Man Of A Thousand Faces (1957)

A vaudeville performer (James Cagney) is told by his singer wife (Dorothy Malone) that she is going to have a baby. But when she meets his deaf mute parents (Celia Lovsky, Nolan Leary) for the first time, she becomes hysterical that their baby will be born a deaf mute. After the child is born (he is "normal"), the marriage crumbles and she attempts suicide on stage during his performance. The ensuing scandal sends him to Hollywood and the movies where he eventually becomes a major star. Directed by Joseph Pevney, this largely fictionalized film biography of the legendary Lon Chaney is enjoyable enough but it comes with all the usual melodramatic cliches of the genre. The film plays fast and loose with the facts: just two examples, after he divorced his first wife, Chaney never saw her again yet the film has them meeting after he has become a big star and rather than dying at a hospital, the movie has him dying in bed at home, etc. It doesn't help that the 57 year old Cagney was already 10 years old than Chaney when he died. As good an actor as he was, Cagney didn't have a thousand faces ... maybe 4 or 5 but indisputably Cagney. As an actor, he simply doesn't have the ability to transform himself like Chaney did and even here, he seems to want to remind us that he is Cagney. After performing a dramatic scene as Chaney in THE MIRACLE MAN, he does a soft shoe tap a la Cagney. Malone as the unsympathetic neurotic first wife is quite good as she is able to lend some empathy to the character. With Jane Greer as Chaney's second wife, Jim Backus, Marjorie Rambeau, Jack Albertson, Jeanne Cagney, William Hudson, Robert Evans as Irving Thalberg and Roger Smith as Lon Chaney Jr.