London After Midnight (1927)

London After Midnight (1927) aka The Hypnotist is a silent mystery film with horror overtones produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

The film stars Lon Chaney, Marceline Day, Conrad Nagel, Henry B. Walthall, and Polly Moran and was directed by Tod Browning. It is also a lost film, quite possibly the most famous and eagerly sought of all lost films. The last known copy was destroyed in a fire in an MGM film vault in 1967. 

The setting of the film is 1920s London. Sir Roger Balfour is found shot to death in his home. Inspector Burke (Lon Chaney, Sr.) of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate. The suspects are Williams (the butler), Sir James Hamlin (Henry B. Walthall) and his nephew, Arthur Hibbs (Conrad Nagel). A suicide note is found and the case is supposedly closed. Five years later, the old residence of Balfour is taken up by a man in a beaver-skin hat, with large fangs and gruesome, sunken eyes. His assistant is a ghostly woman, with flowing robes and raven black hair. Could it be Balfour, returned from the dead?

Chaney's makeup for the film is noteworthy, for the sharpened teeth and the hypnotic eye effect he achieved with special wire fittings which he wore like monocles. Based on surviving accounts, he purposefully gave the "vampire" character an absurd quality, because it was the film's Scotland Yard detective character (also played by Chaney) in a disguise. 

Surviving stills show this was the only time Chaney used his famous makeup case as an on-screen prop. The film grossed almost $500,000 at the box office, becoming the most successful collaborative film between Chaney and Browning. However, accounts by filmgoers and critics who saw the film before its destruction in 1967 (including film historian William K. Everson) suggest it was not one of Chaney and Browning's strongest films. Unfortunately, it is now a lost film. 

No copies of the film are known to exist, although there has been an attempt at a reconstruction utilizing the script and publicity shots. Browning later remade the film, with some changes to the plot, as Mark of the Vampire (Lionel Barrymore plays the police inspector and Bela Lugosi portrays the vampire). 

A novelization of the film was written and published in 1928 by Marie Coolidge-Rask, but this book is itself a rarity.

The film was used as a part of the defense for a man accused of murdering a woman in Hyde Park, London in 1928. He claimed Chaney's performance drove him temporarily insane, but his plea was rejected and he was convicted of the crime. The last known print of the film was stored by MGM in Vault #7. In 1967, an electrical fire broke out in the vault that destroyed countless films from the silent era, including this last known print.