THE MONSTER (1925)

 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...