London After Midnight

<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 11000-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 librarian at the Library of Congress. He is the author of <em>The Oxford Guide to Library Research</em> (Oxford University Press 2015) and of <em>Horror & Mystery Photoplay Editions and Magazine Fictionizations</em> (McFarland 2004; vol. II BearManor Media 2016).</p>