American popular literature has a long grotesque tradition, stretching back to Washington Irving, our first literary celebrity. It achieved its apotheosis, in terms of both sensationalism and art, in the work of Edgar Allen Poe -- and it migrated naturally into the exaggerated conventions of Victorian theater, and from there into movies.
After WWI, and perhaps in part owing to the unprecedented horrors of that conflict, grotesque melodrama became a distinct genre in cinema, much as film noir became a distinct genre after the collective nightmare of WWII. Its power and prestige is best illustrated by the extraordinary popularity of Lon Chaney. One of the most celebrated stars of the silent era, he specialized almost exclusively in the genre of the grotesque. (He's seen above in and out of make-up for The Miracle Man.)
In tracing the rise of the modern horror film from its roots in silent cinema, we can easily misconstrue the grotesque genre as it was experienced by early audiences. The Phantom Of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, proto-horror films starring Chaney, actually have more in common with a grotesque contemporary melodrama like The Penalty, also starring Chaney as a legless underworld crime boss -- and the three have more in common with each other than any of them has with Dracula, for example, with its supernatural elements, or even Frankenstein, with its elements of mad-science fiction.
The Phantom, the Hunchback, and the legless Blizzard from The Penalty are all disfigured men whose afflictions have rendered them terrifying, while not quite extinguishing the romantic souls within. It's hard not to see in this an echo of the many thousands of mutilated survivors of WWI, and a metaphor for the psyche of a world scarred by previously unimaginable battlefield carnage.
The word grotesque does not quite describe the dramatic tone of The Penalty or the world it creates. Demented is closer to the mark. It does not present us with a vision of normality penetrated by grotesque elements -- it is set in a universe which has become unhinged at the core, and this nightmare universe is delineated matter-of-factly, as though its logic were the logic of the world as it is.
This creates a wonderful, dreamy kind of surrealism, with great poetic force, and a delightful atmosphere of frisson -- but it is finally very disturbing. One is tempted for this very reason to dismiss it as lurid pulp, but one cannot -- mostly because of the authority of Chaney . . . the physical authority of his shockingly convincing impersonation of a legless man, and the artistic authority of his performance as the paradoxical Blizzard.
We are given to drawing a distinction between silent film performers who "over-acted" and those who played in a more restrained and "modern" style. Chaney is usually considered more modern in this sense. But in truth, Chaney overacts in every frame of The Penalty, by modern standards. It's just that the broad strokes of his expressions and gestures are so grounded in psychological truth, so complex in their suggestiveness, so graceful and sublime in their execution, that we are swept beyond our modern expectations of what acting should be. We are experiencing screen performance as audiences of the time experienced it.
The intimacy of the camera certainly did require a technical toning down of physical expression and gesture for actors coming from the stage -- much as a smaller theatrical venue would have for actors accustomed to playing huge auditoriums -- and there were certainly lunkheaded actors who couldn't pull this off. But most of the time, when we talk about the difference between over-acting and more naturalistic acting in silent films, we are simply noting the difference between bad acting and good acting.
One of Cocteau's great maxims was "You have to know when it's all right to go too far." Great silent film actors knew this -- and great modern actors know it, too. James Cagney and Jack Palance -- and Jack Nicholson, for that matter -- habitually overact by so-called modern standards, yet their performances still seem fresh and convincing, perfectly au courant. Daniel Day Lewis's performance in The Gangs Of New York, one of the very greatest performances ever committed to film, is as wild and over-the-top as any silent film performance ever was, and yet it is a work of complicated and compelling genius.
The camera did allow a new breed of actors to step to the fore -- the minimalists, of whom Robert de Niro is probably the most astonishing. But Lon Chaney was no minimalist. He was an actor in the grand style -- and, quite simply, a supreme master of that style, consistently pitch-perfect, and consistently breathtaking.
The delirious tale of The Penalty begins with a boy injured in a traffic accident, treated by an incompetent doctor who unnecessarily amputates both his legs. An older doctor covers for the younger physician's mistake, and the chastened bumbler goes on to an exemplary career in medicine. But the boy never forgets.
He grows up to be the crippled criminal mastermind Blizzard, played by Chaney, who amasses power, covets more, and plans his revenge -- on the doctor and on the world.
On the first front, he insinuates himself into the life of the doctor's daughter -- a sculptor torn between her ambitions as an artist and society's expectations of exemplary womanhood (domestic and submissive) -- by posing for her portrait of Satan. On the second front he is plotting a takeover of the city of San Francisco by means of a lunatic scheme involving ten thousand "foreign malcontents", armed to the teeth, and uniformed in silly matching straw hats, cunningly woven in advance by harlots conscripted from the ranks of Blizzard's working girls.
It's all quite mad, but presented as an authentic threat to the civil order.
A subplot involves a plucky undercover female police operative who infiltrates the crucial straw hat operation and quickly learns more than it's safe for her to know. Principally she discovers the underground lair where Blizzard stores the munitions for his planned insurrection -- a subterranean world, reached through a trick fireplace, that's right out of the wildest Gothic fiction, and vaguely reminiscent of Erik the Phantom's underground kingdom beneath the Opera.
Blizzard is a beast, with the soul of a poet. He is a fine critic of art, and fires the sculptor with the courage she needs to break free of her bourgeois shackles and strike out on her own for glory. Villain indeed!
Blizzard also wins the heart of the undercover operative by his soulful piano paying -- and she wins his by her skillful operation of the pedals while he plays. She comes to her senses only when she discovers that his grand plan involves amputating the legs of a certain . . . but you get the idea.
Female independence is presented as possibly sexy and possibly admirable but, in the end, a very bad idea, for which a woman will inevitably pay a dreadful price.
The preposterous villainy resembles the harebrained villainy of Feuillade's serials -- at once innocent and unsettling, mundane and surreal. Possibly both reflect a post-war malaise informed by a sense that the ordinary world has gone subtly but irrevocably insane.
Chaney's performance, as usual, gives it all an unlikely interior coherence and logic. The filmmaking is aptly described by Michael Blake, Chaney's biographer, as craftsmanlike -- the shots are handsomely framed and lit, and the narrative moves along at a lively clip. Chaney alone elevates the film to greatness.
Every time he moves himself around with his crutches or with his hands alone, we watch a ballet on stumps unfold -- the aesthetic determination and commitment of the actor become the villainous determination and commitment of the character he's playing. We admire him and recoil from him at the same time.
This is the thrill of the grotesque drama. We are allowed to engage and embrace our deepest fears and discontents subconsciously, while retaining our outward allegiance to conventional virtues. The film dangles the possibility of Blizzard's redemption before us -- then snatches it away at the last moment . . . as it snatches away the possibility of new horizons for the women.
The ultimate effect, however, is one of ambiguity, a suspension of faith in the old certainties -- an intriguing discombobulation of the moral universe.
Kino's edition of the film on DVD features a splendid print and some wonderful extras. They include the surviving footage from The Miracle Man -- which is painful to watch, because this lost film looks as though it might have been marvelous. Included also is one of the few surviving one-reelers from Chaney's early years at Universal -- By the Sun's Rays. It's not much of a film, but it's fascinating to see Chaney at work at the beginning of his movie career. His physical grace commands attention, even when his choices as an actor are obvious or even crude. Chaney was born for the screen, as Chaplin and Pickford were -- with an instinctive insight into the movies's mysterious expressive power.
There is, perhaps most delightfully of all, a brief short in which Michael Blake shows us some of the Chaney artifacts held by the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. We see the suit and the stumps Chaney wore in the movie, his make-up case -- the mirror he looked into while working his magic. Blake handles them all with the delicate hands of a make-up artist, which he is -- and the awed respect of someone who genuinely admires the craft of a master.