"Beauty and the Beast": Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

©2023 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois lon CHAney WAs A pHenomenon of the silent cinema, and according to exhibitors, he was the most popular male star of 1928 and 1929 (Studlar 202). He was born in 1883 and began a theatrical career in his late teens, working with touring vaudeville acts for about ten years before moving into film. During 1912 and 1913, his first film work was uncredited bit parts for various studios, but he then worked under contract for Universal until around 1917, after which Chaney again worked for various studios and made a name for himself in strong supporting roles, such as in The Scarlet Car (1917) and Riddle Gawne (1918). His break came in 1919, when he played “The Frog” in The Miracle Man, the same year that he also made The Wicked Darling for Universal, which was his first feature-length collaboration with director Tod Browning, with whom he would work ten times over the following decade, particularly during the period 1925–30, when Chaney would work exclusively for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. By the time he signed his contract with MGM, Chaney was already a huge star, known for his mastery of makeup and disguise, a skill that he used to great effect throughout the 1920s and that earned him the nickname “the Man with a Thousand Faces.” When sound was being introduced during the late 1920s, Chaney initially resisted the transition, and by the time he made his first sound film, a remake of his 1925 film The Unholy Three, he had been diagnosed with cancer and passed away one month after the film’s release. Following his death, the industry was eager to find a replacement, and the horror stars who emerged after 1930 were usually judged in relation to him. For example, in 1933 alone, it was suggested that Lon Chaney’s “historical mantle . . . has apparently descended on Mr Karloff’s shoulders” (Mannock 30), while Claude Rains was declared to be “the new Lon Chaney” (“New Lon Chaney?” 5). However, although Chaney is acknowledged to be a key figure in the history of horror in particular and of cinema more generally, it is still the case that, as Gaylyn Studlar observed over twenty-five years ago, beyond The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), “the numerous other films from his seventeen-year movie career are almost totally neglected by contemporary scholars” (Studlar 204; for notable exceptions see Skal and Worland).1 Studlar’s study of Chaney is therefore an important intervention, and it brilliantly explores the “failed and freakish” masculinities that he performed (210), masculinities that drew upon sHAne BroWn received his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2014 and is the author of Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male–Male Intimacy and numerous other books and articles on horror, silent cinema, Elvis Presley, and Bobby Darin. He also writes young adult fiction. mArK JAnCoviCH is a professor of film and television studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of numerous books and articles and was the founder of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies. He currently acts as series editor (with Charles Acland) for the Bloomsbury book series Film Genres and as the managing editor for the journal Horror Studies. “Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney