Chaney was a big man who played frightened ones. As Lennie Small and as Larry Talbot he asked for pity rather than fear, and got it; Universal then had him play every monster on the lot, and not all of them fitted.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing to notice about Lon Chaney Jr. is how hard his characters are thinking. In Of Mice and Men (1939) Lennie Small is a huge man forever trying to hold on to something George has told him, and Chaney plays the slowness as effort rather than emptiness: you can watch the words go and watch him reach after them. It is a part that invites an actor to make faces, and he mostly declines. We found it moving in a way we had not braced for, and the reason is that he never asks us to laugh at Lennie or to marvel at him. He lets us see the work.
He had been in small parts since 1931, billed as Creighton Chaney, and took his father's name in 1935 because the studio wanted it. Lennie was the breakthrough. Two years later Universal cast him as Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man (1941), and for the rest of the decade he was the studio's all-purpose monster: the creature in The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), the Count in Son of Dracula (1943), Talbot again and again. Jack P. Pierce built the faces; Chaney supplied the misery underneath them. From the 1950s he worked as a character actor in Westerns and dramas, among them High Noon (1952) and The Defiant Ones (1958), and carried on in films and television until the early 1970s.
What worked was the sympathy. He said so himself: "All the best of the monsters played for sympathy. That goes for my father, Karloff, myself and all the others." Talbot is the proof, a man who does not want to be what he keeps becoming, which is Lennie's predicament with fur on. What did not work was the assumption that the trick would carry to any monster handed to him. Some critics have found him wrong for Dracula, too heavy in body and voice for the part, and we would not argue. He was typecast, he minded it, and he spent his later years asking in interviews why nobody would let him be anything else.
In High Noon (1952) he plays Martin Howe, and our review, which rated the film highly, did not stop to mention him. That is not a complaint. A character actor's best work is often the sort nobody notices, and by 1952 Chaney had learned to disappear into a room as completely as he had once filled it. Start with Lennie. Then watch the first Wolf Man, and then decide how many more monsters you need.
Biography
Lon Chaney Jr., born Creighton Tull Chaney, was an American character actor. The son of silent film star Lon Chaney, he began his career in the early 1930s, initially credited under his birth name before adopting Lon Chaney Jr. in 1935 at a producer's insistence.
He is known for his portrayal of Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, in several Universal horror films, including The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). Other notable roles include Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men (1939) and Martin Howe in High Noon (1952). He also appeared in The Defiant Ones (1958) and numerous Westerns and other genre films through the 1960s.
Chaney continued working in film and television until 1971. He died in 1973.
