The Monster

The inmates have taken over the asylum in The Monster (1925), a silent film so peculiar as to be virtually impossible to categorize.  The picture is best enjoyed as a thoroughly surrealist venture, chock-full of bizarre images that seem to emerge full-blown from a nightmare -- and, yet, the picture is clearly intended as a comedy.  Thus, at the outset, the viewer is confronted with an extreme incongruity -- a nightmare that is, also, supposed to be as funny as possible.  In the first five minutes, all audience expectations are confounded:  we see a kind of zombie, a hideous living corpse, perched like a buzzard in a tree.  He lowers a mirror wreathed in branches onto the highway.  An approaching car sees its own headlights in the mirror, veers to the right, and crashes.  Then, two scuttling black shadows seem to emerge from the ground itself, hauling away the unconscious victim of the crash.  All of this occurs in the darkness and the images are very frightening.  Then, there is an intertitle explaining that "in Danburg, the disappearance of Dr. Bowman was the biggest news since the milk man eloped with the bootlegger's daughter."  The words are printed on a title showing a small town with a cheery-looking sun rising over it.  For the next fifteen minutes, the movie is a well-observed social comedy -- an effeminate store clerk yearns to be a detective and tries to court his boss' rather sharp-featured daughter.  There's a party at which the hero is spurned in favor of a man in a tuxedo who looks exactly like a slightly larger version of our tiny, slim-shouldered hero.  The heroine leaves with the man in the tuxedo and they end up crashing on the desolate country highway, lured off the road by the corpse with the mirror.  The cowardly hero has pursued the couple and finds himself alone with a grinning madman (Daffy Dan as he's called in the titles) on a dark lane in the middle of thunderstorm.  Ultimately, both men and the heroine end up in a spooky asylum over which the hyper-volatile if debonair surgeon, Dr. Ziska (played by Lon Chaney) presides.  Ziska, of course, is a psychopath who has taken over the madhouse and the film reprises the old Poe yarn "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether" -- lunatics have imprisoned the actual staff of the asylum in a nasty-looking subterranean oubliette and now are seeking victims for an experiment plotted by the insane Dr. Ziska:  he intends to kill a man in an electric chair and somehow surgically implant his soul in the body of a young woman.  Ziska is aided by the living corpse, Daffy  Dan, a madman who continuously mimes rolling an invisible cigarette, and a huge Sinbad the sailor deafmute, a muscle-man who fancies himself the slave of Ziska (the burly man with oiled chest and bald head looks like a genie freshly escaped from his bottle).  There are many remarkable and terrifying images in the film -- disembodied arms appear out of furniture to hold victims down; a man walks a telephone line like a tightrope in a storm; a madman tied to a post in a downpour gibbers wildly; Lon Chaney gloats over his helpless female prey, sliding his hands over her body but without ever touching her in a spray of clinically white light; people slide down hidden chutes, climb long ladders and fly, slapstick style, on the ends of pendulums through windows; ]Roman candles ascend into the night sky while lightning flashes; a madman is trapped on a roof in a downpour; nightmare faces peer out of oval openings in the wall and windows automatically shut with a guillotine-like drop of huge wood panels; a boulder hangs on a hook over a pit and one of the madmen is hoisted by his heels and writhes in mid-air.  Even in the scenes designed as bucolic comedy, there are weird touches -- the hero, played by Johnny Arthur, is a slight, trembling, young man, almost comically slender, who would be posited as homosexual except for his interest in the town's maiden:  when she enters his shop, she pointedly asks for "pansy seeds" and, on the wall, we see displayed a big sign touting Mazola oil.  At the party, Johnny Arthur mimes total horror when he sees his rival, a man that looks exactly like him, albeit six inches taller, arrive as a "sheik" in a tuxedo.  (In some scenes, we can't tell the two men apart -- this casting must have been a conscious decision, but why?)  Lon Chaney wears the mask of sanity, but it is always trembling and only notionally in place -- at one point, Johnny Arthur says that Ziska "must be mad" and Chaney drops the ruse:  his famously agile features contort into a rictus of madness, he twitches uncontrollably, and glares in close-up at the camera, then, slowly, and with immense effort, pulling himself together (although his eye still twitches) to feign sanity.  It's an impressive scene and shows the viewer why Lon Chaney was a big star in the twenties.  The Monster is a remarkably interesting film:  it's only 86 minutes long, but not paced right.  (The movie is based on a stage show that must have featured all sorts of effects contrived to occur in a single Gothic set -- although the film is short it drags; the premiere version was twenty minutes shorter and probably better:  without the rather lame continuity, the movie's intrinsic surrealism would have been enhanced.)  In the final scene, the hero has won the girl and is touring a country with her in a jalopy.  The local constable, an old toothless man, incongruously mounted on a motorcycle has set a speed trap on a muddy rural lane.  The effeminate hero with his girl drive past him and the constable gives chase.  The driver slams on his brakes and the motorcycle violently crashes into the rear of the touring car -- this is supposed to be uproariously funny but we see the force of the impact in the whiplash motion of the hero and heroine's necks.  And, on that note, a shock to the system, the film ends.  (The film was directed by Roland West, the man accused of having murdered his lover, Thelma Todd about ten years later -- a Grand Jury refused to indict but everything suggests that West killed the actress and, then, staged her death as a suicide by carbon monoxide.)