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American Silent Horror Collection (The Man Who Laughs/The Penalty/The Cat and the Canary/Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde/Kingdom of Shadows) (5pc)

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Kino International's AMERICAN SILENT HORROR COLLECTION contains four silent horror classics and a 2001 documentary. The very good documentary, KINGDOM OF SHADOWS, is narrated by Rod Steiger in a quietly soothing voice and charts the rise of the horror film from 1900-1928. It is rich in film clips.

The four silent features never looked nor sounded so good as they do here, many mastered from nitrate negatives. Lon Chaney's THE PENALTY (1920) has an eerie music score and rich color tinting. It a ghoulish number, with Chaney as a double amputee crime lord in 1920 San Francisco who seeks revenge on the surgeon who cut off his legs after an auto accident as a child! This gripping melodrama's bonus material includes a tour of Chaney's makeup kit, two original theatrical trailers for other movies, the 1914 Chaney one-reeler BY THE SUN'S RAYS, surviving footage from THE MIRACLE MAN (1919), and an essay by Chaney author and scholar Michael F. Blake, among other items.

John Barrymore's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1920) is the masterpiece of this elegant horror set. His magnificent performance really holds up, especially his scary Hyde. Memorable bonuses include a 1909 audio recording of a stage performance for "The Transformation Scene", the hilarious Stan Laurel parody DR. PYCKLE AND MR. PRIDE (1925), an excerpt from the rival 1920 Sheldon Lewis version, and more. Mastered from a 35mm sepia negative, Barrymore's film has a wonderful score by Rodney Sauer and the Mont Alto Orchestra. Watch this one on Halloween night with a loved one.

I adore Paul Leni's THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927), which is the grandfather of all old dark house thrillers with a reading of a will on a rainy night. It is still one of the most enjoyable of the genre, especially in a sepia-tinted nitrate negative. Starring are Laura La Plante, Creighton Hale, Tully Marshall, Gertrude Astor, and Flora Finch. The Neil Brand music score has been orchestrated by Timothy Brock.

Lastly, we have another Leni film, THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (1928), which is almost more of a romance than a horror film. Blind girl Mary Philbin loves the deformed Conrad Veidt, who had a permanent smile carved on his face as a child. So everyone in medieval France thinks he is mocking them. This is a very elaborate Universal production, filmed on the back lot with sets left over from THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923). Bonuses include a 20 minute behind-the-scenes documentary, Conrad Veidt and Greta Garbo home movies, a gallery of rare photos, and more. This has the original Movietone soundtrack, restored by Universal for this studio print DVD.

Kino's AMERICAN SILENT HORROR COLLECTION will brighten your home video collection if you are an adult who treats horror films seriously as something frightening and not gross or bloody. I highly recommend it to discriminating film scholars.

Where to begin... Kino Video's "American Silent Horror Collection" is a good boxed set. Quality is pretty good, tho' a little spotty.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", John Barrymore's 1920 version has decent quality, but the music sounds a little too electronic for my taste. Picture quality, good. Shown at a faster speed than normal.

"The Cat and the Canary" (1927) has a very good picture, and the music fairly fits the action. Agin, it runs a little fast.

"The Penalty", Lon Chaney's 1920 tour de force, has a very good picture, but a lousy music score. (Michael Polher wrote this, and in my humble opinion, has no idea of themes, or pacing, or melody. Better to put on a CD of your choice when watching this film.) This film seems to run at the proper speed, which enhances the quality of this film.

"The Man Who Laughs" (1928) suffers from being run at too fast a speed, due to the Movietone (sound on film) soundtrack. This is a tender story, with Conrad Veidt giving an over the top performance. But the faster projection speed of the film tends to diminish the tenderness of the subject. Film quality varies, but is fairly good even so.

The final item in this boxed set is "Kingdom of the Shadows" a 1998 documentary narrated by Rod Steiger. While the film clips and history of horror in cinema are very good, the narration is deadly -- too soft and not very dynamic. (If you have insomnia, this is the one for you!)

To sum up: this is a good collection to own, even with some shortcomings.

Just in time for Halloween Kino seems to be delivering a heavily discounted set of silent horror films. One is new to DVD, one is a new Kino DVD release, and the rest Kino has had around for some time at much higher individual prices than if you buy this collection. First some quibbling with the product details as currently displayed. The description I've seen says there are 5 discs, not 4. Also, I don't know where the run time of 70 minutes is coming from since each included movie is a feature-length film from the 1920's with the exception of "Kingdom of Shadows", which is a 1998 feature-length documentary about silent horror. Included is:

1. The Man Who Laughs (1928) - directed by Paul Leni. A boy, Gwynplaine, is punished for the deeds of his disobedient nobleman father by having a permanent smile carved into his face. He is left for dead, but survives. He rescues an orphaned infant girl, raises her, and becomes a clown. As the baby grows to adulthood, Gwynplaine's feelings toward her turn to love. However, he refuses to marry her because of his appearance. Meanwhile, a jester learns of Gwynplaine's true identity and informs the queen. Gwynplaine inspired the character of The Joker in the Batman comic series.

2. The Penalty (1920) - starring Lon Chaney. Chaney plays Blizzard, whose legs were needlessly amputated when he was a child. He overhears the doctors all agree to lie to cover up the mistake, and he grows up an embittered criminal out for revenge. The end takes a strange twist and is somewhat dissatisfying, but the first 80% of the film is great.

3. The Cat and the Canary (1927) - directed by Paul Leni. This is the Kino DVD debut of this film, and it will be available separately. A wealthy man's fortune is to go to the only heir left with his name - Annabelle - as long as she can be found to be sane. The person who is second in line is known only to the lawyer in possession of the will, who mysteriously disappears before he can make that person's name known. Numerous other events point to Annabelle perhaps being insane after all.

4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) - starring John Barrymore. Later film adaptations may have been technically better, but Barrymore is the definitive Jekyll and Hyde through the strength of his range as an actor.

5. Kingdom of Shadows - a 1998 documentary narrated by Rod Steiger making its debut on DVD. Its subject is the development of horror cinema from the birth of film to the end of the silent era. The documentary includes some stunning imagery via film clips from Nosferatu, The Golem, Haxan, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Faust, and many others. The bad part of this documentary is the annoying narration. Steiger whispers and mumbles throughout and even does so during the playing of the film clips, which can be quite distracting.

A lot can be said of this great horror film collection from KINO VIDEO. The four films contained are some of the greatest heralded through time.

The Penalty, starring the great Lon Chaney, tells the story of a crippled gangster enraged at his misfortunes and his desire to bring his pains down on others. Only one person can save them all from his terrible plan: the doctor responsible for his state.

Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde was the first real adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's grim tale of mulitple personality brought about by medical drugs. John Barrymore plays the title double role with superior effect,wonderful as Jekyll with his caring incorruptible ways and splendid as Hyde with all his degradation and impurity. Sadly, as in all films, things have to come to an end when the persona of Hyde seeks to destroy them both.

Cat and the Canary is far step from Jekyll and Hyde with its strings of humour lacing into the themes of horror, but that is what makes this film a classic. Staaring Laura La Plante as the cornered and vulnerable Annabelle, Cat and the Canary begins with the reading of a will in an old dark house and unfolds with a mystery of murder and theft. With Annabelle as the trapped Canary, who is the Cat?

The Man Who Laughs, this fascinating historical drama tells the tale of a young man called Gwynplaine who as a boy was disfigured on the orders of King James. Gywnplaine, portrayed by Conrad Veidt, has become the star of a carnival act led by his foster father Urssus. He is also in love with his blind assistant Dea. But his unknown past catches up with him, and he and his companions are thrown into a terrible problem none of them can easily escape.

The accompanying documentary of this collection, Kingdom of Shadows, is the letdown of the set. Although it presents a lot of footage of other silent greats, the narrator speaks very quietly and is hard to understand. It also drags on a bit in particular areas. For a regular audience this documentary may be a bit too much, but I can say it is a must for silent horror fanatics.

All in all this set of horror cinema is a collection of masterpieces. KINO's American Silent Horror Collection, it is ready to chill you.

*Wallace Worsley made five films with silent movie icon Lon Chaney. Lamentably, two of those, Voices of the City (1921) and The Blind Bargain (1922), are lost. The Ace of Hearts (1921) survives, but their most famous collaborations remain The Penalty (1920) and the epic Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). It is for these two films Worsley, an otherwise undistinguished commission director, will be remembered, if at all. The Penalty was Chaney's first starring role, and the film justifiably made him a major star.

The plot of The Penalty is beautifully absurd, operatic, and addictive. An injured young boy has been unnecessarily mutilated by a young Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary). A seasoned colleague arrives and tells Dr. Ferris that amputating the boy's legs was not at all necessary, but the veteran promises to remain silent about the malpractice. The bed-ridden boy hears the conversation and tells his parents what has transpired. However, the boy's revelation is dismissed as delirium cause by a contusion.

Twenty seven years later, the boy has become Frisco's criminal master-mind, nicknamed the Blizzard. Chaney's performance as the Blizzard is a tour-de-force that was achieved through a painful pulleys, belts, leather stumps, and a harness which strapped his legs behind him. Because of the extreme contortion and discomfort to the actor, Chaney's scenes were filmed in short takes. His performance is amazing. He swings, pulls, and climbs with such robust, Tex Avery-like vigor that the illusion is feverishly complete. Only Douglas Fairbanks could exude as much screen energy, but while Fairbanks grinned his way through elaborate stunts, Chaney invited you to see him sweat and even laugh with him through his pain.

The Blizzard runs a complex syndicate which local law enforcement cannot penetrate. Desperate, officials send an undercover agent, Rose (Ethel Gray Terry) into Chaney's lair. The criminal is abusive, misogynist, seedy, and initially lacking in sympathy. There is a dark, latent sexual undercurrent between the Blizzard and Rose. Only music calms the Blizzard, and Rose serves as his feet, pushing the pedals of his piano while he plays.

The Blizzard is part Ahab and part Dr. Mabuse, plotting an elaborate (and far-fetched) revenge against the entire city (which involves utilizing the straw man communist menace. The fifties was not the first Red Scare era, and Worsley's earlier Ace of Hearts projected a similar paranoia). Among others, his vast net of revenge seeks to catch the doctor who maimed him. The Blizzard is also part Milton's Lucifer who, after the fall, rises to become Master of Hell. Chaney literally becomes Satan when he answers an ad to model as the Prince of Darkness, for Dr. Ferris' sculptor daughter Barbara (Claire Adams). Chaney's malicious charm bleeds through when he offers to pose "if there's enough of me."

The Blizzard intends to blackmail Ferris into mutilating Barbara's fiancee, Dr. Allen (Kenneth Harlan). He lusts after Allen's legs and wants them for himself. It would be horrific, except that Allen is so suburban, so unimaginative, so insensitive, so belittling of his fiancee's artistic ambitions, and so downright annoying that you almost find yourself rooting for the Blizzard's plan to succeed.

A hackneyed conversion mars the last act of The Penalty, and the film descends into pedestrian moralizing. Tod Browning would have allowed the misfit villain's crimes to go unpunished in a far more guilty, callous, and affluent society. There is also some unintentionally hilarious inter-titles and unintentional surrealism which, here, simply doesn't work. In the right hands, The Penalty could have been one of the silent screen masterpieces, but Worsely's direction fails to rise above the script.

An even more vivid example of Worsley's flat-footed direction is in their collaboration, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) which propelled Chaney into superstardom. Seen today, especially in light of the vastly superior 1939 remake (directed by William Dieterle and starring Charles Laughton), the silent version of the Victor Hugo classic falls far short of its potential. If Worsley was out of his element in small, dark territory, he was even more out of his element in epically budgeted, dark literary territory. In both The Penalty and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Chaney secures his credentials as an auteur actor, trumping the director and scripts. Both films are essential silent cinema, but they wouldn't register at all without the Man Of A Thousand Faces.

*In 1927 Universal Studios chose their new emigree star director Paul Leni to turn John Willard's hit stage play, The Cat and the Canary, into a work of German Expressionist art. Carl Laemmle was clearly envious of the types of films being produced in Europe and Leni had proven himself with the critical success of Waxworks (1924).

The Cat and the Canary is a compact (not a shot is wasted) standout in the "old dark house" genre. Who needs dialogue when the visual story telling is so richly expressed? Leni's style certainly was a profound influence on both the Universal films to follow, and on James Whale in particular, whose Old Dark House (1932) virtually lifted Leni's shots of shrouded corridors and expansive, ominous windows. Whale may have learned how to frame a composition by absorbing Leni. Leni's lighting, camera angles and set design mirror the emotional state of the actors to remarkably vivid effect.

Cyrus West is likened to the canary (think Tweety Bird) and his greedy relatives are the circling cats (think Sylvester), hungering for his fortune. So incensed is the dying Cyrus that he dictates that his will be read twenty years after his death. When it comes to money, relatives can wait. They all show up on the twentieth anniversary of Cyrus' passing.

To contemporary viewers, the relatives are a gang of archetypes: the bitchy, greedy matriarch Aunt Susan (Flora Finch), the sexy cousin Cecily (Gertrude Astor), the Harold Lloyd-like Paul (Creighton Hale), a seemingly insane, red-herring psychiatrist (Lucien Littlefield), death-warmed-over in the form of Mr. Crosby (Tully Marshall), and the virginal Annabel (Laura La Plante, who Whale later used in 1929's Show Boat). The gang is ushered in to the reading by a mysterious, somber servant named Mammy Pleasant (Martha Mattox). The actors are a hoot, one and all, and superbly directed. Of course, there is a romance, but it is subtle and, in a rare example of silent cinema, not embarrassing to watch.

Dead bodies emerging from hidden panels, disappearing bodies, a lycanthropic hand snatching diamonds from the virgin's neck, a cowering geek hiding under the bed and taking a peek at Cecily's legs, a conniving aunt, and a villain (with a fake eye and saber tooth) who seems the role model for every Scooby Doo cartoon ever made all add up to something we have seen copied to death (pun intended) countless times since. Leni's imaginative style, however, takes precedence here. Leni even has a good time playing with an intertitle (the film impressively keeps intertitles to a bare minimum). The "Gosh, what a spooky house!" text shakes and shimmers as if it too is scared from being stuck in such a scary place!

The Cat and The Canary is played for laughs and it's not surprising that Hollywood re-made it twice, first starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in 1939 and, again in 1978 (the latter had an interesting all-star, if eccentric, cast directed by cult nasty fav Radly Metzger). Both remakes are pleasant enough diversions, but Willard's play becomes something unique and influential only in the hands of this German Expressionist artist. Leni's original is finally getting its due.

*Paul Leni's credentials as an avant-garde painter and art director served him well. A Jewish German refugee, he came to the United States in 1927 at the invitation of Universal Studios. His first film for them was the old dark house melodrama, The Cat and the Canary (1927), a critical and box office hit. Leni and Universal followed up with The Man Who Laughs (1928) and his final film, The Last Warning (1929), which was released shortly after his untimely death from blood poisoning at 44. Due to his brief life and career, Leni remains the most enigmatic of the silent horror mavericks (at least, that's the pedestrian label often attached to him). Where his career might have gone is almost impossible to assess. Universal desperately wanted a follow up to their immensely successful version of Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and they thought they had it with Leni at the helm of Hugo's The Man Who Laughs. Despite lavish production values and artistry, however, The Man Who Laughs was a disappointing box office failure, partly because it was released just as that new invention called "talkies" was taking hold. Today, The Man Who Laughs is rightly seen as a landmark, influential film and vivid example of exported German Expressionism.

Set in 17th century England, Conrad Veidt (another Jewish German refugee) is Gwynplaine , the young son of a recently executed political revolutionary nobleman. Gwynplaine is kidnapped by gypsies and, as punishment for sins of the father, he is forever maimed when his kidnappers carve a hideous grin into his face and abandon him to the elements of a violent snow storm. In a scene worthy of D.W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920), or William Beaudine's grim Sparrows (1926), the child Gwynplaine comes upon the corpse of a frozen mother cradling her still living, blind infant daughter, Dea. Gwynplaine takes the babe in arms and finds sanctuary for them both.

Years later, Gwynplaine is the freak star of a traveling sideshow. The grown-up Dea (Mary Philbin of 1925's Phantom of the Opera) is in love with Gwynplaine and is, incredibly, unaware of his deformity. Eventually, Gwynplaine discovers his noble heritage and, now that the political tide has turned, he is tempted by rank and the possibility of a duchess for a wife in Olga Baclanova (of 1932's Freaks).

If Veidt's Gwynplaine seems eerily familiar to contemporary viewers, that may be because he was (reportedly) a considerable influence on The Joker as created by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson (although even the late Heath Ledger's incarnation of the arch villain seems comparatively one-note when experiencing Veidt as the original role model). Like Lon Chaney (who was Veidt's only real competition in the field), the actor willingly endured excruciating physical pain to realize his role.

Veidt is supported by an excellent cast. Philbin evokes a vivid pathos as the loyal Dea (that pathos may have been a genuinely latent quality, given that she was, like Jackie Coogan, a young star who was victimized by mercenary parents who milked her for all she was worth). Baclanova is also superb as the bewitching and genuine temptress who is erotically fascinated with the freak. She nearly leads Gwynplaine astray in a smoldering (for its time), emotionally complex, and fetishistic scene which could have made Tod Browning smile. Baclanova's acting as the Duchess surpasses her later role for Browning in Freaks, and we can readily identify with Gwynplaine's conflict of loyalty.

Like a true expressionist master, Leni utilizes multifarious compositions to convey human angst, pity, fear, torture, eroticism, and aspiration. The film's only real flaw is the studio-mandated happy ending, which does not entirely convince. Amazingly, this was the only compromise made by Leni; otherwise, The Man Who Laughs may be the most genuinely authentic German Expressionist film made in the good old U.S.A. It often seems like a melodramatic Rafael Sabatini tale filtered through an expressionist lens. It is a psychologically interior film, simultaneously unsettling and mesmerizing. The history of essential silent cinema cannot be discussed without its inclusion.

The three films are part of Kino's valuable American Silent Horror Collection.

*My reviews originally appeared at 366 Weird Movies.

The Man Who Laughs- 4.5/6
The Cat and the Canary- 5/5
The Penalty-5/5 (well other than the music score it was a 5/5)
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde- 4/5 (note this is not a review of this copy in general I have owned a separate copy from a different company)
Kingdom of Shadows 1/5 (note not finished its near impossible to listen to this guy talk without nearly passing out)
All in all a (almost) flawless set from Kino this was the 1st time I've purchased from Kino and it will not be my last.