lon chaney was a phenomenon of the silent cinema, and according to exhibitors, he was the most popular male star of 1928 and 1929 (Studlar 202). He was born in 1883 and began a theatrical career in his late teens, working with touring vaudeville acts for about ten years before moving into film. During 1912 and 1913, his first film work was uncredited bit parts for various studios, but he then worked under contract for Universal until around 1917, after which Chaney again worked for various studios and made a name for himself in strong supporting roles, such as in The Scarlet Car (1917) and Riddle Gawne (1918). His break came in 1919, when he played “The Frog” in The Miracle Man, the same year that he also made The Wicked Darling for Universal, which was his first feature-length collaboration with director Tod Browning, with whom he would work ten times over the following decade, particularly during the period 1925–30, when Chaney would work exclusively for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. By the time he signed his contract with MGM, Chaney was already a huge star, known for his mastery of makeup and disguise, a skill that he used to great effect throughout the 1920s and that earned him the nickname “the Man with a Thousand Faces.” When sound was being introduced during the late 1920s, Chaney initially resisted the transition, and by the time he made his first sound film, a remake of his 1925 film The Unholy Three, he had been diagnosed with cancer and passed away one month after the film's release.Following his death, the industry was eager to find a replacement, and the horror stars who emerged after 1930 were usually judged in relation to him. For example, in 1933 alone, it was suggested that Lon Chaney's “historical mantle . . . has apparently descended on Mr Karloff's shoulders” (Mannock 30), while Claude Rains was declared to be “the new Lon Chaney” (“New Lon Chaney?” 5). However, although Chaney is acknowledged to be a key figure in the history of horror in particular and of cinema more generally, it is still the case that, as Gaylyn Studlar observed over twenty-five years ago, beyond The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), “the numerous other films from his seventeen-year movie career are almost totally neglected by contemporary scholars” (Studlar 204; for notable exceptions see Skal and Worland).1Studlar's study of Chaney is therefore an important intervention, and it brilliantly explores the “failed and freakish” masculinities that he performed (210), masculinities that drew upon the traditions of the freak show. However, she is too quick to read him as different from other male stars such as John Barrymore and Rudolph Valentino, and this is due to an understandable, but nonetheless misleading, focus on the body. As she puts it, “Chaney's variations of the grotesque male body create a radical contrast with the male body foregrounded for the audience's spectacular consumption of Barrymore, Valentino, and, albeit in less explicitly sexual ways, of Fairbanks” (201).For example, the focus on the body distracts from that which unites Chaney with Valentino: their narratives of sacrifice. As Studlar notes, Valentino may have been intoxicatingly beautiful, but his ethnicity also made his desirability problematic. He was associated with the figures of the “tango pirate” or the “lounge lizard,” figures who operated as folk devils in the 1920s, which witnessed intense campaigns by a nativist “white America” to assert racial hierarchies and halt immigration from southern Europe, China, and Japan (Gerstle). The tango pirates and lounge lizards were ethnic males who entertained “white” women in tea dances and nightclubs and were identified by campaigners as a “danger to America's biological future”: “the nation's dancing, pleasure-mad women were leading the country into ‘race-suicide’” (Studlar 163).Consequently, Valentino's sexuality was associated not only with pleasure but also with danger, and his most successful film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), required that he “be redeemed through suffering and the realization of true love” (Studlar 170). If his love is initially illicit, he proves his worthiness in the end when he “dies on a muddy battlefield” during World War I and then makes “a ghostly return to encourage Marguerite [his lover] to fulfil her duty to her now blind husband” (Studlar 170). As we will see, Chaney's films revolve around similar narratives of sacrifice: his films are usually love stories, in which he initially seems to be an inappropriate suitor for the woman whom he desires but then eventually proves his worthiness through sacrifice at the end.2 Certainly, this love is sometimes presented as a paternal affection, as Studlar notes, but many films explicitly concern romantic love and even sexual desire.The focus on Chaney's physicality is therefore misleading, given that it accepts that which the films often worked to challenge. Elsewhere, Studlar challenges “the popular assumption that he was a star of horror movies” (205), and she lists an alternative set of terms through which his films were understood in the period. On the one hand, as Jancovich and Brown have shown, these terms were often explicitly associated with “horror” at the time (Jancovich and Brown, “Most Stories”), and on the other, Chaney's association with horror was so strong that his presence shaped the ways in which his films were read. As one article put it, “[i]n each and every picture, the unmistakable menace of Chaney will be there—the nightmare shocks—the lurking, nameless terror that grips the heart, and makes each separate hair to stand on end” (Ussher, “Menace” 30).Furthermore, Jancovich and Brown also stress that in the 1920s, horror was associated with another term, “mystery,” and horror and mystery were understood in ways quite different from contemporary uses of these terms (Jancovich and Brown, “Most Stories”). Horror and mystery concerned investigations into the strange, eerie, and uncanny, in which appearances were not to be trusted and in which strange goings-on within a haunted house might be revealed to have a rational explanation (thus demonstrating that what appeared to be supernatural was an illusion) or the inverse: rationalist accounts of the world might be exposed as illusions and that which was usually dismissed as fantasy or superstition might be shown to be real.Consequently, rather than being “a shocking spectacle of difference” (Studlar 241), Chaney's performances often illustrated that things were not how they appeared: that his monsters might be visually marked as other but that their physical appearance was deceptive, a theme that brings us back to ethnicity in various ways. On the one hand, like Valentino, his characters were often marked as ethnically other, but on the other, these narratives often chimed with the ethnic audiences of 1920s cinema. As Douglas Gomery has pointed out, the Hollywood studios operated by owning “15% of all US theatres (but the majority of first-run),” a strategy that allowed them to cream off the most valuable audiences and “gather 50–75 per cent of box-office revenues” (Hollywood 18). However, as Gomery also points out, the core of the audience was the new ethnic middle classes, for whom the cinema confirmed their sense of having achieved social mobility.As Gomery discusses, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Balaban and Katz became one of the most powerful and influential cinema chains in the United States, and by 1925 it had “merged with Hollywood's largest studio, Famous Players-Lasky” to form “the most powerful movie company in the world” (Gomery, Shared 34). The basis of this success was the company's initial strategy of targeting areas such as North Lawndale in Chicago; as the 1920 census demonstrated, 75 percent of the population were “Russian Jews who had come to America in the 1880 and 1890s [and] settled in the neighbourhood around Hull House (Maxwell Street)” but had then “moved to [North Lawndale] in order to prove that they had ‘made it’” (Gomery, Shared 44). Furthermore, Balaban and Katz constructed their cinemas to enhance this feeling of having “made it.” The buildings were designed lavishly so that they “spelled opulence to the average Chicago moviegoer” (Gomery, Shared 47), while service workers were on hand to treat “the movie patron as a king or queen” (Gomery, Shared 47). In this way, these “movie palaces” were designed to create an “upper class atmosphere” (Gomery, Shared 49).But while these movie palaces might have offered an experience like that of an upper-class theater or hotel, these venues were not upper-class theaters or hotels. These movie palaces offered their patrons the illusion of entry into the world of the glamorous upper classes, but their customers came to the cinema because they implicitly acknowledged their exclusion from the worlds of the upper class: they knew that they would not be welcome in that world or feel that they fit into it. As we have seen, this was a period of struggle between what Gerstle has called “civic nationalism” and “racial nationalism” (Gerstle). If the former promised ethnic groups, “If you work hard, you can become one of us,” the latter asserted, “You can never become one of us, no matter what you do!”It is this experience that confronts the eponymous heroine of Olive Higgins Prouty's 1923 novel Stella Dallas and its 1925 film adaptation. Stella dreams of escaping her working-class roots and becoming upper-class, but she ultimately finds that she is neither accepted by high society nor comfortable within it. At the film's end, then, she is resigned to her poverty but stares through a window (that looks very much like a cinema screen) as she witnesses her daughter's marriage. Stella is able to witness (but cannot be a part of) the ceremony that will enable her daughter to achieve the social mobility that Stella will never enjoy and that, ultimately, depends on Stella being rejected by her daughter. Like both Myrtle Wilson and James Gatz in The Great Gatsby (published in 1926, three years after Prouty's novel and one year after the film adaptation), Stella is condemned to moments of spectatorship, in which she can only ever stare longingly at that which will always be beyond her grasp. Furthermore, Stella's decision to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her daughter looks very similar not only to the sacrifices that conclude most of Chaney's films but also to the familiar narrative in which ethnic immigrants sacrifice their own lives for the sake of the next generation.The current article will therefore examine articles about Chaney and reviews of his films that were written during his career and use them as evidence of some of the ways in which he might have been understood during the 1920s. Of course, these articles were usually exercises in public relations that were designed to sell Chaney and his films in specific ways, but even so, they provide a sense of how audiences were cued to read these films. In the process, the first section will explore the ways these films were discussed as weird romances in which Chaney's monsters are motivated by a hopeless love but achieve redemption at the end through self-sacrifice. The second section then moves on to analyze how his monsters were often seen as sympathetic and appealing figures and how, even when they were not, their monstrous actions were understood as being a product of social conditions. In other words, Chaney's monsters need to be understood in terms of changing attitudes toward social deviance and are often contrasted with an apparently respectable pillar of the community who acts as the real villain. Finally, the third section investigates Chaney's films as mysteries in which things are not how they appear and the ways in which this relates to the representation of various deviant “underworlds.” Furthermore, these underworlds were related to a growing interest in subcultural communities in the US at the time and to the ways in which “cultural relativism” worked within the 1920s. This will finally bring us back to the ways in which Chaney's films evoked in viewers contradictory responses of both horror and pleasure, repulsion and desire.As has been demonstrated elsewhere, Chaney did not simply address a male audience but was understood as having an appeal to women (see also Jancovich and Brown, “Finest”). Nonetheless, this appeal needs clarification, and one can see Chaney's monsters as almost an inversion of Barrymore's Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde might have had his attractions, but he was basically evil and repulsive, whereas Chaney's monsters might have looked repulsive and even have been psychologically twisted by circumstances, but they were usually tortured souls who “aroused sympathy” in viewers (Rush., Review of Laugh 14). For example, Picture-Play claimed that in He Who Gets Slapped, Chaney “pulls your heart strings until they nearly break” (Denbo 88), while Variety condemned Mockery (1927) for “striking no sympathetic chord,” a criticism that implied that sympathetic chords had been crucial to Chaney's other roles (Abel. 23). Of course, sympathy was not limited to women, but it was predominantly associated with femininity at the time and implied both “womanly comparison” and “spiritual affinity” (Kistler 366).Many of Chaney's films were even explicitly seen as romances, although they were also impossible and doomed romances, in which Chaney's characters fell for women who (for one reason or another) could never be his partner. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was clearly understood as the story of Quasimodo's doomed love for Esmerelda, while The Phantom of the Opera concerns a young opera singer with whom “the phantom has fallen in love” (Hall, “Fantastic Melodrama” 9). Mockery is also supposed to strive for a “beauty and the beast effect” in its story of “a Russian peasant” and his devotion to a “countess” (Abel. 23), while the story of Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928) is “built upon an aging man's hopeless love for a young girl” (Rush., Laugh 14).In other instances, as Studlar has noted, the story is one of parental, rather than romantic, love. For example, in The Trap (1922), Lon Chaney's character is robbed of his wife and property by another man, but when his wife dies, he adopts a five-year-old boy he believes to be his rival's child. Initially, his intention is “to wreak vengeance on the child, but instead he learns to love it” (Fred., Review of Trap 33). West of Zanzibar (1928) follows a similar storyline, while both The Road to Mandalay (1926) and Mr. Wu (1927) concern a father's attempt to protect his daughter from men he believes to be a threat. In all of these films, the love for the child is intense, and its intensity is captured in Mordaunt Hall's description of The Tower of Lies (1925) in The New York Times, where Hall claimed that Lon Chaney plays a character whose “whole life changes . . . when he takes the baby in his arms. He is tender and feels the awakening of paternal affection. Thereafter he goes about his labor with cheer and good will, always looking forward to going home and seeing his child” (Hall, “Swedish Story” 24).Sometimes, the story is even about a surrogate daughter. For example, He Who Gets Slapped (1924) concerns an older man whose paternal feelings compel him “to save the young [female] rider from marriage to the heavy” (Fred., Review of He Who 24).Furthermore, the line between romantic and paternal love is often unclear. It is therefore interesting that many later versions of The Phantom of the Opera explicitly make the Phantom into a paternal figure. Laugh, Clown, Laugh starts as the story of “hopeless love” but transforms into one of parental sacrifice, in which Chaney's clown manages “to open the way for [the young woman's] mating with a young lover” (Rush., Laugh 14). In Shadows (1922), Chaney's character even sacrifices himself for a male friend, a minister, rather than for either a lover or a child, and so “makes possible a happy ending to the troubles that beset the minister and his wife” (Fred., Review of Shadows 43).In all cases, however, the point is that “Lon Chaney doesn't do at all in a semi-heroic role” (Rush., Review of While 24), and while most of his roles are motivated by love, this love is rarely requited. Consequently, Variety complained that While the City Sleeps (1928) was uncomfortable viewing: “The spectacle of a middle aged cop with fallen arches and uncouth manners, even if he has the heart of a lion, getting himself in a sentimental love affair with a flighty flapper, is dreadfully hard to take” (Rush., While 24).The problem here is not that he finally gets the girl—which he does not—but that the romance is not marked as impossible from the outset. A similar point was also made in regard to Nomads of the North (1920), which was criticized for being unconvincing because Chaney “lacked the romantic bearing to capture the heart of a girl like Nanette” (Leed 35). It is hardly surprising, then, that Chaney rarely gets the girl. The Shock (1923) is one of the only exceptions. Here he plays “a cripple with a twisted mind” who “falls in love” with a young girl and, under “her good influence,” is cured both physically and mentally, all of which “opens the way to a happy ending, with the cripple restored and in happy embrace with the heroine” (Rush., Review of Shock 36). If this ending is rare, so are the films in which Chaney is not motivated by love or where his love is presented as evil. Voices of the City (1921) and While Paris Sleeps (1923) might be examples of the latter, but these were early starring roles.Indeed, these romantic elements were so explicit that critics understood Chaney's films as being versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” story—his breakthrough role was even as “The Frog” in The Miracle Man—although in Chaney's films his fairy-tale creatures were not capable of being transformed into handsome princes at the end. The importance of this dynamic is made explicit in the Variety review of Mockery, a review that condemned the film as a failure because this “beauty and the beast effect is entirely lost . . . The contrast is not strong enough, since Chaney does not look as repulsive nor Miss Bedford as beautiful as it is intended to convey” (Abel. 23).In other words, most of Chaney's films were romantic stories in which he appears to be a monster but not only is redeemed by his love for a woman but also proves his worthiness by sacrificing himself for her. This theme of redemption is even taken to extremes in The Shock, where his underworld “cripple” is “miraculously made whole when he is crushed in a falling building while engaged in an effort to rescue the heroine from a band of criminals” (Rush., Shock 36). The film also has been described as an attempt to emulate The Miracle Man, the 1919 film “in which Chaney came to the fore almost overnight in the part of the ‘Frog,’” a “fake cripple” who is involved in a scam but is finally converted into a believer when he witnesses a “real” miracle (“Film Review” 66).Elsewhere, in The Trap, Chaney's character is similarly transformed by his love for a child, so that he is cured of his desire for revenge. Although the film eventually ends with the boy leaving Chaney for his rival, the film still suggests that Chaney's character “is finally to find happiness, after he has been practically a victim of his own hatred for years” (Fred., Trap 33). West of Zanzibar features much the same dilemma: Chaney's Flint is the victim of Crane, who seduces Flint's wife and leaves him crippled. When the wife then gives birth to a child, Flint “suspects Crane of being the father” and treats the child cruelly (Hall, “Magician's Revenge” 9). However, when Flint finally gets his revenge on Crane, he discovers that the child is actually his own daughter, and the film ends with him “sacrificing his life” to save her (Waly. 11). Similarly, in The Road to Mandalay, Chaney's Singapore Joe may be a villain, but the plot is motivated by his desire for revenge against a man he mistakenly believes wronged his daughter; once again, the film finishes with Joe sacrificing himself so that his daughter and her lover can “escape” from a villainous rival. He even protects his daughter from the knowledge that she has been responsible for her father's death. At the end, she still does not know that Joe is her father, and she fatally wounds him when she “stabs her father in the back” to protect her lover (Meakin 12). Consequently, Joe chooses to die without revealing that he is her father, so as to save her from the realization that she has committed patricide.Similarly, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is centered on the ways in which Esmeralda is “saved by the hideous bell ringer” and the punishments and sacrifices that Quasimodo accepts for her sake (“Hideous Bell-Ringer” 9), while Mockery concerns the agonies that Chaney's Sergei endures in order to protect his beloved Countess. It even climaxes when “Sergei almost loses his life . . . to save the Countess from another attack” (Abel. 23). Similarly, He Who Gets Slapped ends when Chaney's clown dies in order to save the female lead from the villain, and Chaney's sacrificial death is also central to the ending of The Unknown (1927); here he plots to destroy his rival, but when the plot threatens the woman he loves, he “dashes to her rescue, and is himself killed by the plunging hoofs” (Sid. 20). Although While the City Sleeps does not end in his death, it still requires Chaney to sacrifice himself for the woman he loves: “In the end Dan, of course, learns that the girl really doesn't love him for himself alone [and] brings the two lovers together” (Rush., While 24). Even in The Unholy Three (1925), Chaney's villainous Echo is finally redeemed by his sacrifice for the woman he loves: “in the finish the regeneration of Echo is brought about, and he releases the girl from her promise so that she can go to the arms of the man she loves” (Fred., Review of Unholy 30).Consequently, Chaney's monsters operate ironically, and while they might start out by obstructing, frustrating, or even opposing the creation of the couple, they ultimately succeed in unifying the young lovers—but only through the sacrifice and self-destruction of these monsters. As we have seen, this dynamic is central to one of the key women's pictures of the period, Stella Dallas (1925), of which a Variety reviewer claimed, “Women will love it,” writing that it “tells of a mother who eliminates herself” so that her daughter can achieve social mobility and so marry the boy whom she loves (Skig., Review of Stella 42). Like Chaney, then, Stella loves her daughter but finally realizes that she must sacrifice herself so that her loved one can achieve happiness.To put it another way, Chaney's monsters were only monstrous in physical terms, and this is perhaps most clear in relation to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. One critic described his character in this film as “an extraordinarily grotesque and hideous human with the soul of an appealing child” (Ussher, Chameleon 22). The same article also claimed that Chaney's character in He Who Gets Slapped was “a satirically broken, highly disappointed man of subtle dignity” (Ussher, Chameleon 22). Chaney himself said, I wanted to remind people that the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice. The dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals. Most of my roles since The Hunchback, such as The Phantom of the Opera, He Who Gets Slapped, The Unholy Three, etc., have carried the theme of self-sacrifice or renunciation. These are stories which I wish to do. (Chaney)In this way, Chaney also can be seen as operating in similar ways to Chaplin's little tramp. As Maland argues, in the mid-1910s, Chaplin “was consciously beginning to shift and mold his star image” in an attempt to “make him acceptable to genteel Americans” (17). His “Charlie” character was made less “vulgar,” and his 1915 film The Tramp “concentrated . . . on trying to achieve pathos” (22). Not only was this similar to the pathos of many Chaney films, but both The Tramp and The Bank (1915) sought to “reinforce a value dear to the Genteel Tradition” (one that was also a feature of many Chaney pictures): “In both films Charlie feels deeply discouraged but shakes off that discouragement with an energetic resilience” (23). However, it is not only his resilience that is important here but also the sense that, as is emphasized in The Kid (1921), Charlie is a “social pariah whose intuitive goodness opposes the flaws of respectable society” (61), so that The Kid offers a “vivid portrayal of cruel people and venal social institutions that make it difficult for the poor but noble Charlie to survive” (56).Furthermore, as with Chaney, not only does romance play a central role in Chaplin's films, but Charlie also rarely gets the girl in the end. Even when Chaplin made an exception to this rule in The Gold Rush (1925), with a final scene that is “superficially a happy ending” (79), Maland notes that Chaplin “subtly undercut” the scene through “a self-referential gesture” (80): as Charlie and his love have their picture taken together, he kisses her, prompting the photographer to exclaim, “Oh, you've spoiled the picture.” More commonly, Charlie is required to accept romantic defeat or even to sacrifice himself for the happiness of his loved one. For example, in The Circus (1925), Charlie is in love with Merna but comes to realize that “he is not right for [her] and that Rex is, so he sacrifices his own desires for the well-being of the other two” (107).Like Chaplin, then, Chaney's creatures may be social pariahs, but they are often good at heart; and even when their actions are monstrous or lack redemption at the end, they are usually understood as being motivated by mistreatment from others, so that their actions are not necessarily a clue to their true character. As the Variety review of Outside the Law (1920) put it, “[i]t's real underworld stuff, of an educational sort, bringing out the inner emotions of thieves” and as such represents the “now prevalent belief there is always a chance for a crook to reform” (Sime., Review of Outside 40). In this way, Chaney's films can be seen, at least in part, as a product of changing attitudes in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As May put it, reformers like Jane Addams and Frederic Howe . . . felt the onslaught of modern life disrupting their early values. In their minds, the industrial order had run wild, taking victims in its path. Prostitutes were no longer seen as inherently depraved, but as victims of urban life which destroyed domestic bonds and unleashed chaos, lust and exploitation. (50)Similarly, the criminal was no longer simply evil or immoral but a victim of social forces. For example, in He Who Gets Slapped, Chaney's character has become twisted due to “his painful experience in life when he was a scientist” and suffered both “the theft of his brainwork and his wife” by the villain of the story (Fred., He Who 24).In fact, even Chaney's most villainous characters are the product of painful events that left them bitter and twisted: in The Penalty (1920), his “vendetta . . . against society” is due to a childhood trauma, in which he was “deprived of the use of his legs by the mistake of a practicing doctor” (Sime., Review of Penalty 34); in The Trap, Chaney “plays a trapper who . . . discovers that he has lost his sweetheart to a stranger,” a stranger who also has taken “legal possession” of “a mine the trapper had started” (Fred., Trap 33); in Mr. Wu, Chaney's character seeks revenge against “a young Englishman [who] makes love to and seduces” his daughter (Ung. 17); and in West of Zanzibar, he plots revenge against the man who has destroyed his marriage and left him crippled (Waly. 11). In fact, it is rare to find a case where Chaney plays a villain whose actions are not given an explanation, with A Blind Bargain (1922) and The Monster (1925) being notable exceptions.Furthermore, Chaney's films often feature doubles, but unlike Barrymore's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), in which the high-minded Jekyll is contrasted with the monstrous Mr. Hyde, Chaney's humane monsters are contrasted with a series of monstrous humans. Sometimes Chaney even played dual roles, as in A Blind Bargain and The Blackbird (1926), but whether or not Chaney plays both roles, his hideous outsiders are usually victimized by an antagonist who not only is free of physical deformity but also has a superior social status. In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo is confronted by “the dirty villain,” Jehan, the brother of Notre Dame's archdeacon (Sime., Review of Hunchback 22); in He Who Gets Slapped, he is the victim of Baron Regnard; and in Shadows, his “oriental” outcast is an innocent who sacrifices himself to protect a missionary who is being blackmailed by an evil banker (Fred., Shadows 43). Also, as we have seen, Mr. Wu features him as “a great Chinaman” whose antagonist is a respectable “young Englishman” who has wronged his daughter (Ung. 17), while West of Zanzibar concerns Flint's mission of vengeance against Crane, a “white trader” who operates as another villainous gentleman (Waly. 11). The ambivalence of this kind of plot is also signaled by Variety's review of The Devil-Doll (1936), a Lionel Barrymore film that was explicitly seen as an imitation of Chaney's horror films and in which the main character is likened to one of literature's great revengeful heroes: “Lionel Barrymore . . . is a scientific Count of Monte Cristo who avenges his false imprisonment” (Bige. 18). Not only does Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo justify its hero's quest for vengeance by pitting him against various pillars of society wh