The Shock

Shock, The (1923)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Lon Chaney plays a cripple who has been used by a Chinatown gang to commit various crimes. He's sent away on his newest job where he falls in love with a girl but it turns out his job is to kill her father. As usual, Chaney gives a remarkable performance and I have no problem calling him one of the greatest actors ever. He perfectly captures all the right emotions for the role and his physical appearance of a cripple is remarkable. Two other highlights include a bank being blown up and an earthquake that happens in the film. The special effects are very good and the suspense and drama are very high.

Lon Chaney plays Wilse Dilling, a cripple who gave into the enticements of crime long ago. Chaney is working for a ruthless woman in Chinatown in San Francisco and is sent to a small town to "keep his eyes open" and "make friends." There he is befriended by a kind young woman who tells him repeatedly that if the cause/dream is right than the will is enough to achieve it. Circumstances such as the young woman having a fiancée and her father the object of the ruthless woman in Chinatown make this one heck of an old-fashioned melodrama with Chaney giving a tour-de-force performance as a crippled criminal blind-sided by love and acts of kindness making him change. Chaney's features, particularly his face, give off such emotion and pathos that he can do so much with so little. The films has many exciting twists and turns culminating an a rather impressively staged earthquake. The Shock, while perhaps a bit hokey in plot, is yet again another example of just how good films were in the silent era and how performers such as Chey were not just the best of his generation but in the pantheon of all-time greats.

Having recently been in Christchurch, New Zealand, during the Great Canterbury Earthquake, the earthquake in the film came, like the real thing, by surprise. I was impressed by how well and realistically they did the earthquake sequences (which must have cost a bob or two). The imperceptible shake which builds up to a massive shaking and rattling from which you cannot get away frighteningly familiar. Thankfully, the house I was in shook, but was undamaged. However parts of central Christchurch are quite old and look (or rather looked) very much like the two-storey townscape used in the film. The clip where the earth opened up was also very reminiscent of cracks left in the New Zealand landscape. Of the the filmmakers had probably lived themselves through the San Francisco earthquake.

There were some nice railway sequences (Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe I think). It was interesting that when they put the girl on her stretcher into the train, she is still lying across the vestibule as it pulls out.

Lon Chaney once again plays a criminal, and a crippled one on crutches at that. He's Wilse Dilling, and he's a feared killer and dope peddler working out of San Francisco's Chinatown (again) for Queen Ann (Christine Mayo), the boss of the criminal underworld in the city. She sends Wilse out to a small country town to keep an eye out on a banker (William Welsh), but Wilse falls for the banker's pious daughter Gertrude (Virginia Valli). Will Wilse be able to carry out his sinister orders when the time comes, or has Gertrude's kind and religious way of life helped the career criminal turn his life around? Also featuring Jack Mower, Henry A. Barrows, Harry De Vere, John Beck, Walter Long, and Togo Yamamoto.

Chaney seems to have hit a creative rut here, as several aspects of his previous films are repeated and mixed together. The film sets up Wilse as being a real scary customer, one to be feared, but whenever things get tough in the film's second half, he just gets tossed around like, well, a cripple. The movie's deus ex machina finale is silly, as is the implausibly happy ending. On the plus side, Chaney is once again good at playing a multi-layered character, and he gets to show some subtle facial acting. Director Lambert Hillyer would stick around Universal into the sound era.

While not nearly as well-remembered today as some of Lon Chaney's other films, "The Shock" is a good melodrama, and it gives Chaney a rather interesting role that shows he could give a convincing performance even without lavish disguises or costumes to work with. Here his character, Wilse Dilling, is a disabled career criminal who is forced by events to re-evaluate his life. Chaney gets good mileage out of his character's crutches and wheelchair, but more than that, he helps the viewer to see his dilemmas as he alternates between despair and hope.

The story is interesting and fairly involved. Wilse starts off under the thumb of the heartless crime boss "Queen Ann", who is using him as part of an elaborate scheme of crime and revenge. But Wilse softens as he gets to knows Ann's intended victims, and he soon becomes caught in the middle as a series of tumultuous events unfolds. Although the production is not of the same quality as in Chaney's best-known movies, it fits together pretty well, with only a couple of slow spots, and most fans of silent films should find it well worth watching.