Here’s an experiment for you long-suffering readers: Take your legs and fold them underneath you, so you’re sitting on your feet. How’s that feel?

Now, keeping your feet where they are, hop down on the floor and walk around on your knees. Hey, nicely done! See that fireman’s pole over there? Just walk over there on your knees and slide down it, keeping your feet doubled back. Be sure to land on your knees: no cheating. Good work! How’s everyone feeling?

It’s hard to watch Lon Chaney in “The Penalty” without thinking along these lines. The man famous for playing grotesque, often mutilated characters here plays double amputee Blizzard, whose legs were mistakenly removed above the knee when he was a lad.

For the role Chaney had his legs bound and walked around on his knees in a pair of leather stumps, a long overcoat concealing his feet behind his back. This is about a 90-minute movie and he’s in most of it, stumps and all; his performance is a major feat of endurance. It looks painful. It must have been agonizing.

Chaney’s Blizzard is tortured in more ways than one: as a tyke, he wakes after surgery to overhear his amputator, Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary), getting reamed by a boss-type doctor: “You should not have amputated! You’ve mangled this poor child for life… I shall lie for you.” (Just imagine for a second being Dr. Ferris here. It’s his first serious case, and he seems to feel dreadful. You’d think he’d need years of therapy! But Dr. Ferris pushes forward into a distinguished medical career, so — go him, I guess.)

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