A Lon Chaney Double Feature

Although he is best remembered for outlandish roles performed from beneath layers of make up in spine-twisting poses, Lon Chaney spent a considerable portion of his career depicting bare faced criminals in charismatic performances that others built upon in Depression Era gangster films.

In Nomads of the North, action, intrigue, and the love of three men for the beautiful Nanette Roland mingle with the majestic north woods, a murder and a manhunt, culminating in a raging forest fire as friendship and love for a woman overwhelm a lawman's sense of duty. Lon Chaney plays Raoul Challoner, Nanette's true love, who arrives from the North just in time to stop her with murder. He and Nanette flee to the North where they are located three years later by Corporal O'Connor (Lewis Stone), who was assigned to bring him in- and the mayhem begins.

In a variation on the phony cripple which he played numerous times, Chaney stars in The Shock as Wilse Diling, "dope peddler, safe cracker, gun man," a handicapped hoodlum of old San Francisco who drags himself from the darkness of Chinatown into the redemptive sunlight of the country, where he finds the inspiration to turn away from his life of crime. But when the father of the woman he loves is blackmailed, Diling ventures back into the "whirlpool of vice and intrigue" of his criminal past where this thriller reaches its spectacular, earth shaking climax. Chaney wrote: "I have dozens of letter from convicts… and all say the same thing: that they appreciate my characters because no matter how evil they are, there is always some redeeming spot of good in them."