The 1957 Lon Chaney Biopic Man of a Thousand Faces Is Notable Mainly For Its Powers of Prophecy and Robert Evans' Prescient Performance as Legendary Studio Executive Irving Thalberg
Within the finely wrought mythology of the endlessly self-mythologizing Robert Evans, the 1957 Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces is notable less for its cinematic value than its powers of pop culture prophecy.
The idea, as world-class raconteur and storyteller Evans articulated countless times in countless forms, including memoir, audio book and documentary, was that by playing legendary Hollywood mogul Irving Thalberg — at the insistence of Thalberg’s widow Norma Shearer no less — he attracted some powerful cinematic magic that set him on a path to becoming a famous mogul himself, the Thalberg of New Hollywood, larger than life and as charismatic and magnetic as any of the movie stars he worked with.
This was attributable in no small part to Evans’ background as an actual movie star, although “star” may be excessively generous given the brief and relatively modest nature of Evans’ career as a movie actor, particularly when compared to his later triumphs as the Golden boy head of Paramount in a time of greatness, adventure and glory and later his equally auspicious run as the independent producer of smashes like Chinatown, Marathon Man and Urban Cowboy before things famously took a turn.
Because with Evans the reality was always somehow as dramatic and crazy and wildly melodramatic as the myth, Man of a Thousand Faces largely bears out this preposterously self-aggrandizing conception of the wonderfully hokey Lon Chaney Sr. biopic as a movie that eerily predicted that a ridiculously good-looking male starlet with a marginal career in front of the camera and a gorgeous punim at once angelic and devilish would go on to follow in the footsteps of the legendary show-business insider he played in what would turn out to be one of his first, and last, major screen roles.
Thalberg was a beloved figure in Hollywood, a martyr who died young but left behind an incredible creative legacy. Man of a Thousand Faces errs predictably on the side of fawning hagiography. Evans plays the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon as an impossibly boyish guardian angel who swoops benevolently into the impossibly melodramatic life of Lon Chaney Sr. at a crucial moment and uses psychology and skillful manipulation — the savvy producer’s best friends — to convince Chaney to take on a career-making role in 1923’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Evans-as-Thalberg actually opens the movie in 1930 delivering Chaney’s eulogy. Giving a novice film actor like Evans a challenging opening monologue is an audacious, surprising move for a pure movie star vehicle where Cagney not only acts up a storm, but also uses sign language extensively, does pantomime, dances, clowns around in face-paint more disturbing than any of the violence in his gangster movies and suffers terribly but nobly through a fatal illness before dying onscreen.
Man of a Thousand Faces exists to give Cagney an opportunity to over-act egregiously and enjoyably but from the perspective of 2021 it’s just as compelling, if not more so, for the opportunity it provides a future Hollywood legend an opportunity to play an idealized version of both the ultimate studio head, with the soul of an artist and the mind of an accountant, and the persona Evans would go on to develop as the ultimate Hollywood player.
After Thalberg’s eulogy we flash back to Chaney’s childhood as the picked-on son of deaf parents, a background the screenplay lazily treats as a skeleton key that unlocks all of the mysteries of the future vaudevillian and movie star’s dark, complicated psyche and explains all of his behavior, motivation and actions.
Evans-as-Thalberg, for example, instinctively intuits that Chaney’s inherent identification with outsiders is what enables him to inhabit not just the skin but the suffering souls of a wide variety of tortured characters like Quasimodo, while the actor’s gift for emoting broadly enough for the silent screen and big enough for the cheap seats in vaudeville houses is linked to a childhood where he had to communicate with his mother and father through movement, gestures and sign language instead of words.
Chaney’s relationship with his deaf parents plays an unfortunately central role in his doomed relationship with first wife Cleva (Dorothy Malone), an unstable glamour girl and unhinged narcissist who responds to the unwelcome revelation that her partner’s parents are deaf as if learning that Chaney is descended from evil space aliens who will pass the curse of deafness onto everyone they encounter.
Chaney has an unmistakable virgin-whore dynamic with Cleva, an evil, adulterous shrew who treats the disabled like monsters and, in a horrifying bit of melodrama taken from real life, attempts to upstage and sabotage her more successful husband’s career by literally drinking a vial of poison from the wings while he performs onstage, and Hazel (Jane Greer), the perfect, saintly, asexual woman who comes to replace Cleva as Lon’s wife and the mother figure of his son, who would go on to fame as Lon Chaney Jr. but is known as Creighton here.
Man of a Thousand Faces suggests that Chaney’s offscreen life as a husband and father and son was so wildly melodramatic that it made the silent potboilers he starred in seem uneventful and sleepy by comparison. After Chaney splits with Cleva after her flagrant infidelities and cruelty become too much to bear, his beloved child is taken from him and put into foster care under the logic that a vaudevillian’s ramshackle, itinerant lifestyle is not suitable for a young, impressionable boy.
So the aimless, frustrated baggy-pants entertainer heads to Hollywood, where a new racket called silent movies is in desperate need of warm bodies to play extras, and sometimes something a little more distinguished.
Chaney sets himself apart from his less experienced competition through his mastery of make-up as much as his gifts as an actor. Man of a Thousand Faces depicts Chaney’s success as being equally attributable to his gifts as a self-taught make-up artist, whose skills have been honed and perfected in countless forgotten vaudeville shows throughout the decades, and as a character actor who specializes in extreme challenges.
Playing one of the most legendary hams of the silent screen gives Cagney an irresistible opportunity to shamelessly devour scenery. To cite a characteristic example, once Chaney has made it to the top of the Hollywood food chain by playing larger-than-life characters, we get to watch his peculiar genius in action as he plays a disabled man reduced to dragging his seemingly broken legs across the pavement in an over the top burlesque of suffering and determination before throwing away his crutches climactically and slowly, methodically untwisting his contorted body and standing up through some manner of magic.
Then to really drive home the stark contrast between the veteran physical comedian and silent screen thespian and the characters he played, Cagney, as Chaney, does a little soft shoe in celebration of nailing yet another impossibly difficult take.
Man of a Thousand Faces is pure Hollywood hokum, a shamelessly sentimental celebration of a legendary cinematic showman that’s lumpy and leaden and way too long with a runtime over two hours, but also embarrassingly affecting as well as just embarrassingly corny at times.
At the time of its release, Man of a Thousand Faces was unmistakably Cagney’s movie but these days it belongs to the handsome young man playing Irving Thalberg as much as it does to the Oscar-winning gangster movie staple in the impossibly juicy lead role, albeit for reasons that have more to do with the actor/icon’s real-life offscreen future than his glibly charming and just plain glib turn here.
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