Burl reviews The Penalty! (1920)

Shh, it’s Burl! I’ve got a silent picture from a century ago to review for you today: in fact a starring vehicle for the great Lon Chaney! Ha ha, yes, this must be one of the absolute jewels in his crown, as we have on view all at the same time his astonishing physical feats, his makeup prowess, and his tremendous acting! And maybe I’m just not listening in the right places, but I don’t hear this one talked about as much as I do some other Chaney pictures! It’s The Penalty!

It’s a crime-horror-melodrama as rich as a ripe pear! Ha ha, it even has nudity in it! It begins in the past, with a boy who has been injured by traffic brought in to the surgery of a young and untested doctor! The sawbones lives up to that colloquial name for his profession and saws the boy’s bones! But an older doctor arrives and instantly diagnoses that the boy’s legs didn’t need to be cut off after all! The older medico reluctantly pledges to cover for the younger one’s mistake, but the boy overhears this exchange, and thus begins a lifetime of rage and resentment, and the longest-term revenge plot outside of Oldboy!

Twenty-seven years after his unfortunate dismemberment, the boy has grown into Blizzard, music lover and legless genius of the underworld! Ha ha, Chaney’s performance as this near-demonic crime czar is really something to behold, and it’s no surprise when the sculptress daughter of his great doctor enemy asks him in all innocence to pose for a bust of the Ol’ Scratch she’s making! There are times when Chaney’s face becomes so devilish you expect to see horns, and it’s impossible to say whether at those times he’s wearing one of the crazy makeups he was such a genius at, or was just harnessing the power of gurning like no actor before him or since!

The story, by Gouvernor Morris (ha ha, just what did he gouvern, if anything?), is intensely melodramatic in that crazy silent movie fashion, and if you don’t like that sort of thing this will not be for you! But if you don’t mind implausibilities stacked like cordwood, impenetrable motivations (to our twenty-first century minds, anyway), and what some may consider wild overacting, you’ll stand a good chance of loving this picture as much as I did! Ha ha, can you buy a scheme that might have inspired Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, but involves the secret manufacture of hundreds of pretty straw hats? Or a special brain operation that will transform a raging, evil lunatic into a nice and helpful guy? I did, and felt amply rewarded for my open-mindedness!

It’s got some great sets and beautiful inky cinematography, and the direction by Wallace Worsley is effective enough that you wonder why Worsley, despite his premature passing and the fame of his Hunchback of Notre Dame, he wasn’t more famous! It’s black as pitch and sports a tragic ending - the penalty of the title, in fact - and so, as silent films go, this is most certainly not The Lonedale Operator! I give The Penalty three and a half leather stumpholders!