Rating: 3.5/5
Hooptober 2.0 | 20/31 | Before 1970 5/5
Dr. Ferris treats a child victim of a traffic accident. In a haste to ensure the child’s survival, he amputates the child’s legs just above the knees. Dr. Allan visits to check on the child and chastises Ferris for his unnecessary and irreparable choice. Still, Allan will save Ferris’s reputation and lie regarding its necessity. The child awakens for the first time since the accident in agony, overhearing their plot. The doctors assure the child’s parents that the child misheard them in an ether daze.
San Francisco, Twenty-Seven Years Later Barbary Nell and Frisco Pete hang around the Barbary Coast, a red-light district of San Francisco. Nell drinks up a fellow until he passes out, then lifts cash from his billfold. Pete, upon catching her, stabs her and kills her. Blizzard, the Barbary Coast underworld leader, sees Pete running away and offers to hide him away. Blizzard is the child that Dr. Ferris mutilated, all grown up.
Lichtenstein, from the Federal Secret Service, meets with his best operative, Rose. He offers her a job to infiltrate Blizzard’s underworld and bring his entire operation down. Specifically, Lichtenstein wants to stop Blizzard from empowering the socialist movements and unions.
Rose’s role will be to gain entrance to the underground hat factory Blizzard runs with the labor of the city’s dance hall girls. Lichtenstein believes it is a front for an anarchic movement Blizzard will lead.
Meanwhile, Blizzard concocts a more personal plan that will allow him to walk again. How? It begins when Blizzard poses for a bust of Satan. The artist? Dr. Ferris’ daughter, Barbara.
In time the man would mangle the soul of the daughter, even as the father had mangled the body of the man.
The film was an early breakthrough role for Lon Chaney, who played Blizzard. To play the role, he wore a dangerous apparatus that held his legs completely back. The result is effective — you can tell what he’s doing, but his acting sells it. His performance makes the movie great but is not the only selling point.
The film also cashed in on the first Red Scare that evolved from post-WWI nationalism. US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer easily conflated organized labor movements, strikes, and Galleanist anarchist bombings to empower illegal search and seizures, arrests, and deportations.
Throwing Blizzard in with this phantom organized villain conveyed the extent of his power to audiences of the time.
Still, the film effectively builds two through lines — the Red uprising and Blizzard’s leg plot. We get the secrets of his shop and the moments of his past that led him to his life of crime. The sets are rich with details — hidden passages and accommodations to Blizzard’s physical condition fill out the world in their fleeting moments.
The movie surprised me with scenes of nudity. Barbara Ferris is a sculptor and has a model pose nude for one of her statues. It’s not racy or indulgent, but it caught me off guard.
The film was the first collaboration between Lon Chaney and director Wallace Worsley. Because of the success of this, they worked on a few more movies together, most famously with 1923’s adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
While it drags in places and has a… convenient ending, I still quite enjoyed this.