Amazon.com The Man of a Thousand Faces wears his own rugged countenance in this rousing pair of silent melodramas from the early 1920s. Though typically known for his heavily made-up portrayals of monstrous villains and disabled outcasts, Lon Chaney plays the noble leading man in the gorgeously filmed Nomads of the North, adapted from James Oliver Curwood's timeless tale of love and murder on the lush Canadian frontier. Chaney is heroic as he saves his beloved Nanette (Betty Blythe) from a snidely suitor, but he's nearly upstaged by the adorable pets Brimstone and Neela, a black Labrador and brown bear cub (respectively) who survive river rapids, cougars, and the film's climactic (and genuinely dangerous) forest inferno. The Shock finds Chaney in familiar "cripple" mode as an underworld denizen seeking redemption, foiling the dragon queen of San Francisco's Chinatown and winning the heart of a sympathetic beauty. Vague shades of Quasimodo here, and Chaney's follow-up was the classic Hunchback of Notre Dame. --Jeff Shannon Description Lon Chaney, one of the most gifted and versatile actors of the silent era, headlines this exciting double bill of action classics. In "Nomads of the North" (1920, 77 min.), three men vie for the love of beautiful Nanette Roland while the majestic north woods become the site for murder, a manhunt, and a raging forest fire. Chaney plays Nanette's true love, Raoul Challoner, who arrives to stop her forced marriage. An accidental death sends the couple fleeing to the north, where lawman Corporal O'Connor (Lewis Stone) doggedly pursues them--and the mayhem begins. Then, Chaney portrays dope-peddling, safecracking, handicapped hoodlum Wilse Dilling in "The Shock" (1923, 89 min.), a gripping gangster yarn. Dragging himself from the darkness of Chinatown to the redemptive sunlight of the countryside, Dilling turns away from his life of crime but finds himself pulled back when the father of the woman he loves is blackmailed. Drawn into a whirlpool of vice and intrigue, Dilling fights to retain his humanity as the film careens to a spectacular, earth-shaking climax.
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