Man of a Thousand Faces

Plot synopsis:
In the early 1900s, actor Lon Chaney (James Cagney) is working in vaudeville with his wife Cleva (Dorothy Malone). Chaney quits the show and Cleva announces that she is pregnant. Lon is happy and tells Cleva that he has been hired by the famous comedy team Kolb and Dill for an upcoming show.
Cleva pressures Lon to visit his parents (whom she has never met) in his hometown of Colorado Springs. Lon is reluctant because his parents are both deaf mutes, a fact Lon has never shared. Cleva reacts with disgust and does not want to give birth, fearing that the child will also be a deaf mute and she doesn't want to be the mother of a "dumb thing."
Months later, the baby Creighton is born and it soon becomes clear that the child is not deaf. Despite this good news, Lon's and Cleva's marriage continues to erode over the next few years. Soon she takes a job as a singer in a nightclub, dropping young Creighton off to his father backstage at his theater before being driven to work.
Lon has developed a close but platonic friendship with chorus girl Hazel Hastings (Jane Greer). Hazel is happy to help look after young Creighton. After the child gets sick at the theater, Lon complains to Cleva's employer, who reluctantly agrees to terminate her.
When confronting his wife in her dressing room, Lon discovers that Cleva has been dating Bill, a wealthy patron. Cleva learns she's been fired and reacts by screaming, which causes Bill to enter the dressing room. Bill comforts her and then asks Lon who he is. Lon responds by telling Bill that he is from the collection agency, and that he is here to collect his wife. Bill looks at Cleva with contempt and walks away.
Lon returns to the theater, where he discovers Hazel being accosted in the corridor by a tall, thin man. Lon punches the man in the face and tells him to get up. Hazel explains that he can't and the man lifts up his trousers to the knee, revealing two wooden legs. He is Carl Hastings, her former husband, once rational, but now consumed with bitterness as the result of his accident.
Cleva enters the dressing room to find Lon with his hands on Hazel's shoulders. Cleva screams that she will not go back to being a "nurse maid" so that he can play around with a chorus girl. Cleva leaves home and vanishes. Days later, Lon is performing a dance routine in clown makeup at a matinee when a totally deranged Cleva walks on stage and swallows a bottle of acid in front of an audience, permanently damaging her vocal cords.
Cleva is hospitalized, but runs away once more. The scandal essentially destroys Lon's career in vaudeville. The state takes custody of young Creighton as they deem his home situation to be unsuitable, causing Lon to react angrily. On the advice of press agent Clarence Locan (Jim Backus), Lon moves to Hollywood to try his luck in the new field of motion pictures.
After starting as an extra, Lon's tireless work ethic, and his expertise at makeup, make him an in-demand bit player and later a feature player. Lon is cast in the silent film The Miracle Man as a man thought to be physically challenged who is seemingly cured by a faith healer. His success starts him on the road to stardom in such films as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera.
As his career soars, Lon face personal challenges. Although he marries Hazel and regains custody of Creighton, ex-wife Cleva reappears, seeking to spend time with Creighton (who has been told by Lon that she is dead). Hazel reveals the truth to Creighton, who leaves to stay with his mother, angry with Lon about the deception.
Lon becomes ill on the set of the sound version of The Unholy Three and is diagnosed with bronchial cancer. Hazel and Locan decide to (initially) hide the truth of his condition from him. Creighton (Roger Smith) reconciles with his father and they take a fishing trip at Lon's mountain cabin. After returning from his fishing trip, Lon collapses and is returned home to live out his final days.
On his deathbed, the dying Chaney (now unable to speak due to the cancer) reverts to the sign language of his childhood to express his love for his friends and family and to ask for forgiveness for unspecified transgressions. Lon signals Creighton to bring him his makeup box. He removes a stick of greasepaint and ads a "Jr." to his own name on the box, signaling to his son his desire for him to carry on his life's work. Creighton leaves with box in hand, ready to start his film career as Lon Chaney, Jr.

Tags: insanity

Review:
Playing the leading role in this marvellous biopic is James Cagney who gives an outstanding measured performance as Lon Chaney the strange tortured character actor of silent pictures who, ironically, died from throat cancer with the advent of the talkies.Crisply photographed in black & white Cinemascope by the great Russell Metty ("Touch Of Evil") the picture conveys a strong sense of time and place.
Expertly evoked is Vaudeville in the early part of the 20th Century where Chaney began as a song and dance man (Cagney delighting us with his special brand of hoofing) and early Hollywood where he became an extra at Universal Studios.
Then with the help of his make-up box and his uncanny facility to alter his appearance - sometimes resulting in great pain - he soon became known as The Man Of A 1000 Faces.Notable reconstructions of Chaney's creations are quite brilliantly achieved in the picture.
Little wonder that the great Orson Welles in the seventies declared that the screen's greatest actor was James Cagney!Others in the cast of this splendid film are Dorothy Malone giving an excellent performance as the singer and Chaney's first wife Cleva Creighton, Jane Greer as his second wife, Jim Backus as his press agent and Robert Evens as the boy wonder of the motion picture business Irving Thalberg.The picture also boasts a terrific music score by the underrated and now wholly forgotten film composer Frank Skinner (1897/1968).
A soundtrack album of his music from the film - issued at the time of the picture's release - is now a much sought after recording!A wonderful movie on DVD presented in a sharp black & white widescreen format that every collector will want to own if only for Cagney's amazing performance.
& this is a fine film bio of another screen great, Lon Chaney, Sr.../ Cagney is wonderful and gives a tour de force performance...
Cagney is the reason for seeing this film,,,he is ably supported by Dorothy Malone, (who sometimes tends to overemote but is effective in this), Jane Greer, looks and acts wonderfully, Jim Backus, and a very young Roger Smith...
True, the film is short on depicting Lon Chaney's film characters and although we do get to see Cagney in makeup as the Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, the scenes are extremely brief.
Most of the film depicts Chaney's conflict with his first wife, wonderfully played by the stunning Dorothy Malone - whew, what a knockout!- and the stormy relationship with his son.The film is a soap opera but Cagney is wonderful showing that he can play drama, comedy and even dance and mime..
That led to his interest in pantomime, a stage career in vaudeville and finally silent movies.The film plays fast and loose with the facts of Chaney's life, but I think it captures the spirit of the man who created for the silent screen so many tortured souls.
Jane Greer is also good as the wise and patient second wife who knows she's playing second fiddle to the relationship of father and son.Universal was Chaney's home studio and the studio approached the making of this picture with reverence and care for it's first great star..
Thus is the story of Lon Chaney in "The Man of a Thousand Faces".
But this was an early introduction to what I'd heard of as "vaudeville," & the transitional sequences with Cagney as a film lot extra (with a real silent flick star Marjorie Rambeau, as Gert) were fast-paced & convincing.
One Face Cagney Shouldn't Have Put On. This is the biography of famous actor Lon Chaney, portrayed by the more- famous James Cagney.
Normally, I like biographies and I am a big, big fan of Cagney....but this film turned me off fairly quickly, and I wish the "Yankee Doodle" man had turned down this role.Dorothy Malone plays an awful, selfish woman who was Chaney's first wife.
1957 bio-pic on the life of silent film legend Lon Chaney,this overlong and poorly written film has only the central performance of James Cagney as the title character to recommend it.
Nearing the end of his long and distinguished career, Cagney was already 10 years older than Chaney was when he died when filming began and is hardly convincing as a young and struggling vaudevillian and new father.
Things improve when Chaney goes to Hollywood where the screenplay deals with his success as a character actor and his near miraculous ability to transform his face and body as necessary to play what became an amazing range of exotic and tortured characters.Unfortunately the writers choose to concentrate the bulk of the film on Chaney's family problems.
Even though she eventually becomes a sympathetic character, the script comes down strongly in favor of Chaney's second wife, who dutifully gives up her own show business career to become the stay-at-home wife and step-mother to Chaney's young son.Jim Backus does his best in the role of Chaney's friend/press agent to keep from being a walking cliché while forced to utter lines like " 'Mystery' did you say?
We'll call him 'Lon Chaney, Man of a Thousand Faces!' " Jane Greer gives up her usual femme fatale persona to play Lon's devoted second wife, and a very young Roger Smith plays son Creighton (later to become Lon Chaney, Jr.), hoping to follow in his father's footsteps.
The sodden direction by Joseph Pevney precludes any mystery as to how this story will resolve itself.Only the performance of James Cagney makes this film worth watching, even as the script wallows in Hollywood kitsch and repellent 50s attitudes towards women and the handicapped.
James Cagney was 58 years old when he starred in this movie as Lon Chaney, who died in 1930 at the age of 47.
All of these events happened to Chaney before he was 31.While Cagney does give a good performance, he's so "too old" for the role, it's hard to get past it.
The filmmakers try to hide it by having Cagney is clown make-up or or theatrical guise through a lot of the early part of the film when he's married to the first wife (Dorothy Malone, who's 33 here).
With Malone out and the second wife (Jane Greer, also 33) in, Cagney looks like their father.There's a lot of lip service to Chaney's film career, which really took off with THE MIRACLE MAN in 1919.
He was "discovered" by Cagney in Hawaii and promoted for the role of Chaney, Jr.Others in the cast include Jim Backus as the press agent, Marjorie Rambeau as the old-time actress, Marjorie Bennett as Vera the maid, and Celia Lovsky as the mother.
Cagney plays Lon Chaney in this film about the great imitator's life.
In this way both he and the man who plays him (James Cagney) have much in common.Cagney and Chaney looked totally different, yet Cagney makes this role work.
It's possible Jimmy Cagney couldn't resist the role of Lon Chaney here because of the opportunity it gave him to draw on his own stage and vaudeville experience to perform a couple of dance numbers.
Chaney was only 47 when he died, ten years younger than Cagney was when he filmed the role and was a rather gaunt figure whereas the middle-aged Cagney had a round face (although he appears to have slimmed down quite considerably for the part) and was noticeably short in stature.
Cleva did destroy her singing voice when she attempted suicide – but she didn't attempt it on stage.The film devotes most of its time to Chaney's personal life but does offer occasional glimpses into the film-making business.
A few scenes that demonstrates the chaotic process of studio film-making in the very early days of Hollywood, when the absence of sound meant that several different genres of film could be shot alongside one another in an enclosed space, are quite interesting but, while we do see Cagney re-enacting a few famous Chaney scenes, the general impression is that his career is sidelined for much of the film.Chaney died in 1931 (after making only one sound movie – a remake of his silent hit The Unholy Three).
The film ironically touches on this theme, but it discloses it in a shroud of scandal, making it seem as though Chaney's desire for privacy was mainly because he had something to hide.Cagney is a great actor and puts his heart into the role but the rest of the cast is strictly playing out the typical sentimentality, complete with shining heroines and poor Lon Jr (Creighton) looking and talking like a blonde Ricky Nelson.Such syrup could even be excused if the film at least gave more than a mere ten minutes (at most!) to what made Lon Chaney great.
FACES is well done, photography and make-up wise, but I must agree that more concentration on the Chaney career as opposed to the personal story, would make for a more interesting film, overall.
Way too much emphasis on boring aspects of his personal life and not enough time devoted to what it took to create Chaney's landmark, classic movies.
The laughable Hunchback imitation reminded my of the makeup in "I was a Teenage Frankenstein."  To be fair, the script gave Cagney limited opportunity to delve into the psychology of the "Man of a Thousand Faces."  Some scenes were sadly lacking in closeups, significantly reducing the impact of the drama/horror depicted.Too bad this picture weren't made around 1940 at the height of Lon Jr.'s prowess as an actor.
When James Cagney was cast as legendary silent film star Lon Chaney in 1957 he was 58 years old.
He also has Cagney play several scenes in thick clown face make-up - because that's what we remember Chaney for.
You might think that a biopic of Hollywood's first great horror actor might focus the bulk of its attention on recreating those years and films, but MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES spends an inordinate amount of its overlong running time bringing us up to speed on Chaney's vaudeville career.
What were the members of the Motion Picture Academy thinking when James Cagney was not nominated for his outstanding performance as Lon Chaney in 1957's "Man of A Thousand Faces."?Cagney was at his best portraying the masquerade man whose personal life was such a heartbreak.
This was certainly an outstanding follow-up after the wonderful "Love Me or Leave Me" two years before.Fresh from her Oscar win for "Written on the Wind," Dorothy Malone pulled off another great performance.Cagney's acting toward his deaf mute parents was a sight to behold.
Totally fictional biography of Lon Chaney...but still a good movie.
Loving (and fictional) tribute to Lon Chaney--actor and makeup artist who was in such classics as "Phantom of the Opera" and the "Hunchback of Notre Dame".
There are plenty of things wrong with this movie--James Cagney looks NOTHING like Lon Chaney--Chaney was tall and kind of mean-looking with a thin face; Cagney is short, pleasant-looking with a round face; GREAT liberties were taken with Chaney's real-life story (he was not the saint this movie paints him to be); the recreations of Phantom and Notre Dame just look silly; every show business cliché imaginable is shoe-horned into this and they totally ignore the fact that Chaney was actually pretty abusive to his son.That aside...this IS a good movie.It's well done and beautifully shot in wide screen and black and white; Dorothy Malone does wonders with an underwritten role; ditto for Jane Greer; the movies moves fairly quickly and is always absorbing (I was never bored) and Cagney is just great!
For the first time in my 28 year long life, I saw James Cagney as the character actor he really was.
I read an other comment on this film about the life of Lon Chaney and I agree that it is a terrible biography about the great actor, but what was neglected was to say that this film was a showcase for James Cagney.
Interesting, albeit a bit slow and lengthy, bio-pic of horror-film icon Lon Chaney follows the actor from his early days as a vaudeville clown through his rise to stardom in films such as 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' (1923) and 'The Phantom of the Opera' (1925) to his premature death from lung cancer in 1930.
Cagney is good (and gets to demonstrate his ability as a hoofer) but is clearly too old for the role (he was 58, Chaney died at 47 and much of the film is about the actor in his 20' -30's).
IMO - This 1957 bio-pic of famed silent-era actor and make-up artist, Lon Chaney failed to rise above being mere mediocrity for the most part.For one thing - Not only did I find that actor, James Cagney was not at all suited for his part as Chaney - But, Cagney was nearly 60 at the time of this production and he did a mighty poor job of convincingly portraying a man who was only 30.Another problem with this presentation was that it, unfortunately, turned Chaney's private life into too much of a soap opera for my liking.As I understand it - This film was largely a fictionalized account of Chaney's life.
There was a time when movie bios were a mix of fact and invention -- and 1957's "Man of a Thousand Faces" typifies the genre.
Though James Cagney looks nothing like the gaunt Lon Chaney, he brings depth and humor to the role.
Mostly, because I am a fan of James Cagney's and thought his performance in this movie was excellent.
It is a trite saying, but they really don't make movies like this nowadays...Which is probably why everyone who has any interest in any decent film MUST have cable (or TCM, at least); This film was made in 1957, and has that un-pretentious quality to it, the sadness in Lon Chaney's real life, and his determination to be a Hollywood film actor.While a previous reviewer has aptly pointed out, the make-up is amateurish, the details of Cagney's life are left out(especially with reference to his son, Creighton) this is still a good film which manifests the life of a struggling actor, and there is an amusing cameo with a young Robert Evans as Irving Thalberg, studio genius.When I watch films like this, I wish we could go back in time to these days, the times of our parents and grandparents, it reminded of the premise behind Redford's "Quiz Show"-there is a genuine feeling to it; The Hollywood studios were money-oriented, but the public was not bombarded with PR and tabloid trash; it seemed a romantic era where film stars would never consider doing TV commercials for Geritol or McDonald's..
I can possibly overlook that because every time I see this film, I forget that it's Cagney and I "get into" the story of Chaney's life.
The Lon Chaney character gives Cagney an opportunity to show his range, and the depth of his talent.
However Cagney's recreation of many of Lon Chaney Sr's many movie character scenes especially.
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Bio pic has James Cagney playing silent screen star Lon Chaney from his early days on stage up to his untimely death in 1930.
The Miracle Man, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera have scenes re-enacted here and Cagney perfectly captures them even though, yet again, he doesn't look like Chaney.
Chaney was a man way ahead of himself as far as the creation of the special type of makeup he used for all the different characters he played.Lon Chaney's roots were in vaudeville, where he also was greatly admired.
His life with Hazel, his second wife, turned out to be a fine one without the ups and downs that affected his first one.The main attraction for watching this film was James Cagney, an actor who always gave an honest performance.
Jim Cagney stars as Lon Chaney,the man of a thousand faces.
Chaney was a slender and tall man and Cagney was short and stubby.Is the film accurate?
Chaney Jr became an actor because he had a family to feed and he thought he could get work because he was Lon's son.The life of a legend is poked and pulled at until it was turned into this.
Dorothy Malone is particularly good here, although her role as Cagney's first wife is difficult to like.
And as far as Cagney being too short to play Chaney Lon was 5 ft 8 in and Cagney was 5 ft 7 in, not much of a difference at all.Again if you are going to review at least get your facts straight!!!!!
Wonderful biopic on film legend Lon Chaney.
Played by early film great James Cagney.
Lon Chaney is credited for so many great performances, so it's very appropriate that a man of equal greatness takes on his life.Fresh from her acclaimed role in "Written on the Wind" (for which she would win an Oscar), Dorothy Malone plays another juicy part as Chaney's selfish first wife, a promising singer whose bitterness over her fear of son Creighton becoming deaf that she deliberately seems to go out of her way to destroy her marriage.
Jane Greer, who played evil broads earlier in her career, is much more believable as his second wife who looked on young Creighton (Lon Jr.) as if he was her own son.
None of this however ruined my enjoyment of the picture, as Cagney does a superb job of recreating some of Chaney's famous silent film characters along with portraying the actor's conflicted private life.
As a kid growing up in the Fifties, I never knew there was a Chaney 'Senior', and the only one I could relate to was the 'Wolf Man' Chaney from his horror films and later, his TV and movie Western roles.For Cagney, this was a natural in more ways than one.