The Penalty

Wallace Worsley, Goldwyn, 1920, from Gouverneur Morris’s novel. Lon Chaney is Blizzard, a San Francisco crime boss whose legs were taken off by a surgeon when he was a boy. He wants the doctor’s daughter and a graft that would put someone else’s legs on him. Chaney strapped his calves behind his thighs in a leather harness and walked on his knees through the picture. Ethel Grey Terry is the woman the police send in. Seven reels. The AFI synopsis keeps the last operation; the film is about the harness more than the plot.