Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Directed by Joseph Pevney

Film Review

Biographical dramas on notable historical figures had figured prominently in cinema since its earliest years - George Méliès's profile of Alfred Dreyfus came out in 1899, just four years after the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumière brothers.  The industry was still in its infancy when filmmakers woke up to the commercial gain from pandering to the cinema-going public's fascination with the lives of kings and queens, folk heroes, celebrated artists and revered statesmen, the men of genius who had shaped the world - never fearing to bend the truth for the sake of a good story.  It wasn't until the late 1950s that Hollywood began to pay homage to its own leading lights.  1957 saw the release of not one but two important cinema-related biopics.  Honouring two of silent cinema's greatest icons, Universal's Man of a Thousand Faces and Paramount's The Buster Keaton Story provided a fully-fledged template for subsequent fictionalised accounts of the lives of Tinsel Town's biggest stars, setting a high standard of production excellence that was seldom matched in the decades that followed.

In his heyday, Lon Chaney was an international superstar - as famous as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, but with one important difference: he was a star without a face.  What made him famous was the fact that his visage altered completely from one film to the next.  He was the ultimate Human Chameleon, and the fact that the public never saw the man behind the mask lent Chaney a somewhat sinister mystique that no other performer enjoyed - then or since.  Chaney avoided interviews like the plague and resisted every attempt to have his unmade-up face photographed by the press.  'Between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney', the publicity-shy actor insisted.  He did his utmost to cultivate his reputation as the Man of Mystery, and in this he was so successful that he came close to airbrushing himself out of history altogether - helped by the fact that he did not live long enough to make the transition to sound cinema.  By the 1950s, Lon Chaney was all but forgotten, his work mostly unseen for over a generation as the public had virtually no access to the now overlooked silent films of the past.

Such was the scarcity of biographical information on Chaney that Robert Arthur, the producer of Man of a Thousand Faces, had to send out questionnaires over a wide area on the off-chance that someone could offer some private recollections of the man whose personal life had practically disappeared without a trace.  Needless to say, making sense of the mass of incomplete, muddled and often wildly inconsistent responses that landed on his desk was the greatest challenge that Arthur and his writing team had in making his big screen tribute to one of the silent era's biggest names.  It wasn't until four decades later that meticulously researched biographies of Chaney began to appear in bookshops (Michael Blake's Lon Chaney: The Man Behind the Thousand Faces being a definitive reference), so Robert Arthur's biopic was for many years seen as the authoritative account of the actor's life, although it is now known to be riddled with factual inaccuracies.

Man of a Thousand Faces gets the broad outline of its subject's life correct but bends the truth quite drastically in quite a few places, for the purpose of constructing a coherent story and fitting the melodramatic conventions of the time.  Most of film's inaccuracies relate to Chaney's first wife Cleva, although she lived long enough to see the screenplay and offer her approval (along with that of Chaney's son, Creighton).  In reality, it was Cleva, not her husband, who destroyed her own career, through a depression-fuelled alcohol addiction.  After her divorce, she never met her son until her after husband's death - indeed, Creighton only found out about his mother's existence after the reading of the will in which his father left just one dollar out of his 500 thousand dollar estate to his loathed former wife.  The scenes in the second half of the film where Cleva visits Chaney and begs to see her son are pure fiction, as is the melodramatic twist where Creighton abandons his father to support his struggling mother.

The passing of the professional baton from Chaney Senior to Chaney Junior did not take place in the nice cosy way the film imagines.   At no time did Lon Chaney encourage his son Creighton to follow his profession.  In fact, he did everything a responsible father could do to dissuade him from taking up such a precarious trade, never spoiling him and doing all he could to make his son into an independent, well-rounded adult.  The scene at the end of the film in which Chaney Senior hands his precious make-up box over to his son, having appended the letters JR after his name in grease-paint, is pure fabrication - as is the suggestion that he died at home surrounded by his loving family.  It was financial necessity and failure in his other business ventures that drove Creighton Chaney to finally give in to persistent entreaties from the movie men to start making films under the name Lon Chaney Jr in the mid-1930s.  Creighton cherished his father's name but hated the Jr appendage and so dropped the latter as soon as had established himself in the business by the early 1940s.  It was as Lon Chaney that Creighton Chaney is credited for his most celebrated roles, notably that of The Wolf Man.

It is not the minutiae of Lon Chaney Senior's complex life that matter in Man of a Thousand Faces, but rather the overall impression it paints of a formidable artist driven not by personal ambition but by an overwhelming urge to rail against the societal prejudices and intolerances that so offended him.  The film opens with the ten-year-old Chaney outraged by his neighbours' bigoted treatment of his deaf-mute parents and this howling sense of injustice is what becomes the actor's defining quality, the stimulus for the numerous warped outsiders that Chaney would play with such conviction and heartrending pathos on screen for over a decade.  It is the essence of the man, not the trivial details of his messy life, that preoccupied the film's writing team, and this they manage to get across admirably, helped in no small measure by the lead actor James Cagney.

Now in his late fifties, Cagney was fast approaching the end of his own illustrious career, with just a few films to go before he took early retirement in the early 1960s (he did pop up one more time in 1981 in Milos Forman's Ragtime).  Although he was - and still is - best known for his hard-boiled gangster portrayals, in classics such as The Public Enemy (1931), The Roaring Twenties (1939) and White Heat (1949) - Cagney was also an extremely accomplished song-and-dance man, as he had demonstrated just a few years previously in the hit musical Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).  In that film, the actor turned in what he considered to be his best performance as the legendary entertainer George M. Cohan.

Like Cohan, Cagney had started out in vaudeville and had battled against poverty and rejection for many years before he finally achieve fame and fortune.  Here, there was an obvious connection with Lon Chaney's early years, and so Cagney was perhaps better suited to play the Man of a Thousand Faces than any other actor on the planet.  The similarities between the two men - in both their personal and professional lives - are striking and the ease with which Cagney appears to inhabit Chaney's skin and illuminate his inner soul is assuredly the film's most appealing aspect.  Just as Chaney spent his entire screen career exposing the pain and torment within the hearts of those that society shunned and reviled, so Cagney does his utmost to show us the real Lon Chaney, the man beneath the make-up and skilfully borrowed personas.

Through a performance that counts as one of his finest (sadly one that failed to attract an Oscar nomination), James Cagney completely dispenses with his familiar odious gangster mannerisms and instead adopts the guise of a more down-to-earth regular Joe, with the failings and foibles that afflict us all.  One of the film's strengths is that it doesn't set out to lionise its subject.  Instead, it portrays Chaney throughout as an ordinary man struggling through life by making the most of his extraordinary talent, showing both the good and bad sides of his nature. The break-up of Chaney's first marriage has a particularly bitter edge to it, and a subsequent encounter between Lon and his rejected wife Cleva on the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame shows the actor at his most awful, his monstrosity grotesquely emphasised by his appearance in the guise of the hideously deformed Quasimodo.

Chaney appears at his most humane in his scenes with his elderly deaf-mute mother (expertly played by Celia Lovsky, former wife of Peter Lorre, known to Star Trek fans as the original Vulcan sage T'Pau) and adorable pre-teen son Creighton.  For an actor who is best known for dishing out rough treatment and snarling venom-tipped abuse at all and sundry, Cagney is unbelievably gentle and good-natured in these affectionate vignettes, imbuing them with a raw poignancy and intimacy that is rarely found in his extensive filmography.  It is in the film's masterfully staged set-pieces, however, that Cagney is most in his element - particularly the outlandish clown show-stopper which shamelessly steals the famous shadow dance from the Astaire-Roger's musical Swing Time.  This is James Cagney The Entertainer at his finest, a brilliantly conceived set up for the film's first and most dramatic dive into unadorned horror - Cleva's public attempt at suicide.

With the first half of the film devoted almost entirely to Lon Chaney's interminable domestic strife, it comes as a welcome relief when the location shifts to Hollywood and we are finally granted what we had hoped to see - some insights into Chaney's legendary screen career.  With the exterior set of Quasimodo's Medieval Paris still standing on Universal's back-lot, the recreation of the famous torture scene of The Hunchback of Notre Dame was readily achieved and Cagney does a good job imitating Chaney's harrowingly authentic turn as a whip-lashed victim of mob brutality.

The gruesome unmasking scene from The Phantom of the Opera is also deftly reproduced, although Cagney's make-up differs markedly from that created by Chaney in the original film, the latter having a far more genuinely frightening effect.  In the recreations, Cagney's face is covered with a complete latex mask, rendering it flat and inexpressive - in stark contrast to the monstrously realistic effect achieved by Chaney with his minimal use of applied face make-up.  The film's most stirring reference to Chaney's career is the scene in which Cagney brilliantly recreates the bogus metamorphosis of a supposed cripple from The Miracle Worker (1919) (the only sequence that still exists from this lost classic).  Lon Chaney's unique ability to contort his entire body through almost super-human muscular control is adeptly reproduced by Cagney, in a sequence that feels as blisteringly iconic as the original.

The fact that Man of a Thousand Faces is so heavily slanted towards its central protagonist inevitably means that the other people in Chaney's life get little more than the most superficial of renderings.  This is most apparent in the two female leads - Dorothy Malone and Jane Greer - who, as Mrs Chaney 1 and 2, both come across as pretty flat archetypes, in the interests of narrative simplicity.  Malone's Cleva has no chance to show a sympathetic side as, right from the outset, she is portrayed as a mean, self-interested bigot who loathes deformity and can't be bothered to take the duties of parenthood seriously (in other words, the exact polar opposite of her husband).  Greer's far more likable Hazel is just as thinly drawn, the familiar self-sacrificing heroine without which no Hollywood melodrama of this era would be complete.  Both actresses do what they can with their badly underwritten, horribly stereotypical roles, but neither succeeds in making their characters much more than stock melodrama types - just part of the decor.

As the adult Creighton Chaney, Roger Smith scarcely registers as anything more than the average well-brought up kid, with scarcely a trace of the real Lon Chaney Jr's charm, charisma and tangled personal neuroses.  In the supporting cast, only Jim Backus (the voice of Mr Magoo) makes much of an impression as Chaney's loyal friend and press-agent Clarence, and the least said about Robert Evans's unbelievably wooden turn as the great Irving Thalberg the better (the non-professional actor was only given the part at the instance of Thalberg's widow, Norma Shearer).  Evans went on to become head of Paramount Pictures and thereafter a highly respected independent film producer, his credits including Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974).

Man of a Thousand Faces is a stand-out example of the Hollywood-themed biopic but it does suffer from its pretty slavish adherence to the melodramatic conventions of the time, with its screenwriters and musical composer Frank Skinner tending to over-do the sentimentality in a few places.  James Cagney's faultless lead performance has a sustained reality that overrides the film's casual mawkishness, helped by the lush widescreen black and white photography which achieves the look of a prestige production.

The film is one of the career highlights of actor-turned director Joseph Pevney, who had previously distinguished himself on the Joan Crawford vehicle Female on the Beach (1955), having worked successfully with Charles Laughton on The Strange Door (1951) and Alan Ladd on Desert Legion (1953).  From the mid-1960s onwards Pevney moved away from the cinema and devoted himself to working on television.  He is best remembered today as one of the principal directors on the original Star Trek TV series in the 1960s, for which he helmed some of the most highly regarded episodes - including The Devil in the Dark, Amok Time, The City on the Edge of Forever and The Trouble with Tribbles.  Pevney's television screen credits are impressive and include directorial work on some of the most popular shows of the '60s, '70s and '80s, including The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The High Chaparral, Bonanza, Marcus Welby, M.D. and Trapper John, M.D.

Man of a Thousand Faces is by no means a masterpiece but it delivers what it set out to achieve - to pay a respectful and fitting homage to one of the most iconic stars of the silver screen.  Unlike too many subsequent biopics of celebrated entertainers, it goes beyond the myth and provides a plausible flesh-and-blood portrait of the human being behind the legend, whilst celebrating his genius.  For a man like Lon Chaney, who became a Fantômas-like man of mystery in his own life time, always staying well away from the public gaze, it is quite an achievement for a film to get so close to him and give him such a solid corporeal identity.  This comes partly from James Cagney's committed portrayal of the great man, animating and settling the shape-shifter spectre with his own lifeblood and experience so that Chaney becomes more than just an indefinable mythic entity.  But it also comes from the film's adept weaving of fact and fiction into an engaging story of one man's personal crusade - not to make himself rich and famous, but to make the world a more human and tolerant place, by forcing us to see the anguish and suffering of those that society chooses to reject.

Film Synopsis

In 1930, Lon Chaney's untimely death at the age of 47 shocked the world and led those who knew him to offer heartfelt tributes to this, one of the undisputed giants of silent cinema.  A quarter of a century before, Chaney was an unknown vaudevillian, eking out a modest existence as a stage performer with his young and beautiful wife Cleva.  With a child on the way, Cleva is forced to give up work, and so Lon is grateful of the opportunity to work for the celebrated comedy duo Kolb and Dill on their next show in San Francisco.  The couple's already strained relationship deteriorates further during a Yuletide visit to Lon's elderly parents, where Cleva is horrified to discover that her husband's father and mother are both deaf and dumb.  Fearing that her unborn child will be similarly afflicted, Cleva looks forward to the birth with dread.  Her fears prove unfounded, however, and the newborn Creighton Chaney is a perfectly normal baby boy.

Over the years that follow, Cleva neglects her duties as a mother to concentrate on her career as a singer.  This creates further tension in the Chaney household and Lon is driven to cancel his wife's professional engagements when their child falls ill.  Lon's discovery that Cleva has been having an affair with her rich patron sends the marriage into terminal decline.  The last straw comes when Cleva learns that her husband has developed an affection for a chorus girl in his theatre troupe, Hazel Hastings.  Lon is performing his popular musical clown act when his distressed wife suddenly appears on stage and swallows acid in front of a shocked audience.  Although she survives the attempt on her life, Cleva will never be able to sing again.  Amid the resulting furore the Chaneys' divorce quickly ensues, but Lon is devastated when his son is taken into custody by the state as he is unable to provide a stable home for the infant.

In a determined bid to regain custody of his beloved Creighton, Lon Chaney heads for Hollywood, hoping to find work in the up-and-coming motion picture business.  Initially employed as a lowly extra, Lon soon gains a reputation as an adept character performer, thanks to his uncanny ability to totally transform his appearance with make-up and control over his body.  Lon draws on his experience as a mime artist - acquired by the need to communicate through sign language with his deaf-mute parents in childhood - and finds he has a remarkable talent for expressing the inner torment of those that society rejects.  By the early 1920s, he is known throughout the world as The Man of a Thousand Faces, famous for his startlingly vivid portrayals of misfits and monsters - unloved, loathed and spurned outsiders of every shape and hue.

Encouraged by Universal Studios' ambitious new boss Irving Thalberg, Lon Chaney triumphs in lavish productions such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, and he soon has everything he could desire - custody of his son, financial security and a devoted second wife, in the form of Hazel.  The teenage Creighton has high hopes of following in his father's footsteps, but Lon Chaney Senior does little to encourage him, insisting that actors are like idiots - born, not made.  Creighton's relationship with his father suddenly breaks down when the pampered youngster discovers that his mother is not dead (as his father insisted she was) and has been prevented from having any contact with him.  Lon's continuing professional success comes as scant consolation when his son suddenly abandons him to live with his mother.  The arrival of sound cinema brings new challenges which the actor - now at the height of his glory - is determined to overcome. Alas, time is not on his side...