The Penalty (1920) on Netflix
Passed19201h 30mCrimeDramaHorrorThriller
Blizzard, the legless crime lord of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, carries two ambitions. He wants revenge on the doctor who needlessly amputated his legs, and he wants to loot the city.
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- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.3/102,880 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes83%
Plot summary
Blizzard rules the criminal underworld of San Francisco's Barbary Coast. As a child he suffered a head injury that went undiagnosed, and Dr. Ferris, the attending physician, amputated both his legs. Blizzard's empire takes in gambling, prostitution, drug dealing and human trafficking, and he intends to rally the city's lawbreakers behind something larger still. Lichtenstein, who heads the Secret Service, gives his agent Rose the job of entering the gang and learning what Blizzard intends. She gets in as the director of a hat factory he has installed in a room of his house, where dance hall girls make hats. Blizzard also sits as the model for a bust of Satan by Barbara Ferris, the doctor's daughter, to get close to her father.
Cast
- Milton Rossas Lichtenstein
- Montgomery Carlyleas A Crook(uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Penalty (1920)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To play the legless crime boss Blizzard, Lon Chaney wore an apparatus of two wooden buckets and leather straps, his knees in the buckets and his lower legs tied back; studio doctors asked him not to wear the painful device, but he insisted so his costume would be authentic.
- The original release reportedly included a short epilogue clip showing Lon Chaney out of character, to assure audiences he was not an amputee; that clip does not survive, but in the scene where Blizzard imagines his gang carrying loot from the Mint Building, Chaney can be seen directing the heist unamputated.
- The Penalty was one of Lon Chaney's breakout roles, and together with Treasure Island, also of 1920, it secured his place as one of America's most famous character actors before his better-known turns in 1923's The Hunchback of Notre Dame and 1925's The Phantom of the Opera.
- The Penalty was the first of five films Lon Chaney made with director Wallace Worsley, the others being Ace of Hearts, Voices of the City, A Blind Bargain and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
- The Penalty was screened at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival in March 2018 with a newly commissioned score by Scottish composer Graeme Stephen, written for guitar and cello.
