The Shock

Lambert Hillyer, Universal, 1923. Lon Chaney is Wilse Dilling, a crippled crook sent from San Francisco to a quiet town to set up a banker. Virginia Valli is the banker’s daughter he was not supposed to care about. The 1906 earthquake is restaged as both plot and punctuation; the AFI lists the picture at about seventy minutes. Cost a reported $90,220 and earned more than twice that, a Jewel beside the Super Jewel Hunchback the same year. Chaney’s walk is another harness job. The shock of the title is geological and moral, and the film knows the pun.