Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Lon Chaney: Behind the Mask (1996)

This Lon Chaney documentary, written and directed by Bret Wood, covers familiar ground but leaves us with few insights into the career or persona of the versatile actor. The presentation might have been lifted a bit with a different narrator. Ronald Gordon’s reading is so flat that it is detrimental to our engagement. Perhaps the highest value of the film is in the selection of film clips that include a few rarely seen productions unavailable in quality home video editions. If the clips are indicative of the survival state of these films, sadly, some have only survived in 16mm and 8mm reduction prints.

This Blu-ray Disc edition of this Lon Chaney documentary was previously released by Kino in a VHS videotape boxset of Chaney films released in the late 1990s. The clips from Chaney films will vary in quality depending on their survival status.

Supplementary material includes a presentation of By the Sun’s Rays (1914), which has previously been offered by Kino on their Blu-ray Disc edition of The Penalty (1920).

Previously available on VHS videotape, this Blu-ray Disc is now the best available home video edition of the documentary.

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