The Road to Mandalay

The Road to Mandalay is a 1926 American silent drama film directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, Owen Moore and Lois Moran. It was written by Elliott Clawson (with Joseph Farmham doing the intertitles), based on a story idea by Tod Browning and Herman Mankiewicz. The script's original shooting title was Singapore. The film took 28 days to complete at a cost of $209,000. The worldwide box office gross was $724,000. Some stills exist showing Chaney's makeup as Singapore Joe.[1][2]

Originally a 7-reel feature, the film was considered lost until a 9.5mm abridged version, of about 35 minutes, with French intertitles surfaced in Paris and was transferred to 16mm.[3] This fair quality French abridgement is all that survives of The Road to Mandalay. The intertitles were translated back into English, and the print now resides in the Warner Brothers Classics Vault.

Archivist Jon Mirsalis (who restored the film) opined, "The English-to-French-back-to-English intertitles lost something in the translation, but I was able to restore the original intertitles from the original MGM cutting continuity. After all that work, one would like to say that the finished product is a great film waiting to be rediscovered. Sadly, it is not. THE ROAD TO MANDALAY is probably the worst of the Chaney/Browning features done at MGM. It is predominantly style with little substance, and even lacks many of the odd Browning touches that add to most of his other pictures of the era. Still, Chaney's make-up and performance are fascinating to watch. He "blinded" one eye by placing egg white over it, used collodion to form a deep gash across his forehead, and put several large tattoos on his arms. He spends much of the film sneering and growling, and comes across as one of the most distasteful characters of his career.[4]".

Dr. Hugo Kiefer, a Los Angeles optician, designed the white glass contact lens that Chaney also wore to simulate the blind eye. Two of these contact lenses can still be found in Chaney's make-up case at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.[5][6]