Christensen's second completed project at MGM was Mockery, starring Lon Chaney as a slow-witted Russian peasant who falls in love with an aristocrat in distress (Barbara Bedford) during the Bolshevik Revolution. While fellow Metro directors Tod Browning and Swedish-emigre Victor Sjöström (in Hollywood, Seastrom) both successfully exploited the Chaney star persona and its narrative requirements-betrayal, masochism, revenge, madness, and death-Christensen's original script resisted the formula. Mockery's Slavic beauty-and-the-beast tale exhibits Christensen's legendary chiaroscuro lighting and earned Chaney excellent reviews, but the film disappointed the star's fans and ended the director's relationship with the studio that had imported him from Europe.-Arne Lunde