Man of a Thousand Faces

TCM's lineup tonight is dedicated to silent screen star Lon Chaney, starting with an old documentary. The first feature film up is not a movie starring Chaney, but a biopic that aired a couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on Hollywood biopics of Hollywood stars. That movie is Man of a Thousand Faces, at 9:30 PM.

The movie starts off mentioning that Hollywood came to a standstill for one day in August 1930 to honor one of their old stars. Irving Thalberg (Robert Evans, who would go on to become a producer) enters a sound studio that had been the filming location for films like The Unknown that starred one of MGM's early stars, Lon Chaney, who has recently died. (Phantom of the Opera was made at Universal, as was Man of a Thousand Faces, which I supposed made for some interesting discussion between the studios.) As you might guess, this is the opportunity for the film to go into a flashback, because as I mention over and over, it's a highly original way for a movie to introduce its story.

In the early 1890s, young Lon Chaney is living in Colorado Springs, as the child of two deaf parents, something that causes Lon a lot of grief because the other kids treat him terribly. But it also gave him the ability to communicate without having to speak, which would eventually become useful when he got to Hollywood. But before Hollywood, there was a career in vaudeville with his first wife Cleva Creighton (Dorothy Malone). They're working a crappy part of vaudeville, and Cleva gets them fired for her lack of punctuality exacerbated by the fact that she's pregnant with what would become Lon Chaney Jr., although Lon Jr.'s given name was Creighton.

Lon takes his wife back to his family in Colorado Springs, which is where Cleva learns that Lon's parents are both deaf, something that Lon couldn't bring himself to tell Cleva up to this point. And with good reason, since she believes in the stereotypes that deaf people are some sort of freak. Worse, she's worried that if Lon's parents are deaf, there's a very high possibility that her child is going to be deaf too. The kid isn't, but it's something that causes tension for the rest of Lon and Cleva's marriage as she still wants work of her own to help support the family. Helping look after the boy is vaudevillean chorus girl Hazel Bennet (Jane Greer). Cleva and her boyfriend think Lon and Hazel are having an affair, one of the things that leads Cleva to walk out on her and the marriage to end in divorce.

But this being the early 1910s, Lon is deemed unsuitable to raise a child by himself, so young Creighton is declared a ward of the state and put in a foster home. Lon is determined to get a good enough job to be able to get his son a stable home, leading him to head out to Hollywood. Having been in vaudeville, he knew how to play a multitude of characters, and he also has a way with the sort of Hollywood makeup necessary to personify those characters on screen. That latter is a very useful skill for Lon in trying to get work as an extra, although being an extra is not enough to get custody of his son back.

Eventually, Lon's old agent Clarence Locan (Jim Backus) also decamps to Hollywood, and, finding Lon, also brings Hazel along. Hazel is the one who has the perception to figure out that what the state wants to consider Lon a fit father is for him to have a mother for the child, even if it's a stepmother. The fact that she was somewhat in love with Lon back when Cleva thought they were having an affair helps, and Lon marries Hazel, getting custody of adolescent Creighton. Clarence is also able to get Lon a bigger job, which is the first stepping stone on the way to Hollywood stardom.

Now, of course, we know that Lon is going to die young in 1930 from the flashback structure in addition to this being a biopic. The final act, therefore, is concerned with Lon having a difficult relationship with his son, in part because Creighton wants to follow his father into acting and in part because Cleva shows up wanting to see her son. Lon isn't thrilled with the idea because, to be fair, she basically abandoned the kid, and because Lon dealt with the abandonment by telling Creighton that Cleva had died. It's less bad, I suppose, than telling a young boy that Mom abandoned them.

James Cagney, unsurprisingly, gives a good performance in Man of a Thousand Faces. There are some liberties taken with Chaney's real life, although they're somewhat less substantial than in a lot of other biopics. Showing, for example, that Hazel had an ex-husband who was a double amputee is surprising but, from what I've read, is actually the truth. The one flaw that the movie has is that it runs a bit over two hours, which is longer than the movie needs to be. I think it spends a bit too long on Lon's pre-Hollywood life. But mostly, Man of a Thousand Faces works and is one of the better biopics I've seen.