Lon Chaney, now on DVD!

April 1 marks the 130th birth anniversary of Lon Chaney, Sr., the "Man of a Thousand Faces" who made quite a few wonderful silent films before his tragic early death at the beginning of the sound era in 1930. TCM is marking his birthday tomorrow with an entire morning and afternoon of his movies leading up to a documentary at 6:15 PM. I was thinking about doing a blog post on one or another of them, but....

First up, at 6:00 AM, is the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Chaney as Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bell-ringer of the Victor Hugo novel. The only thing is, I'm not quite certain whether I've seen this one. I think so, but I may well be conflating it with the 1939 Charles Laughton version, which is a wonderful movie.

Next, at 8:00 AM is He Who Gets Slapped. This would have been a good candidate to blog about today, except of course that I already blogged about it back in August 2010. However, one thing in that old post needs to be changed, which is that the movie has gotten a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

And then there's Tell It To the Marines at 12:15 PM, which I used in May 2011 to put the spotlight on silent film actor William Haines. I wrote back then that the movie wasn't available on DVD, but as with He Who Gets Slapped, it too has been given a DVD release thanks to the Warner Archive collection. Granted, they're both a bit pricier than your average DVD, but at least they're available.