'The Wonderful Chance' is even worse than my IMDb colleague Arne Andersen has made it seem. I know from off-site conversations with Arne that he's a major Valentino fan; unfortunately, he perceives this as a Valentino movie, when in fact Rudy has very much a supporting role. Also, Arne too kindly describes the plot of this film as 'absurdist' (as in Ionesco or Pirandello) when in fact it's merely absurd (as in stupid).
Semi-handsome Eugene O'Brien plays a hard-boiled yegg named Swagger Barlow: a safe-cracker who's just gone on the out after a long stretch inside. Barlow has discovered that he's (very conveniently) the exact double of Lord Birmingham, an English peer. (Lord Birmingham is from a wealthy blue-blood family, but evidently they couldn't afford to buy him a forename: he's just Lord Birmingham, in the same spirit as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Earl Hines. Barlow doesn't seem to have a forename either; maybe they're twins, separated at birth.) Just when we've recovered from that first coincidence, here comes a bigger one. Lord Birmingham is kidnapped ... so Barlow steps into the breach and the breeches. The safe-cracker moves into the Ritz (a Ritz cracker?) and he is straight away accepted as the English peer.
This premise is just vaguely plausible in a silent film, since we're spared the ordeal of hearing a Yank actor attempting a cut-glass English accent. O'Brien merely speaks his lines as needed, and most of the audience probably don't even think about his accent. (In 1920, most American film-goers had likely never heard an English accent: I know that the converse was true.) Still, I couldn't accept that a working-class American, raised in poverty or the lower classes, would be an exact double of an Englishman raised in privilege since birth. I'll rate this mess 4 out of 10, mostly for its sheer audacity.
