Title:Monster, The (1925) By: Roland West Released by: Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Released on: 1925 Rating (out of 10): 6 Date: 04/24/2002
Johnny Arthur, Gertrude Olmstead, Hallam Cooley, Lon Chaney
Monstrous Lon
Adapted from a 1922 stage play by Crane Wilbur, The Monster was Lon Chaney's foray into the burgeoning "haunted house" subgenre of horror, which was just beginning to kick into high gear. It isn't nearly as interesting as the wonderfully outrageous films he would later make with director Tod Browning, but still holds up fairly well. Be warned, though: The great character actor is relegated to the background for most of the film; this may suit the story's purposes, but not those of Chaney fans.
There've been strange goings-on in Danburg lately: A rash of disappearances near the old, supposedly abandoned insane asylum. Johnny Goodlittle (Johnny Arthur) is the nebbishy amateur sleuth who determines to get to the bottom of the recent vanishings—an endeavor in which he finds little sympathy from his fellow townsfolk, who would just as soon write off the incidents as unsolvable mysteries. "He has ambition," a title card informs us, "which in Danburg is as bad as having eczema."
But when Johnny, his girlfriend Betty (Gertrude Olmstead), and his rival Amos (Hallam Cooley) all become trapped for the night in the old sanitarium, the investigation takes a decidedly strange turn. It's there that the three are confronted by Dr. Ziska (Chaney), the rather bizarre caretaker of the massive house, who is performing some even more bizarre experiments in human "soul transference" and sees the new arrivals as perfect test subjects. Can young Johnny defeat Ziska, save his friends, and solve the Danburg disappearances?
The Monster is a very early example of the kind of haunted-house pictures that would become very popular in the late 1920s and early '30s; in particular, its mad doctor and his weird experiment seem to anticipate Universal's Frankenstein (1931). Ziska's sanitarium is a labyrinth of rigged doors and windows, secret passages, ansd hidden traps; it's a gloomy, forbidding place populated by a bizarre assemblage of grotesque madmen. The asylum is an effectively frightening setting; though the movie is mostly tongue-in-cheek, its atmospherics are disturbing all the same.
What's really disappointing about The Monster, unfortunately, is just how little screen time Chaney, the ostensible star of the movie, is allowed. Nearly all of the story is told from Johnny's perspective, and through his eyes the film becomes a serviceable, reasonably-creepy tale; however, The Monster might have been a lot more interesting had more of it been told from the point of view of the mad Dr. Ziska himself. Lon Chaney made a career out of turning the deformed, the disturbed, and the demented into grim antiheroes; while Ziska is more straightforwardly insane than some of Chaney's other characters, in the great actor's hands he could have stood a lot more exposure.
The Monster is historically interesting and watchable enough in itself, but overall it isn't one of Chaney's more memorable films. It's still worth a look, though, because the few scenes that the Man of a Thousand Faces has are memorable indeed. Few who've seen The Monster have easily forgotten a shot in which an enraged Ziska, his ghoulish face further distorted into an expression of fury, lurches right into the camera, right into us—an image that, over 75 years later, has lost none of its power to shock and terrify.
