At the age of 40 Lon Chaney was at last a deserved
superstar, but with his long-ingrained work ethic there was to be no
complacency. He turned his laser focus
to craft a customary self-created make-up for the flamboyant, disfigured Erik
in The Phantom of the Opera (1925),
the world’s most pro-active opera critic and the second of his double-whammy of
parts that catapulted him to the front rank of esteemed Hollywood actors. The
Phantom’s look became one of the most famous Hollywood ‘monster’ roles - and partly
inspired Batman artist Bob Kane in creating the face of the Joker, an even more
iconic mix of terror and the blackest of humour.
Obviously in
a busy schedule no performer can guarantee the highest quality in every project
they agree to and this was the case in Chaney’s next role, a botched blend of
horror and dark humour in The Monster,
released by director Roland West’s production company with Tec-Art and
distributed by M-G-M. This may have given the mistaken impression it was an
M-G-M film but it lacked the talent of such a prestigious studio. The Monster had an intriguing premise to
attract Chaney, that of a former surgeon of repute, Dr Gustave Ziska, who takes
over the sanatorium asylum in which he is revealed to actually be one of its insane
patients. However, we have to wait over thirty minutes for him to appear whilst
we tread water through a convenience store love-triangle between Amos Rugg
(Hallam Cooley), Gertrude Olmstead as the owner’s daughter Betty and Johnny
Goodlittle - Johnny Arthur, who was better suited to noted effeminate roles
than these lame heroics. The title cards aim for wry laughs and miss with tepid
remarks such as deriding Amos who ‘Blew into town – and has been blowing ever since’.
Investigating
the disappearance of a wealthy farmer, correspondence-course detective Johnny
goes to the sanatorium along with Betty and Amos to search for clues. Chaney
makes a darkly suave entrance as Dr Ziska, with white hair and fluffy eccentric
white eyebrows concealing mangled teeth whilst sporting a frock coat and
affecting a cigarette-holder like a sinister Noel Coward. Another attempt at
quality by association is naming his servant as Caliban (Walter James),
Shakespeare’s primitive man-servant from
The Tempest – although here James' oiled bare-chest and ear-ring suggest more
a gypsy circus artist. Chaney commands as much as he can but the material allows him no
chance to be Prospero here and the outside torrent fails to remind us this is
no more than a storm in a teacup.
Our three
heroes survive fiendish traps laid by Ziska and his other henchmen, Knute
Ericksen’s Daffy Dan and the mad monk Rigo played by George Austin. Amongst
these distractions, a couple of brief high-points
are the sight of Betty saved from being crushed by a mechanical weight only to
be gripped by unidentified hands as her bed retracts to unseen depths, while
Amos is about to be clobbered from behind by the fearsome friar before a cut to
black.
By the time
Johnny finds the asylum’s owner Dr Edwards (Herbert Prior) and the missing
farmer, we are given the big reveal of Ziska’s true status, yet truthfully we
are past caring as the plot descends into standard mad scientist hack work. “At
last, the fools have brought me a woman!”
crows Ziska over Betty, strapped to an operating table. He is about to
experiment on her to crack the old chestnut of the secret of life – “Rigo – my knives!”-
yet instead is forced into his own ‘death-chair’ by Caliban and mercifully Chaney is electrocuted out of the movie. It only remains for Johnny to hoist Caliban up,
ready-trussed for the police.
A clunky epilogue has Betty and Johnny together in a car. She stares up at him doe-eyed in
admiration with the line “How can I ever be worthy of a wonderful man like y’all?”
This reads like a weak parody of Deep South folks but at least serves to remind us that The Monster ultimately isn’t worthy of
us nor Lon Chaney...
No comments:
Post a Comment