Cinevent Notes: THE ROAD TO MANDALAY (1926)

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Richard M Roberts
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Cinevent Notes: THE ROAD TO MANDALAY (1926)

Postby Richard M Roberts » Fri May 02, 2014 1:48 am

THE ROAD TO MANDALAY was considered a lost Chaney film for years before a 9.5mm print of a French four-reel cutdown version surfaced in the 1980’s and was blown up to 16mm. Ironically, this 9.5mm version was a pirated copy made for the collector market in the 1930’s, along with several other Chaney MGM features, including THE UNKNOWN(1927), an also previously thought lost work whose original rediscovery was in one of these collector editions until the Cinematehque managed to find it’s print (that had been misplaced among hundreds of prints merely marked “Unknown”). What this means is that these are just two more examples of films survivals thanks to pirates and film collectors, not necessarily on the same playing field, but certainly both camps that have been looked down upon by both film studios and archives over the years, however much in their debt they may be. Lets hope that there may be a pirated print of LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT out there somewhere as well.

MANDALAY was Lon Chaney’s third MGM collaboration with Director Tod Browning, and his character’s makeup for this film was one of his more complicated. Singapore Jim has a blind left eye, and to get the desired visual effect, Chaney had a special glass shield, sort of a prototypical contact lens designed for him by Dr. Hugo Keifer, a Los Angeles Optician. One of the incorrect legends circulated for years about Chaney’s eye makeup claimed that he had achieved it by putting collodion in his eye, which would have only succeeded in permanently blinding Chaneys’ left eye if he was so dedicated to his craft. Collodion was a compound used to create false scars in stage and screen makeup for decades, it is essentially cotton dissolved in ether, and is what Chaney used to create the scars around his eye, not in the eye itself.

Though basically shorn of approximately two and a half reels of footage from its original running time, the surviving four reel print does encapsulate the entire story from the film, and we get much of not only Chaney’s fine performance, but Henry B. Walthall’s as well. Walthall plays Father James, Brother of Singapore Joe, who has raised Joe’s Daughter (Lois Moran)from infancy, shielding her from Joe’s shady past and present. But when Joe discovers that one of his associates, The Admiral (Owen Moore) plans to marry his Daughter, he does all he can to stop the union.

One actress in the picture we must acknowledge is Rose Langdon, who plays Pansy, who operates the Singapore dive where much of the action takes place. Rose was the first wife of comedian Harry Langdon, who had also been his partner in Vaudeville, both on and off the stage, for decades. Unfortunately now with Harry’s soon-to-be-short-lived success, the comic had decided to trade his first spouse in on a new model, and one that would be quite successful in thoroughly cleaning him and making life a general misery at that. Lon Chaney had known the Langdons for years back in his own Vaudeville days, and he was happy to help out Rose by getting her an acting job in THE ROAD TO MANDALAY, she’s effective in what little we see of her in the surviving footage, but apparently she was not that interested in acting, but would remain at MGM for the next thirty years as a costume and wardrobe mistress.

Tod Browning lays on the atmosphere of the Singapore docksides, and Chaney gives us another portrayal of a tough guy with a soft heart that he did so well. Though some character touches are certainly lost in this abridgement, we again must remind ourselves how lucky we are to be seeing anything at all in the first place. A number of Chaney’s MGM films like THE TOWER OF LIES (1925), LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927), and THE BIG CITY (1928) do not exist at all, and his last silent, THUNDER (1929) has only a few short fragments still extant, and so many of his early films are gone and most likely irretrievable, so we are indeed fortunate to have something to at least see of the majority of THE ROAD TO MANDALAY come down to us in some form today.


RICHARD M ROBERTS

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