London After Midnight: A New Reconstruction Based on Contemporary Sources (hardb

<p>Tod Browning's silent movie horror film, <em>London After Midnight</em> (1927) starring Lon Chaney, Marceline Day, Conrad Nagel, Henry B. Walthall, and Polly Moran, has intrigued silent movie fans for decades. Now considered a lost film, surviving production stills, a Photoplay Edition novel, scripts, and other memorabilia give some feel for the actual film, but their varying plot gaps, anomalies, and inconsistencies leave viewers wondering how the actual film unfolded . . . until now.</p> <p> </p> <p>Author Thomas Mann offers a fascinating reconstruction based on his transcription of a rediscovered 11,000-word fictionization first published in <em>Boy's Cinema</em> (1928) that may resolve the conflicts between previous versions. His detailed comparison of all surviving sources sheds new light on the discovery of a second murder victim, a plot element not in the final film; Lon Chaney's two different makeups in playing detective Edward C. Burke; Henry Walthall as Sir James Hamlin holding two guns rather than one in the scene in which his character, under hypnosis, re-enacts a crime.</p> <p> </p> <p>The last known film print is believed to have been destroyed in a 1967 MGM vault fire, but you can now take a front row seat into the haunted mansion filled with vampires, cobwebs, bats, and "The Man of a Thousand Faces." </p> <p> </p> <p>About the author: Thomas Mann is an independent scholar living in Washington, DC. He spent more than three decades as a general reference lib