MAN BEHIND LON CHANEY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 672, 25 May 1929, Page 14

MAN BEHIND LON CHANEY

TOD BROWNING, DIRECTOR AND ADVISER Every follower of tlie motion pictures knows Lon Chaney, the man who lias become famous by reason of his ability to make faces. Chaney’s screen stories of thrills and mysteries have sent little chills coursing up and down the backs of millions, but very few know of the man behind Chaney, his friend, director and adviser—Tod Browning. Tod Browning thinks up weird ideas and creates strange and mystifying characters. Lon Chaney is merely the man who brings them to life and puts them on the screen, with Browning directing. This combination of star and director is unique, and commenced when they were both assigned to the making of “The Unholy Three.” This was a story that producers and directors had side-stepped for many years, as they contended that it could not be made into a satisfactory picture. Chaney and Browning made it —and made it a great suceess. Then, in rapid succesion, there followed ' The Blackbird,” “The Road to Mandalay” and “The Unknown,” and the co-oper-ative team of Chaney and Browning was firmly established. Browning writes the stories for most of the pictures he makes, or else makes his own adaptation of an original version. For many years a traveller and a student of life, a liabitue of sideshows, strange little cafes and out-of-the-way corners of the Bohemian sections of great cities, Tod Browning puts into his pictures the people lie has loot with in the course of his wander ings. He knows London, Paris, Berlin. Vienna, New York and Madrid as well as those who live there. He speaks many languages and he lias met crooks and detectives in their own particular haunts. Even the “armless wonder” portrayed by Chaney in “The Unknown” was suggested to Browning by a similar individual he once met in Barcelona.