, but there’s a talkie remake — also lost. But there’s a promo film which shows the gorilla-suited villain lumbering through a miniature Manhattan, a strong possible influence behind the 1933 KING KONG. One can imagine Merian C Cooper seeing the GORILLA trailer and then being annoyed that the film didn’t offer up an ape of comparable gargantuosity, or do I mean gargantitude?

So we’re lucky that THE BAT and THE BAT WHISPERS (in both Academy Ratio and the wonders of Magnifilm) survive. Paul Leni’s CANARY survives. His THE LAST WARNING was considered lost for a time, and his THE CHINESE PARROT remains MIA today.

And then there’s this — looks fun! Wikipedia says “It is not known whether the film survives, or who holds the rights.” Well, that sounds less final than “lost.” Has anyone tried asking the Boggart?

A guy like you

A lyric from Disney’s THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME there, but what we’re looking at tonight is the Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema of the Universal/Lon Chaney version. Which comes equipped with Kim Newman and Jonathan Rigby and Stephen Jones extras. Which are great. But it’s the film you’d buy it for.

A century of abuse has applied to this film a patina of scratches and scars, but the video upgrade allows us to see the film beneath them with far greater clarity than in all those public domain DVDs, and that includes being able to see the PERFORMANCES, which is the best reason in this case for restoring the thing. The impressive sets — which employed both Charles D Hall and Charles Gemora — are amazing, but Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller, and grotesque woodblocks Nigel De Brulier, Brandon Hurst, Ernest Torrence, Raymond Hatton and Tully Marshall, make the human side of it vivid also.

Newman mentions in his bit that Lon Chaney Jr finally got to don a version of his dad’s Quasimodo makeup in an episode of Route 66, also featuring Karloff and Lorre. Here it is — the hunchback’s shamble-on appearance is the first thing we see.