The Penalty (1920)

Originally posted to Facebook on 1/26/2017

The Penalty was our third film from 1920, and the first we’ve seen starring Lon Chaney. He plays a man who, as a boy, had his legs mistakenly amputated by a surgeon after a traffic accident, and who grows up to be a mob boss who plots revenge. It is every bit as lurid and manipulative as it sounds. Lon Chaney played the part by tying his legs tightly behind him, and could only work for ten minutes at a stretch because of the pain. He of course went on to more famous silent roles, including The Phantom of the Opera, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but this is the first entire movie of his I’ve seen, and it is immediately apparent why he was a star. He theatrically and athletically waddles and climbs from place to place, declaiming his various plans, and dominates almost every scene that he’s in. By contrast, the scenes depicting the proto-FBI organization that is attempting to bring him down take place in a static undistinguished office, and look as if they could possibly have been shot in a single day. This organization assigns a woman agent played by Ethel Terry to infiltrate his criminal organization and find out why he has assigned a large chunk of his criminal organization to the task of making hats, itself a clearly diabolical activity. This movie is not quite as eccentric as last week’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but compared to almost any other film we have seen recently, it is quite idiosyncratic. It probably most resembles the French serials Fantomas and Judex, but those had a significantly lighter tone. This movie is not entirely serious, but it has an intensity (sometimes verging on camp) that those movies lacked.

Next week we’ll see our fourth film from 1920, which, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, is a well-known early German silent: The Golem. I am a little apprehensive about watching an inter-war German film focusing on medieval Jewry, but am fully braced for it. Our list of planned films is, as always, here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT