While the plot of "Mockery" is simple, the characterizations are complex, and not just because of Chaney's acting. German producer Erich Pommer and Danish director Benjamin Christensen brought a European aesthetic to this film; the same aesthetic F. W. Murnau brought to an equally simple story, "Sunrise." It's no wonder the film did not generate much buzz in America where studios pandered to the popular taste for melodrama and one dimensional characters - good guys and bad. The characters in "Mockery" are not that easy to define. They are real humans capable of compassion and cruelty, difficult to stereotype.
Chaney always thrived on direction that emphasized complex characterization. But in this film Barbara Bedford (whose only other notable performance was as Cora Munro in Maurice Tourneur's "The Last of the Mohicans") fares almost as well. Both give sensitive performances, she as a countess in disguise dodging revolutionaries in the Siberian forests of 1918, and Chaney at his best as a mentally slow but goodhearted peasant named Sergei, who helps her. The countess assures Sergei they will always be friends. She later proves to be less a friend, and more a patronizing aristocrat when she rewards his loyalty by securing employment for him on the estate of a war profiteer.
On the estate Sergei has his baser instincts awakened by another servant, the animalistic Ivan, played by Charles Puffy. When revolutionaries overrun the estate Sergei's passions have been so aroused that he tries to rape the countess, but he's thwarted when Loyalist soldiers quell the uprising. The countess, however, vouches for Sergei's loyalty to the Captain, her lover, because her conscience is awakened when the soldiers who seize Sergei accidentally expose the scars of a beating he took in the forest for refusing to divulge her identity to revolutionaries.
Films like this are why I prefer European silents, or American silents directed by Europeans like Murnau, Sjöström, Tourneur, and Christensen. Scenes that might have been cloyingly sentimental, as when Sergei bathes the countess' feet, are extremely moving, avoiding the exaggerated emotion that was a staple of American film, and letting Chaney's gentle hands speak for themselves.
Chaney always thrived on direction that emphasized complex characterization. But in this film Barbara Bedford (whose only other notable performance was as Cora Munro in Maurice Tourneur's "The Last of the Mohicans") fares almost as well. Both give sensitive performances, she as a countess in disguise dodging revolutionaries in the Siberian forests of 1918, and Chaney at his best as a mentally slow but goodhearted peasant named Sergei, who helps her. The countess assures Sergei they will always be friends. She later proves to be less a friend, and more a patronizing aristocrat when she rewards his loyalty by securing employment for him on the estate of a war profiteer.
On the estate Sergei has his baser instincts awakened by another servant, the animalistic Ivan, played by Charles Puffy. When revolutionaries overrun the estate Sergei's passions have been so aroused that he tries to rape the countess, but he's thwarted when Loyalist soldiers quell the uprising. The countess, however, vouches for Sergei's loyalty to the Captain, her lover, because her conscience is awakened when the soldiers who seize Sergei accidentally expose the scars of a beating he took in the forest for refusing to divulge her identity to revolutionaries.
Films like this are why I prefer European silents, or American silents directed by Europeans like Murnau, Sjöström, Tourneur, and Christensen. Scenes that might have been cloyingly sentimental, as when Sergei bathes the countess' feet, are extremely moving, avoiding the exaggerated emotion that was a staple of American film, and letting Chaney's gentle hands speak for themselves.