LON CHANEY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 631, 6 April 1929, Page 25

LON CHANEY

MASTER OF MANY FACES OWES MUCH TO HIS DIRECTOR 1 _1 “Who is this Mr. Chaney?” asked a London Supreme Court judge recently, when a man charged with murder protested that he had been frightened out of his wits by seeing one of Chaney’s screen characterisations. It was a unique if unfortunate tribute to an actor. Now every filmgoer knows Lon Chaney, the man who has become famous because he can make faces. His screen s tor ies have sent little thrills coursing up and down the backs of millions, but very few know of the man behind Chaney—his friend, director, and adviser, Tod Browning. Lon Chaney Browning thinks of weird ideas, and creates strange and mystifying characters. Lon Chaney is the man who brings them to life and puts them on the screen, with Browning directing. This combination of star and director is unique in the annals of picturedom, and commenced with the making of five-reel features some seven or eight years ago. When Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer came into being, Chaney became one of the company’s leading stars, and a little later Browning joined as a director. They were both assigned to the making of “The Unholy Three.” Then, in rapid succession, there followed “The Blackbird,” “The Road to Mandalay," and “The Unknown,” and the co-operative team of Chaney and Browning was firmly established. Browning writes the stories for most of the pictures he makes, or else makes his own adaptation of an original versiqjj. For many years a traveller and a student of life, an habitue of sideshows, strange little cafes and out-of-the-way corners of the Bohemian sections of great cities, Tod Browning puts into his pictures the people he has met with in the course of his wanderings. He speaks many languages, and he has met crooks and detectives in their own particular haunts. Even the “armless wonder” portrayed by Chaney in “The Unknown” was suggested to Browning by a similar individual he once met in Barcelona.