The Writer's Poke

This is Lon Chaney's only non-silent film, a remake of the 1925 The Unholy Three. He would die of lung cancer at the age of 47 after the filming of this movie.  What might interest me most about this version is Charles Gemora in the Gorilla suit. In the 1925 version, they just used a monkey, and sometimes they'd play with camera distortion to make the monkey appear bigger and more dangerous. In the 1930 version, it's just Gemora in a Gorilla suit. Convincing? Not really, but the brief bio on Gemora I read was interesting.  Gemora began his movie career just by hanging around the entrance of Universal Studios. According to IMDb, the Filipino Gemora was just 5' 5", and he would have a 30-year career in film, usually uncredited in the Gorilla suit. When he wasn't the Gorilla, he was worked as a make-up artist. The list of films he worked on is quite impressive, including: Island of Lost Souls (1932), Double indemnity (1944), and The Ten Commandments (1956) as a ma...

Professor Echo (Lon Chaney) is a ventriloquist at the Carnival. His life philosophy is simple: Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry. His pickpocket partner is Rosie O'Grady (Mae Busch). He loves her, but she happens to love Hector (Matt Moore). The Carnival doesn't make a lot of money for Professor Echo and the other "freaks," I'm guessing. So, Echo also dresses up as an old woman and runs a pet store on the side, as you do. Eventually, he gets together with the World's Strongest Man and the World's Smallest Man. They form a faction called the Unholy Three, and they case a rich person's house so they can still some rubies. While Echo never wanted things to go violent, the other two men in the Unholy Three don't have the same scruples. The owner of the rubies dies, and the men decide to frame the murder on Hector. But Echo is a good guy. He can't let Hector go to the chair for something the Unholy Three did, even if that would clear the way fo...

I wondered about this one. Lon Cheney plays the parts of two Manchurians -- the old Wu and the son Wu. The idea of a white actor playing an Asian character doesn't 100% bother me, but I do wish the character of Nang Ping (Wu's daughter) had been played by an Asian actress (she's played by the white actress (Renée Adorée). Basil Gregory (Ralph Forbes) will fall in love with Nang, and they will kiss and stuff, which means to meet "code" or society restrictions, Nang had to be played by a white actress -- I'm thinking a white actor and an Asian actress probably weren't allowed to kiss on screen in 1927. (So the idea that a white guy and an Asian woman could fall in love is really progressive, if you think about it.) Anyway, the old Wu is somewhat progressive. He wants to raise his son as a good Chinese, but he also understands that for his son to be ready to live in the modern world, it will help for him to know the ways of the West. Mr. Gregory (Holmes Herbe...

It's weird that Lon Chaney plays a mad scientist who has taken over the old asylum, but he's not really the star of the show. Instead, we follow the local town dufus whose been told that to succeed in life, he just needs to follow his ingenuity.  I suppose I could write a longer review about this one, but it wasn't scary, and nothing about the simple story was all that interesting. At the beginning of the movie, I guess one way that they got the mad scientist bodies to work on was to cause car accidents. They would lower a mirror down from a tree onto the road, and then the driver would see his own car in the reflection and have an accident in the attempt to avoid a head-on crash.  Local dufus finds the three guys in some sort of dungeon at the asylum. One is the asylum's director, and another is the guy who had the car crash at the beginning of the movie.  Rating: 1.5/5 stars

Mockery might not be a fable in the strictest sense, but the simplicity of the characters and what they represent made me think of it as a kind of fable as I was watching it.  Sergei (Lon Chaney) is a poor peasant somewhere in the Siberian forest. Countess Tatiana (Barbara Bedford) runs into him and asks for his help getting to Novokursk. This is during the Russian Civil War, and although Sergei doesn't know she's a countess, he's obviously going to help her. She's a beautiful woman, and Sergei would probably help her regardless. His only fear is that they will get to Novokursk and then she will forget about him.  When they arrive in Novokursk, her Countess identity is revealed, but she stays true to her promise, helping Sergei find employment. But they are of different social classes, and so this limits the amount of time they will have together as "friends."  Meanwhile, Sergei is listening to Ivan (Károly Huszár), who is poisoning Sergei's mind against t...

This is my first Lon Chaney film, and maybe I'll come back to this one after I've watched a few more... for the moment, though, I guess I'm not 100% mesmerized. I understand the film's idea, but I'm not sure I believe in the realism. If this film is a metaphor for life, sure, but as an actual representation of life, no. Paul (Lon Chaney) is a great scientist on the verge of announcing his major findings to the committee of scientists. That's a little odd, as this seems like his first meeting with other scientists, as though his first major discover is his introduction to the scientific community, as though he's been isolated and alone and never had a scientific mentor or any scientific peers. Or friends. I guess I had trouble getting passed that. Because as it happens, he does have a benefactor, who, as far as we know, is simply rich, not a scientist. He takes all of Paul's work and claims he's the one who did it all. Okay, then have him explain it. ...