The Penalty is all about Lon Chaney. He gives a very effective performance as arch-villain Blizzard, striding around with his legs folded into leather cups so he looks like a double amputee. Chaney is completely unbowed as Blizzard, walking on the top of a factory table where his female employees are making hats, bullying the workers, grabbing them by the hair and threatening them. He even uses his missing legs to dominate one of the woman as he sits on a piano bench playing the keys and makes his assistant sit below him to manipulate the pedals. Chaney brings in moments of athleticism, too, as when he climbs up a series of pegs to peer into a high window looking over the factory floor and when he lowers himself to his underground workspace by using suspended chains. He also deftly hops into chairs and onto the posing platform for Barbara.
And Chaney uses his face with as much dexterity as he does his body. Close-ups tell more of this story than inter-titles, and Chaney carries and entire scene with the way he changes his face. His quicksilver expressions shows us how angry he is in planning to kill Rose and how quickly her musical skill moderates his anger into appreciation. His face quickly flicks from conveying his love for Barbara to anger at her rejection to penance at offending her. There’s little action in either of these sequences, but rather Chaney tells us what’s happening by his countenance. And director Wallace Worsley directs the camera and lighting to focus on Chaney’s expressiveness. Blizzard can look like an old man at one minute, but high key lighting turns this same weathered face into the Prince of Darkness when there’s mention of Satan. The Penalty is a tour de force of silent acting by Chaney.
Worsley brings other directorial flourishes to the film, too. On a couple of occasions, he plays from one small, lit box to the larger dark screen. For example, as Rose is exploring the subterranean storeroom, we see her backlit, peering at us from a square of light into a dark room whose foreground fills most of the screen. That image contrast sharply with the surprise we get when she flips the light switch and, in the well-lit room, we’re jarred by suddenly seeing stacks and stacks of armaments. The play of light and dark in this, and in the pursuit of Nell’s killer, intensifies the feeling of the scenes. Worsley also knows to use editing and cross-cutting to good effect. The editing heightens tension when he cuts between Blizzard at Barbara’s studio and Rose exploring the arms cache in the basement, for example. And a delightfully cross-cut section is Blizzard’s explanation of his plan for looting San Francisco, which is cut with visual enactments of the plan.
The period insight into San Francisco also makes The Penalty interesting to watch today. Whether it’s a mock-up of the turn-of-the-cnetury dance halls in the Barbary Coast section of the city or a view down a street that shows houses set on canted foundations to compensate for the grade of a hill, the film gives us glimpses of old San Francisco. The quick flash of a streetcar, an Asian chauffeur, and the Asian décor of Blizzard’s apartment with its statue of Confucius wafted in incense all show us a set of circumstances and values in this city in 1920.
The film is also interesting for the way melodrama plays out in this silent crime thriller as opposed to how it works in a romance or drama. In this film, actually, melodrama doesn’t function very effectively. The story is chock-a-block with melodramatic elements. Blizzard decides not to kill Rose because he loves the music she produces; Rose falls in love with the man she’s supposed to bring down; Dr. Ferris cures Blizzard of evil by operating on his brain; finally happy, Blizzard is killed by his former henchmen. All this is pure melodrama, and in the hands of a different set of artists, it might have been effective. Way Down East, also released in 1920, uses such melodrama very effectively. But The Penalty has no actor who can engage the camera and, through it, the audience. No one in this film elicits our sympathetic identification the way a Lilian Gish can. Worsley’s camera shows us the chameleon techniques of Lon Chaney, but none of the cast can touch us and make us really care about them or the outcome of the action. That lack of sympathetic attraction is the one major flaw with this movie.
There’s a lot to appreciate in The Penalty. Though it relies primarily on technique, it can be a fun watch on the screen.
