Mockery (MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Libeled Lady and The Awful Truth, Turner Classic Movies showed on September 22 a “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature from 1927 called Mockery, starring Lon Chaney, Sr. as Sergei, a Russian peasant who gets caught up in the ferment of the 1917 revolutions. I was interested in this one mainly because of the director, Benjamin Christensen, an immigrant from Denmark who’d achieved international notoriety from a Danish film he’d made called Häxan in 1922. Häxan (Danish for “witch”) was a semi-documentary, semi-dramatic film about the history of witchcraft in which Christensen himself, an actor as well as director (two years later he starred in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Michael, playing a Gay artist and aristocrat who has the misfortune to fall in love with a gold-digger and blackmailer, played by Walter Slezak), appeared on screen as Satan. MGM signed him in the mid-1920’s when they were on a spree of hiring Scandinavian directors, including Victor Sjöstrom (whom they renamed “Seastrom”) and Mauritz Stiller, who had directed Greta Garbo in her first big film, The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924). Stiller insisted he’d only sign with MGM if they took Garbo along as well, only as things turned out Garbo became a huge star in Hollywood and Stiller flamed out after getting halfway through a 1927 Garbo vehicle, The Temptress. (He moved on to Paramount and made four films – Hotel Imperial, Barbed Wire and The Woman on Trial, all with Pola Negri, and the now-lost Street of Sin with Emil Jannings – before suddenly dying in 1928. Garbo emptied his apartment and went through all his things, sending most of them back to his relatives in Sweden. Five years later she drew on the memories of packing Stiller’s belongings for his family for the famous scene in Queen Christina in which she reminisces about the room in which she’s had her first sexual experience with a man.)

Christensen also didn’t last long at MGM, whose management was notoriously hostile to directors with a personal style (within a few years they had lost Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Rex Ingram and Buster Keaton); he debuted there with a film called The Devil’s Circus starring studio head Irving Thalberg’s light-o’-love, Norma Shearer; but after that and Mockery he ran afoul of MGM’s factory-like production system and ended up at First National. There he made mostly comedy-mysteries with Chester Conklin and Thelma Todd. Three of his four First National films are lost, and the one that survives, Seven Footprints to Satan, my husband Charles and I have seen only in a terrible bootleg print on VHS with intertitles in Italian, which rendered the plot virtually incomprehensible. I’ve seen Häxan twice, once in a heavily re-edited 1968 reissue called Witchcraft Through the Ages and once in a more authentic restoration, and I’ve never cared for it despite some quite good individual scenes. But Christensen is an interesting enough filmmaker I was looking forward to this one. Oddly, the film itself has no writing credits, though imbd.com lists Christensen and Stig Esbern as co-authors of the original story, Joseph W. Farnham as title writer and Bradley King in an unspecified writing role. (Wikipedia credits Esbern with writing a pre-existing short story on which the film was based, King with the actual screenplay and Christensen as an adapter who worked on it between Esbern and King.)

Lon Chaney wears a lighter makeup than usual as Sergei, who in the opening scene is literally starving in the Siberian wilderness and reduced to gnawing on bones (animal, not human) left behind by dead or dying comrades. Then he’s rescued by a woman named Tatiana Alexandrova (Barbara Bedford, who’s really quite good; she’d been making movies since 1920 and she deserved more of a career than she had, though she kept working in character roles until 1945 and died in 1981 at age 78) who demands that Sergei take her to the town of Novokursk. She offers him food and relative comfort for the journey, but tells him that whatever she says to get them past the guards and sentries on both sides of the Russian Civil War, he must go along with. She tells the first guard they meet that she’s a peasant woman and Sergei is her husband, but he can tell immediately by her un-callused hands that she’s not a peasant. In fact she’s a countess who’s anxious to get back to her stately home in Novokursk, where she lives with fellow 1-percenters Vladimir Gaidaroff (Mack Swain, former Mack Sennett star coming off a major comeback as Charlie Chaplin’s sidekick in the 1925 comedy classic The Gold Rush), a war profiteer, and his wife (Emily Fitzroy). They live in a lavish mansion (with an outdoor patio whose set got recycled for numerous later MGM films), where she’s visited by her real lover, Captain Dmitri (Ricardo Cortez) of the counter-revolutionary White Army. Along the way Sergei and Tatiana try to rest in an abandoned cabin, but unbeknownst to them an outlaw (Frank Leigh) is hiding there. He invites the rest of his gang to gang-rape Tatiana, and Sergei is badly injured and whipped trying to protect her. The mockery of the title comes from the way Sergei is treated on both sides of the class divide: from the Gaidaroffs above him and Ivan (Károly Huszár), who’s credited as the “Gatekeeper” and is the straw boss of the Gaidaroffs’ servants.

Ultimately Ivan convinces Sergei that the two and the rest of the Gaidaroffs’ staff should start their own revolution and essentially go on strike. The Gaidaroffs try to report them, but their telephone lines have been cut. In one of the film’s most vivid scenes, they open their front door and witness a big street fight going on: a powerful symbol of just how totally they’ve been cut off from the popular discontent outside. Ultimately the film turns into a bunch of closeups of Chaney as Sergei reflecting his melancholy that the woman who’d asked him to pose as her husband isn’t at all romantically interested in him, and his suffering reaches Christ-like proportions. In fact, Chaney’s makeup (I’m presuming he designed and put it on himself, as usual) only accentuates the character’s resemblance to Jesus, or at least to the popular image as of 1927 of what Jesus looked like. I found myself wishing that Cecil B. DeMille could have borrowed Chaney for his Jesus biopic The King of Kings (1927). Mockery is a typical Chaney vehicle in that he’s obsessed with a woman he can’t have because she’s only interested in someone younger and hunkier, and he responds by suffering nobly and ending up either dead (as he does here: he and Ivan kill each other) or alive but emotionally bereft. It’s one of those annoying movies in which scenes of great visual beauty and emotional power alternate with ones of unwitting silliness (and maybe not so unwitting, either; the scenes of Mack Swain and Emily Fitzroy expressing their helplessness after the infrastructure they counted on to protect them against the slavering mobs has almost totally broken down seem designed to evoke laughter, and I’m sure whoever cast Swain was thinking of his past as a comedian). Mockery got mixed reviews when it was originally released and was believed lost until the 1970’s, when the George Eastman House turned up a print. The version we were watching was from a Warner Bros. reissue in the early 2000’s with a musical score that’s better than some of the ones that have been slapped onto silent films in recent years, and Mockery emerges today as an uneven film but one with definite good points.