Opinions flip-flop about Universal’s Man of a Thousand Faces: its representations of some of the greatest film makeups of all time are weak at best. We don’t expect a ‘legendary’ horror face to look like it belongs in Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But the serious show-biz drama is energized by the great James Cagney, who clearly believed in the show and puts everything he has into it. Most backstage clich&ecute;s are avoided, and those that aren’t have a renewed freshness.
This is one of the best-ever Hollywood biopics despite being an almost completely fictionalized telling of the story of Lon Chaney, one of the most interesting of the silent film talents. Chaney’s makeup skills were as admired and clucked over as today’s CGI special effects, and only decades later did biographers bring out the facts about his fascinating life behind the cameras. This picture captures some of the flavor of silent Hollywood while grossly misrepresenting Chaney’s career; it’s really a showcase for Cagney, who takes the movie and runs with it. Half Sirkian soap opera and half showbiz legend, Man of a Thousand Faces proves that historical accuracy isn’t essential for great entertainment.
Vaudeville clown Lon Chaney (James Cagney) has career problems when his wife and stage partner Cleva Creighton Chaney (Dorothy Malone) is adjudged a liability to his act. Cleva loses all interest in her marriage and her new baby when she discovers that Lon’s parents can neither hear nor speak. She becomes unfaithful, and strikes out on her own. When Lon retaliates by getting her fired from an important singing engagement, Cleva takes poison. Her voice ruined, she disappears. With the help of agent Clarence Locan (Jim Backus) and sympathetic showgirl Hazel Bennett (Jane Greer), Lon restarts his career as an extra at Universal, working overtime to earn legal custody of his young son Creighton. That doesn’t happen until his career takes off playing characters with bizarre infirmities and frightening faces, all conjured from Lon’s seemingly magical makeup kit.
Man of a Thousand Faces combines Universal’s penchant for horror films with their upscale women’s dramas. In the guise of a reverent eulogy to one of the studio’s most revered talents, we see Lon Chaney as a dedicated, warm-hearted and supremely talented trouper (cue James Cagney’s firmly controlled performance) dealing with prejudice, hardship and heartbreak. In contrast to the flimsy plotting of some musical biopics, Chaney’s problems are the kind that would make a lesser man bitter and spiteful — mainly an unfaithful wife who abandons her child and leaves Chaney to the mercy of an unfeeling foster child system. We do wonder about the episode where Chaney brings Cleva home to meet his parents, without telling her that they’re deaf-mutes (an outmoded term). The movie shows quite a bit of sympathy for Cleva, yet ends up condemning her for the usual ‘woman’s sins’: not supporting her husband’s family in all things, abandoning her child. There are enough hints to show that Cagney’s ‘warm, feeling’ Chaney has poor Cleva in an emotional corner, and she just wants out. Sure, she’s unreasonable and prejudiced about a potentially inheritable problem — as was the majority of the U.S. population in 1905. She’s supposed to trust a husband who blindsides her with that?
Cagney’s winning personality glosses over these rough edges. Chaney’s later grudge against Cleva is the only hint in the movie of the real Chaney’s reported unforgiving nature… the vindictiveness toward women that critics suggest may have been worked out in many of his movies. I should hope that modern audiences regard Cleva in a much more sympathetic light — and Dorothy Malone plays her with much sensitivity.
Cagney charms us with clever stage clowning and dancing — and not in his usual tap style, either. He then fascinates us with his early days as an extra, advancing in the extras pool by slapping on a dramatic makeup scar to instantly turn himself into a nefarious-looking Asian pirate. This part of the film is a valentine to the early days of Universal City, where hopeful extras in cowboy duds and tuxedoes hung around the lot, hoping to catch the eye of an assistant director with a casting call. Chaney immediately graduates to star status and movies from one bizarre makeup triumph to the next. Scenes are recreated from The Miracle Man, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera and The Unholy Three.
Almost everything about this section is inaccurate, presenting Universal as a fairy-tale moviemaking paradise. Chaney worked for years as a respected character actor before getting star roles, and Irving Thalberg (played by the oily Robert Evans) was much more than a rubber stamp for film projects sent from cinema heaven. In fact, Chaney jumped ship to MGM not long after Thalberg became enthroned there as Louis B. Mayer’s right hand man. The most ironic compliment for the wholly fabricated screenplay by Ralph Wheelwright, R. Wright Campbell, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts is that it was nominated for an Academy Award. Perhaps conservatives in the 1958 Academy liked the positive image of Hollywood history, as opposed to the acid treatment of Billy Wilder’s earlier Sunset Blvd..
Universal’s famed makeup department was still going strong in 1957, but their specialty had become elaborate foam rubber monsters — Chaney’s silent movie makeups remained unique. Probably for speed as well as practicality, the experts fitted James Cagney for a series of rubber masks that bear little resemblance to the master’s amazing work. Cagney grunts behind a frozen expression as The Phantom, and his Hunchback looks like someone poured a gallon of latex over his head.
Only diehard silent movie fans will be seriously offended, as Cagney’s magnetism makes Man of a Thousand Faces great entertainment. His very presence perks up Joe Pevney’s direction and inspires a good cast to do exceptional work. Dorothy Malone has one of her best roles as the misunderstood Cleva, while the dreamy Jane Greer (those eyes!) shows an almost supernatural patience as the woman waiting to catch Chaney when he’s free. Jim Backus is charming as the agent, dispensing exposition that relates the silent film period to the fading vaudeville circuit.
Celia Lovsky is endearing as Chaney’s mother, bringing forth amusing comparisons between this film and Cagney’s White Heat — when Lon wakes up from a nightmare about his parents’ infirmity, it’s almost a reprise from the gangster movie about the psychotic Cody Jarrett. Marjorie Rambeau’s career extra Gert is nicely observed — although she lives by putting on dress gowns and pretending to be a society dame, Gert is really a paycheck-to-paycheck pauper. Cagney’s sister Jeanne is in the cast, along with bits by Snub Pollard, Russ Bender, Billy Curtis, Troy Donohue, Charles Horvath, Sammee Tong and James Seay. Only future producing mogul Robert Evans seems discordant; he always looked like a weasel stuffed into a tuxedo.
Film fans knowledgeable about the real Chaney are right when they say that the actor deserves a more accurate biopic, one that reflects the man’s much more troubled personal life. Chaney was no monster, but he also wasn’t the unusually warm and softhearted man seen here. The film ends with Chaney and Chaney Jr. spending days of loving harmony on vacation. In real life, young Creighton was starved for fatherly attention of any kind and was harshly dissuaded from even thinking about a life in the movies. The scene of Chaney giving Creighton his makeup kit on his deathbed couldn’t be farther from the truth.
