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Lon Chaney delivers a moving performance as the stooped Chinese laundryman Yen Sin, who barely survived a raging storm that had spit him ashore in the East Coast fishing town of Urkey. Under extraordinary makeup and painstaking physical contortions, Chaney overcomes the paternalistic clichés of the script to create a vivid character whose hard, back-breaking life is suggested in every pained movement of his gnarled hands and stiff, shuffling legs. Yen Sin plays cupid to the courtship between the town's handsome young minister (Harrison Ford) and the young widow (Marguerite De La Motte) of a violent fisherman, and then guardian angel when their fairy-tale romance is shattered by blackmail. This smartly directed film is full of fascinating contradictions, from Yen Sin's entrance (where the community embraces every white survivor and ignores him) to the conclusion where the community wanders off no more enlightened than before. One of the frustrating practices of silent cinema was to cast Caucasian actors in Asian roles, but Chaney brings a real sensitivity to his performance. Despite the tortured pidgin intertitles, which give Yen Sin the exaggerated dialogue of a Chinese cliché, Chaney makes him the film's moral center, a generous, loving individual practically invisible to the "good Christian townspeople" and a quietly observant judge of his community's sins. Kino's print, from the Blackhawk Collection, is excellent. Gaylord Carter provides the organ score.
--Sean Axmaker
Video Details
The masterful Lon Chaney stars in these two classic silent films. "Outside the Law" (1920, 75 min.) - In this early collaboration with director Tod Browning (Dracula, Freaks), Chaney delivers a dual performance of dramatic intensity, starring as Ah Wing, a kind-hearted student of Confucian philosophy, and Black Mike Sylva, a murderous rake of the San Francisco underworld. Like night and day, Ah Wing and Sylva are physical representations of the opposing factions of light and dark that weigh upon the moral conscience of the film's protagonist, Molly Madden (Priscilla Dean), who must choose between lives of crime and domesticity. "Shadows" (1922, 68 min.) - In one of the most challenging performances of his illustrious career, Chaney stars as a Chinese laundryman caught in a web of small-town jealousy and extortion. Both films features new orchestral scores.
