Subtitles:

None

Extras:

• A video tour of Chaney's actual makeup case and the "double amputee" costume worn in The Penalty (9:33)
• Original theatrical trailers from Chaney's The Big City (:47) and While the City Sleeps (:54)
• Surviving footage of Chaney's The Miracle Man (2:37)
• Chaney's one-reel Western By the Sun's Rays (11:27)
• Essay: "The Penalty: Novel, Script to Screen"
• Scene comparison (novel, screenplay, film)
• Production budget sheet from The Penalty

Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, was no mere makeup wizard, as this dark, deviant crime drama shows. Strapping his legs into a painful leather harness to play a double-amputee underworld kingpin, Chaney scrambles through the film like a human spider weaving his criminal web across San Francisco with equal parts seduction and terror. Crippled as child by an incompetent doctor, he dedicates his life to vengeance in a double-barreled plot that will bring both the city and the doctor (now an honored physician) to their knees. Director Wallace Worsley (who later collaborated with Chaney on his legendary Hunchback of Notre Dame) peppers the busy plot with bizarre touches of sexual menace and sadism, and he creates a wicked atmosphere of corruption and murder that implicates every character. Even the absurd twist of a happy ending can't wipe that away.

In The Penalty Chaney transforms his body into that of a double amputee (needless to say, the 1920 intertitles have no qualms about calling him a cripple). There are no elaborate makeup effects. We can see his true face here, and the hammy grimacing that Chaney could indulge in is kept pretty much under control. The evil of his character of Blizzard, king of the San Francisco criminal underworld, is generally conveyed by a slight scowl to his features, which only softens when he’s with his underlings, when he’s applying a mask of pretence to the outside world, or when he’s enraptured by the power of music. (Yes, here music calms the savage beast.)

Chaney’s tour de force in The Penalty is his use of a harness that strapped his legs behind him, thus giving the convincing physical appearance of a legless amputee. There’s no use of trick photography or doubles and hardly any use of camera angles or compositions to hide Chaney’s true limbs (compare, in contrast, the tiring lengths Peter Jackson went to trying to get us to believe in his hobbits). Instead, Chaney’s body minus his legs is deliberately on display. In a powerful physical performance his body is constantly in movement. Equipped with half-size crutches, he’s forever on the move, climbing stairs, jumping on and off chairs, hobbling across the floor. There are some bravura touches, such as the way, in his study, he hauls himself from one peg to another up the wall so that he can look through the high-placed window into the room next door; or how he clambers up and down ropes between his room and the secret basement; or even how, in one scene, he drops down a fireman’s pole to land on his stumps and then move quickly across the floor.

Gary Tooze

October 18th, 2012