For some reason, many silent films with contemporary settings had flashbacks to ancient times. The most obvious example of this is Cecil B. DeMille's 'Male and Female', with its flashback to Babylon ... and, indeed, several of DeMille's movies from the Jazz Age found convenient excuses for sending the main characters back to ancient times (via flashback) on some flimsy pretext. 'Alas and Alack' is a very low-budget film which follows this same structure, interrupting the main story with a barely relevant fantasy sequence set in some fairy-tale mediaeval kingdom.
Lon Chaney plays two roles in this film; his two make-ups here are rather less convincing than usual, but one of his two characters is a fantasy grotesque, so the make-up for this role doesn't need to be plausible. The lead role here is Jess, a poor fishwife somewhere on the Pacific coast, well-played by Cleo Madison. Chaney plays her (nameless) husband, a fisherman who is the equivalent of Tevye the milkman: he gets very little work done because he's busy fantasising about what he would do with his wealth IF he were a rich man (biddy-biddy-boom)...
SYNOPSIS WITH SPOILER: One day, Jess meets a yachtsman who IS rich: Charles Holcombe, who is wealthy but unhappily married to a wife who nags him constantly yet who otherwise ignores him. Jess and Holcombe are attracted to each other, but ... well, the marriage bonds are sacred. They linger on the edge of some sort of romance, but it doesn't happen. He goes back to his spouse (a fishwife in the figurative sense), whilst Jess (a fishwife in the literal sense) goes back to mending fishnets for her husband. Something wonderful **almost** might have happened, but...
This turgid plotline is interrupted while Jess tells her daughter a fairy tale about a beautiful princess who is magically imprisoned in a seashell; to this day, if you put a seashell to your ear, you can hear the princess moaning. The characters in this fairy tale are played by the actors in the main story, as dual roles: Jess becomes the princess, Holcombe becomes a handsome prince, while Chaney shows up as a grim mediaeval hunchback: a practice-run for Quasimodo, perchance? The events in the fairy tale are meant to parallel the events in the main story, or meant to point to some moral, or something. What really happens is that the main story, such as it is, screeches to a halt so that we can see this twee muck about the wee princess in the seashell, and then just when we're beginning to lose CONCH-usness (pardon the pun, it's very shellfish of me), we pick up the dull thread where it left off.
This is one of those stories where people are ABOUT to make tremendous changes in their unfortunate lives, but never quite work up the nerve. Well, why should we care? Chaney's make-ups are interesting, and Cleo Madison gives two decent performances as the princess (who can't quite come out of her shell) and the fishwife (ditto). I'll rate this movie 2 points out of 10.
Lon Chaney plays two roles in this film; his two make-ups here are rather less convincing than usual, but one of his two characters is a fantasy grotesque, so the make-up for this role doesn't need to be plausible. The lead role here is Jess, a poor fishwife somewhere on the Pacific coast, well-played by Cleo Madison. Chaney plays her (nameless) husband, a fisherman who is the equivalent of Tevye the milkman: he gets very little work done because he's busy fantasising about what he would do with his wealth IF he were a rich man (biddy-biddy-boom)...
SYNOPSIS WITH SPOILER: One day, Jess meets a yachtsman who IS rich: Charles Holcombe, who is wealthy but unhappily married to a wife who nags him constantly yet who otherwise ignores him. Jess and Holcombe are attracted to each other, but ... well, the marriage bonds are sacred. They linger on the edge of some sort of romance, but it doesn't happen. He goes back to his spouse (a fishwife in the figurative sense), whilst Jess (a fishwife in the literal sense) goes back to mending fishnets for her husband. Something wonderful **almost** might have happened, but...
This turgid plotline is interrupted while Jess tells her daughter a fairy tale about a beautiful princess who is magically imprisoned in a seashell; to this day, if you put a seashell to your ear, you can hear the princess moaning. The characters in this fairy tale are played by the actors in the main story, as dual roles: Jess becomes the princess, Holcombe becomes a handsome prince, while Chaney shows up as a grim mediaeval hunchback: a practice-run for Quasimodo, perchance? The events in the fairy tale are meant to parallel the events in the main story, or meant to point to some moral, or something. What really happens is that the main story, such as it is, screeches to a halt so that we can see this twee muck about the wee princess in the seashell, and then just when we're beginning to lose CONCH-usness (pardon the pun, it's very shellfish of me), we pick up the dull thread where it left off.
This is one of those stories where people are ABOUT to make tremendous changes in their unfortunate lives, but never quite work up the nerve. Well, why should we care? Chaney's make-ups are interesting, and Cleo Madison gives two decent performances as the princess (who can't quite come out of her shell) and the fishwife (ditto). I'll rate this movie 2 points out of 10.