April Birthdays, 1-3

Raymond Olson says:

Taking up the thrown gauntlet, so to speak, yes, Lon Chaney is one of the very best silent film actors, quite apart from his wizardry as a costume and makeup artist. Although it is not a memorable film, Victory (1919), based on the Conrad novel, includes a third-billed Chaney as a villain, which I recall as a better-than-it-need-be performance. That’s the case with every other Chaney performance I’ve seen, certainly including Quasimodo and the clown called He Who Gets Slapped in Victor Sjostrom film of Leonid Andreyev’s internationally popular play of that title. My favorite of his performances that I’ve seen is in Tell It to the Marines (1926), the most immediately popular of all his movies, in which he plays a marine sergeant who pines for a woman who’s already fallen for a private. Chaney did many such roles, that of the short side of a love triangle (Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera are such), and the gamut of emotion he commands is spellbinding. Although he so often covered it with paint and distorted it with prosthetics (of his own making), his face, especially his eyes, made human and sympathetic one (frequently odd) character after another, and his body remained supple and expressive right up to the end, which was too early (he was 47) .

I also love Rachmaninoff.