The Monster (1925)

Lon Chaney, often dubbed “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” garnered this moniker through his remarkable talent for altering his appearance. Utilizing makeup and prosthetics, Chaney was adept at transforming himself from a regular person into a host of distinct and often more bizarre characters for his most demanding roles.

In the 1925 silent film, The Monster, Chaney receives top-billing, and one would expect he’d be the featured actor. However, this is not the case. Instead, the movie focuses on Johnny Arthur, who plays Johnny Goodlittle, a mild-mannered store clerk who is studying to be a detective. When a local man goes missing, the townsfolk call in an insurance detective to find him. Eager to gain a reputation, Johnny inserts himself into the investigation. He finds an important clue linking the missing man to the local sanitarium but is quickly dismissed by the police.

Working the case on his own, Johnny stumbles onto a plot involving Doctor Ziska (Chaney,) who gathers auto accident victims for use in experiments. Through the methods employed by Ziska to acquire his unwilling patients, Johnny’s love interest, Betty (Gertrude Olmstead,) and her current beau, Amos (Hallem Cooley,) inadvertently enter the sanitarium. On a stormy night, the three find themselves trapped against their will in the spooky sanitarium with Dr. Ziska and his strange assemblage of assistants.

Going in, I found the film’s initial intertitles oddly quirky as I wasn’t expecting a comedy. (For example, “Bowman’s disappearance was Danburg’s biggest thrill since the milkman eloped with the bootlegger’s wife.”)  As the film went on, though, I found its oddball approach to the somewhat dark material made it more unique. While not always successful, the comedic approach works more often than not.

Silent films have a tendency to look a bit stagey and, since writer/director Roland West adapted The Monster from a play, I would assume that was the intent here. It’s notable for being one of the first examples of the “old dark house” movies that became wildly popular in the 1930s and 40s.

The Monster may disappoint Chaney fans expecting him to be the titular villain ala The Phantom of the Opera or to don one of his painfully impressive get-ups like The Penalty. Here, the most we get out of Chaney’s make-up kit is a prosthetic nose and some false teeth. He also doesn’t get a lot of screentime, which doesn’t help. When he is onscreen, however, he’s marvelously campy.

For those without expectations about Chaney, The Monster is a perfectly serviceable lightweight horror comedy. Your enjoyment may depend on your familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of silent film, however. (Those being the facial expressions, the body language, and other techniques used to convey emotion in the absence of sound.) As an enthusiast of cinema’s evolution over nearly a century, I wouldn’t recommend beginning with The Monster. However, it serves as an early example of typical genre matinee fare.