Cinema: The New Pictures, Aug. 26, 1957

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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.