Lon Chaney's twisted performance as the eponymous Blackbird is much fun, as he literally bends himself all out of shape to pretend himself his good, crippled brother, the Bishop. The tortuous melodrama and love triangles of the rest of the film, however, leaves much to be desired. At least, with a Chaney and Tod Browning collaboration, one is bound to be treated to something at least a little offbeat, and such is the case in "The Blackbird," although it doesn't quite reach the level of their better films, such as "The Unholy Three" (1925) and "The Unknown" (1927), although its ironic twist of fate, or double deception, anticipates the latter.
Besides Chaney's physically-demanding dual roles, there are a couple things I appreciate about this one that reinforces his performance. One is the play-within-the-play puppetry. Blackbird's love interest played by Renée Adorée is a vaudeville performer whose face is superimposed over the pliable body of the puppet, the effect not only being actually a film-within-a-film with the multiple-exposure trick--a photographic technique rather than a theatrical one--but also to mirror Chaney's physical transformations. Adorée's stage performance being explicitly a trick calls attention to the doubled deception supposedly off-stage by Chaney--that of his fooling fellow characters and that of the few moments on screen where he doesn't share the deception with the spectator. Even though the photoplay spends too much time on Chaney and the rest lounging about at the club's bar doing not much of anything and even taking time out for Blackbird to intimidate an interracial couple and for a couple of intertitles to include a racial slur against Chinese characters, I do appreciate the reflexivity of the play-within-play, or film-within-film puppetry.
The other interesting aspect is Owen Moore's character. Whereas Chaney's Blackbird/Bishop continues a charade, including going in and out of his room to change personas as if anticipating Clark Kent going into phone booths to reveal his Superman costume, to maintain his "true identity" as a lowly thief by the protection of his respectable alter ego, Moore's "West End Bertie" has completely adopted his respectable persona as a dandy while still carrying out thefts--and, more than that, he exploits the character for the purpose of stealing from his upper-class acquaintances. The love triangle stuff is bland, especially when an old lover of Blackbird's is thrown in the mix, but the initial fascination and rivalry expressed by Chaney when Moore's character is fully revealed to him is compelling.
If one gets past some particularly bad pacing and overdone melodrama for this Browning-Chaney collaboration, or that Adorée's performer turns out to be disappointingly featherbrained and Moore's monocle-wearing dandy none too interesting, either, after his initial confrontation with Chaney's Blackbird, there's clever, reflexive play going on here. On stage in the puppetry and off-stage in the criminal deception and anchored by Chaney's unparalleled bodily versatility, it's a film about characters who pretend to be something else--actors playing actors--and about the malleability and illusory quality of cinema.
