Picturing Disability

I was discussing this book with a colleague and mentioned that I was writing a chapter that included horror and gangster movies. He was taken aback. He wanted to know: “What do these movies have to do with disability?” As I show, people with both feigned and actual disabilities are central to horror and gangster genres as well as to other types of films featuring murderers and other perpetrators of violence. In this chapter, I focus on disabilities and film. Killers and other evildoers are the main topics of discussion, but I end with a brief look at other movie images of disability (Bogdan et al. 1982).¹¹

The still shown in illustration 8.1 was produced in conjunction with the release of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This 1923 film was the most popular pre-Disney adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel. It was Universal Studio’s jewel of that season, its most successful silent film. The still shows Lon Chaney in the role of Quasimodo, a stooped-over, half-blind, barely verbal, deaf, persecuted bell ringer of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral. With him is Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy. Quasimodo had kidnapped Esmeralda earlier in the film and is being whipped for that transgression. In the still picture, Esmeralda, showing pity for Quasimodo, is bringing him water. The film presents a sympathetic portrait of the leading character, but his daunting disability nevertheless estranges him from others and eventually results in his death.

Moviemakers produced stills and posters for the same reason they created movies: for monetary gain. The movie industry was first and foremost a business, and its publicity favored hype and misrepresentation over accuracy. Hundreds of thousands of studio stills were produced, and although they are not as collectible as other forms of photography, some movie fans bought and kept them. They provide a source to examine visual depictions of people with disabilities in movie promotion and correspondingly in the movies. In this chapter, I concentrate on stills from the early years of the movie industry.

The term monster is most commonly used today to refer to strange and frightening creatures that injure and kill. In scientific terminology, it means an animal with a congenital deformity. In the language of medicine, it designates a fetus or infant with a severe disability. These different definitions overlap in stills as well as in movies; the dangerous characters commit appalling and ghastly acts, but they are also scarred, deformed, maimed, and mentally impaired and have other physical and mental disabilities. Movies link physical and mental differences with murder, terror, and violence. Nowhere is this more evident than in horror films.

Horror films—movies that strive to stimulate fear, terror, shock, and disgust in viewers by featuring ugly, dangerous creatures who kill and maim people—appeared in the late 1800s at the start of the film industry. The earliest examples were short-subject scary movies shown at dime museums and on the midway at expositions and fairs (Dennett 1997). The midway varieties were organized in much the same way freak shows were: an outside talker and ticket seller lured patrons into the show tent.

Although horror films were sometimes censored for their excesses, they have always enjoyed a strong following. For a long time, actors became stars by playing evil, ugly perpetrators of violence. Lon Chaney (1883–1930), the “Man of a Thousand Faces,” is a prime example (Mallory 2009). He is never discussed in disability studies circles but is an important figure in the history of disability. Both of Chaney’s parents were deaf and did not communicate orally. His empathy for outsiders, his pantomime skills, and his closeness to people with disabilities are attributed to his early family life. This experience translated to incredible dramatic and scary but sympathetic depictions of movie monsters.

Chaney played in more than 150 films but is probably best known for his roles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (illus. 8.1) and The Phantom of the Opera. He won fame by playing physically deformed, depraved brutes in both. Known for his ability to distort his body, he spent hours accomplishing his metamorphosis using pounds of makeup and other appearance-altering devices (illus. 8.3). His makeup artistry has been heralded as a pioneer contribution to film production.

In his role as Quasimodo, the frightful, crooked, bug-eyed, and in other ways deformed bell ringer in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Chaney was the classic disabled victim of others’ violence who himself turns to violence. For that film, he wore a hump that weighed more than fifty pounds, twisted his torso, and caused him great pain, which he said he endured so he might empathize with Quasimodo.

It is a common plot in horror films for beauty, an attractive young woman, to be the victim of the monster’s rage. The erotic overtones behind the monster-meets-beautiful-woman theme imply an association between certain disabilities and a propensity for sexual assault. At the same time, victims such as the Phantom’s heroine are often people who befriend the murderer (illus. 8.5). We are told in one movie, for example, “The werewolf instinctively kills the thing it loves the best” (The Wolf Man, 1941).

Although Chaney’s son, Lon Chaney Jr. (1906–73), lacked his transforming skills, he followed his father’s example by appearing in many horror films and is probably best known for his performance in The Wolf Man.³³

Boris Karloff (1887–1969) had one of the longest acting careers as a movie monster. He played a variety of roles, but his most famous was Frankenstein’s monster. Like Chaney, Karloff spent hours in makeup preparation. He played the role first in 1931. In illustration 8.6, the monster is shown being tormented by Fritz, a hunchbacked dwarf who steals bodies from cemeteries to supply parts for Dr. Frankenstein’s creations.

The pairing of a monster and a person with a disability appears in most of Karloff’s films. In the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, the monster teams up with a blind hermit. Karloff continued the series with Son of Frankenstein (1939), in which Bela Lugosi plays a crazed, deformed shepherd grave-digger, Igor, who orders the monster to kill. In the 1945 film The House of Frankenstein, Karloff is a doctor killed by Daniel, a psychopathic, hunchbacked killer.

Most of the themes in the movies Karloff did in his fifty-year career were common ones in horror movies. In 1932, he portrayed Morgan, the scar-faced, hulking butler who becomes homicidal when drunk. Karloff also often played a mad scientist. In the 1940 film Dr. Adrian and the Ape, Frances, a paralyzed woman, becomes the object of Dr. Adrian’s concern. In searching for a cure for polio, he seeks the spinal fluid of apes. Linking lower primates with handicap and violence picks up on the Darwinian theme present in earlier pictures.

In 1945, Karloff played the grave robber in The Body Snatcher, the movie adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story. In that role, he supplies dead bodies for doctors’ experiments. After an unsuccessful attempt to cure a paralyzed child, they realize their failure and take up killing (illus. 8.7).

In Dr. Adrian and the Ape, the violence is not carried out by the person in the wheelchair, but for that person. But in 1965 Karloff did play a wheelchair-bound scientist who turns his family as well as himself into monsters. As late as 1971, he played a famous blind sculptor who uses human bones for his work.

Horror films had their origins on the midways of the amusement industry, and as Dennis Gifford (1973), a historian of the horror film, notes, the association of horror and deformity was likely a product of the freak show. Many horror movies have a circus or carnival as their setting, and the sideshow provides their key characters. In The Unknown (1927), for instance, Lon Chaney plays an armless knife thrower. But no film is more transparent in linking disabled freak show performers with horror than MGM’S 1932 film Freaks. Tod Browning, the creator of Freaks, employed Barnum & Bailey’s sideshow attractions—including three people with microcephaly—for the film. It ends with the disabled actors creeping and crawling through the mud on a dark and rainy night to take revenge on the person who has done one of them wrong, turning her into a “freak” exhibit like themselves.

Horror films often provide psychological explanations for the frequent acts of violence committed by the people with disabilities in them. In the classic Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), actor Lionel Atwill, shown in illustration 8.9, plays the mad, deformed, wheelchair-ridden sculptor who turns to making wax figures out of human bodies for his museum. Early in the movie, a fire leaves him paralyzed, so he seeks revenge. The message in this movie, as with others, is that people with disabilities hate themselves because of their circumstance and seek to get back at the world for their condition. The theme was so well received by the movie-going public that it was used again in the 1950s version titled The House of Wax and starring Vincent Price.

In most cases, the roles of people with disabilities in horror movies are played by people feigning disabilities. An exception is Rondo Hatton, who had acromegly, a rare body-altering disease that often manifests in adulthood. Hatton was cast in The Pearl of Death (1944) as the Hoxton Creeper, a mentally retarded, deformed madman. He was so well received in that role that he played other Creeper-like roles. A close-up of Hatton’s face was usually featured in the stills for these movies (illus. 8.10).

Most of my examples of the relationship between disability and horror movies include the link between physical anomalies and violence. In many other movies, however, the villains are not physically impaired; they are mentally ill. In these films, mental illness goes hand and hand with murder, and mental hospitals are the dormitories of death. The examples are legion. Perhaps the most memorable, popular, and acclaimed film of the genre is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho. The title itself screams out the link between mental illness and murder. The film received four Academy Award nominations and spawned two sequels. Interestingly, the stills and posters promoting the film do not feature the mentally deranged motel owner, Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins. It was more affecting to show the terror on the faces of Janet Leigh, the victim, and others rather than emphasize the deranged person’s visage (illus. 8.11).

Beyond horror movies, other film genres link disability with evil, revenge, violence, torture, and murder. It is sometimes difficult to differentiate among horror films, murder mysteries, gangster and adventure movies, and other films with wicked and vicious characters. For example, Psycho has been characterized as a mystery, a thriller, and a horror movie.

Lon Chaney jumped from one genre to another to play evil killers. Perhaps his most famous gangster movie is The Penalty (1920). In it, he plays Blizzard, a notorious underworld figure. As in his horror film roles, he endured body-altering devices to capture Blizzard’s disabled figure. Chaney bound his legs behind him, harnessing his feet to his thighs, and inserted his knees into leather cups that gave the appearance of missing legs (illus. 8.12).

The plot depicts Blizzard as a deranged amputee who lost his legs in an unnecessary childhood operation. He becomes obsessed with taking revenge on the rich and powerful, including the doctor who performed the operation (illus. 8.13). This obsession leads Blizzard to a career as a vicious criminal and mob leader. Tormented by his disability, he kidnaps the surgeon who amputated his legs as well as the physician’s daughter’s fiancé. In a morbidly grotesque turn, he has the fiancé’s legs grafted to his own stumps. In one scene, Blizzard poses for an artist who is doing a bust of the devil. The narrative is resolved with a bizarre twist when Blizzard undergoes brain surgery that cures him of his viciousness and criminal tendencies.

In the adventure film West of Zanzibar (1928), Chaney plays a similar role. Publicity for the film stated, “Fate made him a crawling thing, a crippled monster. So he took his revenge out on life” (illus. 8.14). Chaney, however, did not have a monopoly on the role of the “crippled killer.” Walter Huston played the part of a paralyzed tyrant, “Dead Legs” Flint, who rules his African kingdom from a wheelchair in Kongo (1932).

Many films take their plots from famous works of fiction. Lenny in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is the archetypal mentally retarded, hulking brute. Unable to control his own strength, he first kills a puppy and then a young woman. In the end, Lenny’s sidekick, a nondisabled man, shoots Lenny in the back of the head to protect Lenny from the painful death he is destined to face at the hands of the mob that pursues him. Lon Chaney Jr. is shown in illustration 8.15 playing the role of Lenny in the 1939 film adapted from the novella. This still captures the murder scene in the film.

Film renditions of Melville’s Moby Dick depict Ahab, the obsessive one-legged captain of a whaling ship, seeking revenge on his crippler, the great white whale Moby Dick. In the 1956 version, the popular actor Gregory Peck plays Captain Ahab. One of the stills produced to advertise the film shows Ahab battling the mighty whale as he clings to its side. The captain’s wooden leg is prominent in the picture (illus. 8.16).

The limb-missing, patched-eyed pirates of Treasure Island are cloned again and again in film imitations of adventure stories. Following the plot of the classic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson, the villain, Long John Silver, played by Wallace Beery in the 1934 version of the film, displays his missing leg as a symbol of his wickedness (illus. 8.17).

Although horror and gangster films provide the most dramatic illustrations of the use of disability in films, filmmakers capitalized on disability in other ways. Melodramatic films used disability’s ability to evoke sympathy.

The recipient of the sympathy is not always the person who has the disability. Heidi, a film about an eight-year-old orphan, was the number one box office hit in 1937. The title role was played by the most popular child actress of the time, Shirley Temple. At the beginning of the film, Heidi is living with her grandfather in his remote mountain cottage. But then she is taken from her idyllic life to live in the city as the working companion of Klara, a spoiled, physically disabled rich girl who gets around in a wheelchair. Heidi makes the best of her situation but is unhappy and longs for her grandfather. Because of Heidi’s care and positive disposition, Klara becomes more cheerful and even begins to walk. The housekeeper, who wants to keep Klara dependant, sells Heidi to gypsies. Heidi is eventually reunited with her grandfather. Disabled Klara provides the perfect needy and unhappy person to make Heidi the sweet and loving star character that moviegoers loved. In illustration 8.18, we see Heidi (Temple) patiently teaching the disabled rich girl to walk.

Thousands of films used the same theme: disability in conjunction with sympathy and compassion. In countless film adaptations of A Christmas Carol, Tiny Tim, a physically impaired child, is the sweet innocent who is at first the object of Scrooge’s meanness and later of his charity.

Edith Fellows, a child star who appeared in the Our Gang comedy films, played a quite different role in the tear jerker City Streets (1938).⁴⁴ She wrings the audience’s hearts as Winnie, a poor, crippled, wheelchair-bound orphan whose guardian is a kindly storekeeper, Uncle Joe (illus. 8.19). To pay for an operation that is supposed to cure the orphan girl, Joe sells his store, thereby becoming almost destitute, so that the state social workers take her away to an orphanage. Joe continues to rally to get her back but is so distraught by the situation he collapses in the street. Joe’s illness can be overcome only if he has the will to live. Winnie, knowing this, walks to his bedside and sings his favorite song, “Santa Maria.” She acquires the full use of her legs, and Joe buys a catering truck. Although a box office success, the film was panned by critics as going well beyond the bounds of acceptable melodrama.

Another tearjerker with a wheelchair-bound central character but a different plot, one centered around unrequited love, is Beware of Pity (1946). The Austrian Lieutenant Marek befriends a beautiful baroness in a wheelchair, Edith, who is permanently disabled from a spinal injury she received from a fall from a horse. His attachment to her is out of pity, but she is in love with him. When she declares her love to him, Marek, guilt ridden, pretends to love her and agrees to marry her. When Edith hears about Marek’s true feelings and that he has publicly denied their engagement, she becomes distraught. The movie ends with Edith wheeling herself to the edge of a rooftop terrace in her family’s mountainside mansion and flinging herself to her death. In the still advertising photo, we see paraplegic Edith with the handsome lieutenant on the terrace at the family mansion (illus. 8.20).

Although not as prominent as in horror, gangster, adventure, and melodrama movies, disability was also used in some films to get a laugh. The earliest such films featured fraudulent beggars as a source of humor. In Fake Beggar (1898), a “legless” man begging on the street stands on newfound legs to retrieve a coin that misses his cup. Once discovered to be a fake, he is chased by the police (Norden 1994, 14).

Dwarfs have a long history of appearing in movies. Although a few have appeared in serious dramas, even horror movies (such as Freaks), most have been cast as comic figures who are the brunt of jokes. Little people have appeared in many films that people would classify as comedies or, more pointedly, where they are characters whom a viewer cannot take seriously. The epitome of this sort of typecasting is the Munchkins in the 1939 Academy Award–winning, blockbuster classic The Wizard of Oz. One hundred and twenty-two little people—or midgets, as they were called then—were recruited from around the country to appear as the cute and laughable inhabitants of Munchkin Land. When Dorothy (Judy Garland) arrives in Munchkin Land, the timid Munchkins welcome her with song: “Ding-Dong! The Witch is dead” and “We’re off to see the Wizard.”

Two stills featuring Dorothy and the Munchkins were widely distributed to promote the film. One shows Dorothy with a delegation of Munchkins led by the mayor of Munchkin Land. Dressed in whimsical outfits consisting of oversize jackets with tails, extralarge bow ties, and tall, polka-dotted silk hats, they were great hits (illus. 8.21).

A 1938 film with an “all-midget” cast was the mock Western Terror of Tiny Town. Billy Curtis, the mayor of Munchkin City in the Wizard of Oz, starred as the good guy. It was a comedy that used a conventional cowboy/cowgirl story combined with little people to get laughs. The small-size cowboys gallop around on Shetland ponies and enter the local saloon by walking under the swinging doors. The film includes the convention that the good guy wears white, the bad guy black; the heroine is in danger, and the good guy and the bad guy engage in a fistfight.

Perhaps the most widely acclaimed comedy to feature disability is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In this satirical dark comedy, physical disability was combined with a mental disorder to make for box office success. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Peter Sellers.

Dr. Stangelove is a parody on America’s Cold War fears of a doomsday nuclear war. The film’s plot centers around a launched preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union set in motion by an insane US Air Force general. In the Pentagon war room, politicians and generals frantically try to stop the bombing mission. Peter Sellers plays Dr. Strangelove, the mad, wheelchair-using, former Nazi, nuclear scientist, and presidential adviser who makes outrageous observations and suggestions about the crisis. (Sellers also plays two other roles in the film, a British captain and the US president.) In the widely distributed movie still reproduced in illustration 8.22, Strangelove lifts himself from his wheelchair while a barrage of nuclear explosions go off.

1. For an extensive and comprehensive look at cinema depictions of people with disabilities, see Norden 1994. Also see Chivers and Markotic 2010.

2. The association of disability with violence in images did not start with movies. Age-old folktales contained such portrayals and were illustrated with graphic depictions when they appeared in written form. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scientists embraced theories linking physiology and mental defects with crime. In the late 1800s, the influential Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso embraced and popularized such theories. Greatly influenced by Darwin, he and his followers saw criminals as a lower species of human being. He concentrated on discovering criminals through physical examination. His writing contains illustrations showing examples of criminals with asymmetrical skulls, flattened noses, large ears, enormous jaws, high cheekbones, and narrow eyes.

3. Chaney’s and his son’s contributions to the history of film was acknowledged with US postage stamps in 1991 and 1997.

4. Fellows’s role in Bing Crosby’s Pennies from Heaven (1936) led to a series of leading roles such as the one in City Streets.