The New Pictures

Escapade (Daniel M. Angel; DCA), true to its title, fails to quit when it is ahead. A British import based on Roger MacDougall's long-run London stage hit, the film gets on splendidly as long as it rambles puckishly in the classrooms and dormitories, spying on the rebellious antics of Ferndale School's mischievous boys. But when it suddenly converts its juvenile comics into a pack of stern little pacifists campaigning for world peace, it grows about as hilarious as a U.N. committee session on genocide.

Icarus Hampden--so symbolic a character that he never appears onscreen--is a Ferndale upperclassman grown disgusted with bungling adults and their clumsy efforts to avert planetary suicide. To show up his belligerent pacifist father (John Mills), Icarus organizes a Hydraheaded insurrection at Ferndale, torments the school's bedeviled head (Alastair Sim) into a hand-wringing funk, even has a detested master potted in the backside with a homemade blunderbuss. But these exploits are merely diversionary tactics to mask Icarus' Big Idea. The earthshaking plot: Icarus plans to pilot a stolen airplane to Vienna, jar the Big Four powers with a peace petition signed by Ferndale's young peace lovers.

Will Icarus reach Vienna on his borrowed wings? Will the wax seal on his petition melt if he flies too near the sun? Will his soul-stirring document resolve distrust among the Big Four and shock them to their senses? The questions are indisputably important and the lad's pluck is commendable, but the old. happy, skylarking days back at Ferndale were a lot more fun.

Man of a Thousand Faces (Universal-International) is the glittering trademark that Hollywood gave Lon Chaney in his day. He was also ballyhooed as a "mystery man," and the ballyhoo for once told the truth; when Actor Chaney died in 1930. the film colony mourned an enigma. Reticent and secretive, Chaney, son of two deaf-mutes, shrouded his personality, veiled his past as adroitly as he camouflaged his own features under masterful disguises (he was the Encyclopaedia Britannica's expert on movie makeup). Chaney enjoyed the respect of his own associates in the film industry, but he avoided both publicity and public places.

Who was Lon Chaney? This movie, though taking some drastic liberties with his life, more nearly catches his spirit than any previous try at his biography. The subject was certainly no cinch. The actor liked to assure his rare interviewers: "Between pictures, there is no Lon Chaney.'' In a large sense, that was so. There was no Chaney. but there was a solitary fisherman, a bodkin-eyed amateur movie cameraman, a proficient wigmaker, a talented musician. Hollywood's hungriest reader--and always, the actor testing his disguises. One morning, got up as a Chinese laundryman, Chaney boarded a Los Angeles trolley, deliberately courted a quarrel with the conductor and, after convincing himself that he was convincing in his part, soothed the ruffled streetcarman with a cigar and a lofty chat about international affairs.

As The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the organ-playing ghoul of The Phantom of the Opera, the sad clown in He Who Gets Slapped, Chaney proved the possibilities of escaping oneself. As an artist might rush to his easel to sketch the characters he had encountered in a day, Chaney would go home to his makeup kit and superimpose upon his own flesh the faces he had studied in police courts, water front dives and cafes. With putty and plaster, collodion-created scars, false teeth, wigs, facial clamps, cotton stuffing and rubber dilaters, Actor Chaney would be somebody else -- an art he found most expedient in the days when the studios made their daily castings at first glance and strictly according to script-dictated types.

Universal, the studio that first found Lon Chaney popping up in practically any male bit role it was casting, has done justice to the once-famed star it detected.

James Cagney plays the role with sensitivity and understanding. As Chaney's two wives. Dorothy Malone and Jane Greer, though plotted in severe black and white, manage to make grey-toned human beings of themselves. Most important, Lon Chaney is presented in all his frail- ties. He was a jealous, generous, obstinate, softhearted man. Seldom in Hollywood's euphemistic tributes to its own has the tribute included so many ugly realities at the expense of glamorous garnish.

It is always thrilling, according to most movie biography scripts, to die at the very height of one's career. Chaney did just that in 1930, after spreading his versatile voice all over his only sound movie, a talking version of The Unholy Three, in which he played both a ven- triloquist and a fiendish old lady. There was a popular gag going around at that time about insects: "Don't step on it; it may be Lon Chaney in disguise!" Chaney regarded the quip as a true com- pliment to his art.

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