The Ace of Hearts (1921)

Powerful

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This very moody and atmospheric thriller about a secret society was directed by Wallace Worsley and written by Gouverneur Morris, who were both responsible for Lon Chaney's chilling movie "The Penalty" (1920). The evocative and eerie music (by Vivek Maddala, so much more appropriate than his score for "The Patsy") gets you into the mood instantly as a secret society meet on a windy, rainy night to plot the murder of "one who has lived too long". Even in the depths of all this seriousness there is a romantic triangle going on as Mr. Forrest (John Bowers) and Mr. Farallone (Lon Chaney) both fall in love with the elusive Lilith (Leatrice Joy) who is wedded to "the Cause"!!!After the gruelling role of "Blizzard" in "The Penalty", this role of the lovelorn Mr. Farallone must have seemed like a walk in the park to Chaney but such is the power of his acting that with a few emotive expressions he was still able to give a gripping performance. When the cards are dealt, the Ace of Hearts, the card of death, goes to Mr. Forrest and he is elated that he has been chosen to eliminate "the Menace" (Raymond Hatton). Lilith then announces that she will marry him if that will inspire him further but after a night of love she is a changed woman and begs Forrest to run away with her. He is supposed to go to his waiters job and leave a timed bomb at the seat where "the Menace" has his breakfast every morning at nine o'clock. But things don't go to plan and when he sees a pair of run away lovers (Cullen Landis is one) sitting at a nearby table he cannot go through with it. That means he, himself, is under sentence of death but meanwhile Lilith has extracted a promise from the lovesick Farallone that if something goes wrong he will help them. In an unexpected twist Farallone (which proves Chaney didn't give up all his intensity) makes Lilith promise that if Forrest doesn't return she will, in turn, marry him. But Farallone has an ace up his sleeve that paves the way for the newly wed's happiness.Chaney's intensity toward the end made me wonder if the movie was meant to be far longer than it's 75 minutes. It originally had a far different ending, much more exciting in my opinion. Lilith and Forrest are finally tracked down to their mountain haven by Morgridge, the Society leader, who, in the original ending had picked the Ace of Hearts as the one to hunt down and kill Forrest. He survives the bomb blast but when he sees the happy family (there is now a baby) he also renounces "the Cause" with a view that love conquers everything. When Samuel Goldwyn saw it, he declared it preposterous and ordered a new ending!!!It was this movie that bought Leatrice Joy (soon to be Mrs. John Gilbert) to the attention of Cecil B. DeMille and the next year she would shoot to fame in "Saturday Night" - he intended to do for her as he had done for Gloria Swanson. John Bowers was married to Marguerite De La Motte and his main claim to fame is that his life and death were the inspiration for the Norman Maine character of "A Star is Born", although neither he nor his wife were as famous as the two depicted in the movie.

Lon Chaney is dealt the wrong card in Wallace Worsley's Ace of Hearts,an Anti-Red thriller written by Govuenor Morris who scripted the brilliant film 'The Penalty'. It's tough to really say what is wrong with Ace of Hearts other than the fact it has interesting set-ups but doesn't go through with them. The movie screams it's subject matter of the Red scare to the viewers but this society never lets it's plans be known to the audience. The pieces are there and we are able to put a loose version of their grand scheme together in our mind but it just doesn't work. I wanted to know what these people were up to and why Chaney, John Bowers, and Leatrice Joy believed in this cause. It is kind of a let down to see these characters as stereotypical looking Communists with unkempt goatees. Chaney's character Farallone is one of the most poorly developed he ever played. I imagine that on the shooting script there was next to nothing written in terms of character description. With a few rewrites the picture could have eliminated him entirely and just had Bowers but Lon is able to make this character interesting and compelling and that is a testament to his great skill.There are no small parts, just small actors. Lon Chaney was as large as they come. Farallone is given depth which he really doesn't deserve. Chaney plays him as a desperately lonely man trying to fill his life with this cause and who wants to win the love of Leatrice Joy's character Lilith. He could have been a stern and unwelcoming but Chaney doesn't play him as that. He is hopelessly shy and can never love but from a far. Unrequited love is the glue that held Chaney's career together but each character who experienced it is never the same as the one before. Farallone is a tragic being and in looking at the picture even in this silly Anti-Red scenario he is very human.Wallace Worsley offers fine direction to the picture. He is able to establish the mood of the secret meetings pitch perfectly and utilizes the camera to build tension in ways you all most don't expect from an early movie. I think he complimented Chaney quite well in the pictures they worked together on. The Penalty and Hunchback are obviously two of his finest works but Ace cannot be completely ignored. The scenes in the rain and where Farallone waits the night on the stairs with the dog are exceptional.Again the thing that brings this movie down is the lack of information we get about this secret society. I realize that the studio was skating on thin ice with the sensors but they can't just give us a plot about a secret society and have undertones about the ways of ancestors without giving us the full picture. These characters have strong beliefs to this cause but we don't know what the cause is and thus the characters are somewhat weakened.

This movie packs quite a punch. To an audience used to a lot of exposition, it might not be that pleasurable, but this movie is pretty good at getting right down and dirty into its story and leaving us asking for more.Lon Chaney heads this brilliant fable about a man caught on the losing end of a love-triangle that exists within a secret society. In typical Lon Chaney fashion, this unrequited love threatens to tear his heart and soul apart, and tension mounts over who he may take with him. As the opposing suitor wins the favor of the girl AND the call to do the secret society's dire bidding, the antiheroic protagonist has to figure out how to win the affections of the worried young woman who is anxious over her lover's dangerous mission.This movie never really quite tells what the secret society is, or why they want to kill "The Man Who Has Lived Too Long," but it's strong visualizations of the love-triangle are very foreboding and lovely, and overhead shots of the table as they pass out the cards searching for "The Ace of Hearts" is both thrillingly suspenseful and a good symbol of objective justice. Even a scene that would seem unnecessary involving a dog shows a lot about the characters and their deeper motivations.Lon Chaney is one of my favorite actors of all time, and while his pantomime may seem overdone today, he always does it with a lot of understanding and pity for his tragic characters. This acting job is no different, as we share with him his loneliness, his depression, and his climactic hysteria. Modern-day actors could stand to learn a lot from him, and modern-day directors could stand to sheer down the expository dialog and tell their stories to such an effect as this movie.--PolarisDiB

...the plot isn't particularly strong to begin with; one has to have a good knowledge of the post-WW1 "Red Scare" to get out of it what the filmmakers intended, and even then it's not much to speak of. However, that actually works in an odd way, since it allows for this picture to be an example of how Lon Chaney's acting talents contributed to his movies. They truly carry the show here, especially the subtleties of his facial expressions. There's also a rare opportunity to see John Bowers, one of the stars of silent cinema whose career came to a screeching halt with the advent of talkies; the character of Norman Maine in the first two Hollywood productions of A STAR IS BORN was in part based on Bowers. It's also interesting to see the original Goldwyn Pictures logo at the beginning of the picture, before the design was only slightly adapted for use by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer three years later...