Was there ever a Lon Chaney documentary...

It's possible, but unlikely.

Silent film from the thirties to the late sixties was an embarrassment to a Hollywood that disparaged the origins of its own industry and did its best to ignore the era.

There were historians and fans like Robert Youngston who collected silents and released a few documentaries to theatres (When Comedy Was King) in the hope of reviving audience interest in films that probably hadn't been seen since they were originally released. Silent film on tv was virtually non existent, although some stations would run short comedies to fill some time slots (Keystone Kops, Ben Turpin).

According to reports, the last known copy of London After Midnight was destroyed in a fire in the studio vault in the late sixties, long before the silent film renaissance that continues to this day.

There may have been documentaries on the subject, but I don't recall ever seeing one, and the chances that any of them would include scenes from the Chaney movie are remote.

The Miracle Man is another lost Chaney movie, but the key scene of the actor crawling down a path and being "cured" of his crippling disease exists only because the scene was included in a short retrospective of silent film from the nineteen thirties.

What surprises me is that no museum ever collected a copy of London After Midnight. You surely would have thought an institution as pretigious as NYC's "Museum of Modern Art" would have included a copy in their film archives.

Hope fades, but does not entirely disappear. After all, a good print of the 1912 Richard III was discovered some time ago and is now on dvd. And more recently a copy of Metropolis, far more complete than earlier versions, was found in Argentina.







What Is Essential Is Invisible