RvB's After Images: The Penalty (1920)

On some occasions Anthony Lane of the New Yorker is a real mug. However, he certainly was right in his Spider-Man 3 review. He wrote that the transformation--a literal pulverization, a "turning into powder"--of Thomas Haden Church's Flint Marko was the most interesting part of the blockbuster. But isn't this always the case? Superhero movies quicken the adolescent inside a viewer, and the most savory part is the detail about how people are warped into super-villains. Ex-teens remember the horrific transformations. the mysterious energies and compulsions, and the new, secret identities we grew.

Beside this, it seems that Sam Raimi is trying to channel certain silent movie ideas in his Spider-Man series. Peter Parker must have been based by Steve Ditko on the figure of Harold Lloyd, eager bespectacled kid that he is. It's easy to juxtapose the climb up the tower in Lloyd's Safety Last with Doctor Octopus pursuing Spider-Man up the clock-tower of a skyscraper in Spider-Man 2. Watching Thomas Hayden Church in Spider-Man 3 was a different kind of flashback. With his jaw filled out with some kind of prosthetic, and his ears pushed forward, and that old-time bully's sweater (the kind that thugs used to wear 80 years ago, along with derbies and checked suits) Hayden seems to be honoring the monarch of all screen villains, Lon Chaney. And an excellent place to start a study of Chaney is with one of his most insane films, 1920's The Penalty.

The movie is an artifact of a time as paranoid a time as 2007. Communism had won out in Russia and was spreading through the starving cities of post-war Europe. Racist fears of foreigners, Jews and black people in the US led to enormous rises in Ku Klux Klan membership; in 1924, Indiana elected an openly Klan-backed governor. The US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer engaged in a constitution-bending series of wiretaps, raids and roundups. Against this background, the story of Chaney's The Penalty is a revenge tale seasoned with political paranoia. Chaney's Blizzard has just about the fullest plate of any villain in cinema history. He has a master crime in the works--the armed takeover of San Francisco by an red army of "disgruntled laborers."

Until then, Blizzard's main job is supervising various thefts and assassinations in the infamous Barbary Coast district, and running a sweat shop where women toil making straw hats (all part of his nefarious purpose). But Blizzard is the original multi-tasker. He's courting Barbara (Claire Adams) the artsy daughter of a surgeon. And he's also sitting for Barbara's art project, a bust of Satan. (Seeing Chaney smirk at the sculpture reminds me of that Simpsons line: "Who is that goat-legged fellow, Smithers? I like the cut of his jib!") To relax, Blizzard likes to play a little piano. One of the seamstresses from the shop has to kneel and work the pedals. I should have mentioned that Blizzard has no legs below the knees.

Director Wallace Worsley's film begins with Blizzard's origin story; a flashback might have been more powerful, but never mind. Mangled by a streetcar, the young Blizzard had his legs mistakenly amputated by an inept young doctor. Half-conscious, the child hears an older doctor agreeing to cover up for the mistake. Years later, as Blizzard explains it, he had to leave home early. His father "detested little boys with their legs clipped off. So at fifteen, I hobbled out of his life."

Assuming the alias, and becoming the evil master of the underworld was just a day's work for a mind like that. In Gouverneur Morris' 1913 source novel, out of print but available on-line through good ol' Project Gutenberg, even the author has to wonder about the back story a little himself: "How could any man who depended for a living upon occasional pennies dropped into a tin cup have got together so extensive a collection of books upon scientific subjects, many of them handsomely bound and printed in foreign countries. Works upon explosives, tunneling, electricity, and music were especially abundant, not only in English but in German.

"And there were books upon the organization of armies, and upon the chemistry of precious stones. A cursory examination of his books would have found the master of the house to be interested also in in obstetrics, in poisons and anesthesia; but of romance, humanity, and poetry his library had but a single example; the "Monte Cristo" of the elder Dumas...And you might say, `well, it's either the house of a man whose scheme of life is utterly beyond my comprehension, or a madman.'"

Or you might say that he's a guy who knows where to hit the Friends of the Library sales, anyway. The "anesthesia" is as much of a tip-off to the reader as the nod to Dumas's story of the revenger Edmund Dantes. As well as the usual equipment of the master criminal, the dungeon, the armory, the slaves, Blizzard also has a little operating room: all part of his plan to get his limbs back.

Today, when you want to take the legs off an actor, whether it's Gary Sinise or Rose McGowan, it's all a matter of green-screen. Chaney did it through agonizing low-tech craft, bending his legs double and concealing his feet with the tail of his coat. It's a still shocking illusion, his "stumps" stuffed in pail-shaped leather boots, which he brandishes like the blunt ends of a pair of cannons. He bounces around in them, too, landing on them with what must have been sickening amounts of pain. A source on the Imbd claims that Chaney injured himself for life making the film. Michael F. Blake, who knows more about Chaney than anyone, doesn't confirm this story. However, he writes that the actor's widow told him that Goldwyn studio filmed a snippet showing Chaney walking downstairs with his own legs, so that no one would claim that the movie studio had merely hired a real-life amputee.

On repeated viewings the incredible scenario and Chaney's face are what make this fantasy real enough to beguile. Chaney was an actor whose bizarre makeup and taste for exotic stories made him famous, until his too-early death of cancer. Critic David Thomson notes that while we think of Karloff as Frankenstein and Lugosi as Dracula, Chaney could have played both roles with ease. But a natural role--one that he played with his face bare, such as Tell It To The Marines--merits as much praise as Chaney's more iconic creatures, like the original Phantom of the Opera or the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Strangely, few commentators talk about how you really do get to see Chaney's face in The Penalty. The film isn't about the stunt of the missing legs so much as the pride and rage-contorted face of a disaffected, despised man. And of course, it's worse when he smiles, when he sweeps his coat away to look down with mock surprise--to do a "where's the rest of me?" take. A source for Lugosi and Karloff, yes. In this dapper madman, you see anticipations of De Niro and Jack Nicholson, a half century before they made their mark. Church--a damned fine actor in his own, is carrying on the tradition of agony and revenge in this best moments of Spider-Man 3, this badly flawed movie about a human spider...though the kind of story that would have warmed Chaney, to be sure.