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Blindbargain

A Blind Bargain is a 1922 American silent horror film starring Lon Chaney and Raymond McKee, released through Goldwyn Pictures. The film was directed by Wallace Worsley and is based on Barry Pain's 1897 novel The Octave of Claudius. The film, which features Wallace Beery in an unbilled cameo as an ape-man, is now considered lost.

Plot[]

The film is a contemporary (1920s, though the book was published in 1897) picture that takes place in New York City. The story involves a mad scientist who turns circumstances on a young man to do his bidding.

Robert Sandell (McKee), despondent over his bad luck as a writer and his mother's declining health, attacks and attempts to rob a theatergoer, Dr. Lamb (Chaney), a sinister, fanatical physician living in the suburbs of New York. Lamb takes the boy to his home, learns his story, and agrees to perform an operation on Mrs. Sandell (Virginia True Boardman) on one consideration – that Robert shall, at the end of eight days, deliver himself to the doctor to do with as he will, for experimental purposes. Frantic with worry over his dying mother's condition, Robert agrees.

Mother and son take up their residence in the Lamb home, where Robert is closely watched, not only by the doctor, but also by his wife (Fontaine La Rue) and a grotesque hunchback (Chaney, in a dual role), whom Robert learns afterwards is the result of one of the doctor's experiments.

Dr. Lamb, anxious to keep his hold on Robert, not only gives him spending money, but also assists him in having his book published through Wytcherly, head of a publishing company. Robert meets Wytcherly's daughter Angela (Jacqueline Logan) and promptly falls in love.

In the meantime, the days are slipping by to the time of the experiment. Robert has been warned by Mrs. Lamb and the hunchback that great danger threatens him. At dawn, they show him as a warning a mysterious underground vault in which is a complete operating room and a tunnel of cages in which are strange prisoners – previously failed experiments of Lamb's. In agony and fear, Robert goes to the physician and tries to buy himself out of the bargain, for his book has been published and he is now a successful writer. As yet one day remains before the time limit is up, but the doctor, realizing his victim may try to escape, seizes him and straps him to the operating table. He is rescued by Mrs. Lamb, the hunchback releases a cage door, and the doctor is himself brought to a horrible end at the hands of an ape-man wrecked mentally by the doctor's experiments.

Finally freed from the terms of his "blind bargain", Robert returns to his home to learn that his writings have met with success and that Angela waits for him at the marriage ceremony.

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