My role of Blizzard in The Penalty was even more difficult than the cripple I played in The Miracle Man. I had to impersonate a man whose legs had been amputated from the knee down. To obtain that, my legs were strapped back in a specially made harness. It cut my circulation off, and it caused me unspeakable suffering. The pain was so atrocious that I could only film for a few minutes at a time, and I had to undergo a heart massage after every scene. I was very glad when filming was over, but I’m not at all sorry to have played that role. The results on screen were very convincing; still today a lot of people refuse to believe that I’m not legless.

Lon Chaney, in The Picturegoer, August 1922

The Penalty is the story of a master criminal who concocts a plot to take over the world. […}Variety remarked, “It is not a great feature.” (Chaney’s second wife, Hazel, had been previously married to a men with no legs, and the idea for The Penalty was said to have come from that source). How many actors today could make a film like this work at any level? The idea of a legless man who builds a pristine operating room in an elaborate underground chamber, with foreign slaves working away in it, is simply nuts. But Chaney does make it work. He keeps his acting minimal in the central scenes; he just extrudes inner rage. Nothing more is needed.

Jeanine Basinger, Silent Stars, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999