The film was released by Paramount Pictures, directed, produced, and written by George Loane Tucker, and also stars Thomas Meighan and Betty Compson.

Paramount remade the film in 1932 also titled The Miracle Man with Hobart Bosworth, Chester Morris, John Wray, and Sylvia Sidney.

[3] The film takes place in a small, New England town in 1919 (the Broadway play 1914), where a group of con men plan to use a faith healer to collect money.

The gang consists of Tom Burke (Thomas Meighan), the head of the group; Rose (Betty Compson), a con artist posing as a street walker; "The Dope" (J.M.

The Dope gives up his drug addiction, The Frog gives up his life of crime and takes care of a widow left all alone, and Rose laments King's departure.

[5] Lon Chaney was chosen by director George Loane Tucker, and this was his eighth film as a free-lance artist after leaving Universal Studios in 1918.

His work in the William S. Hart picture, Riddle Gawne established him as a character actor of some notoriety, but it was The Miracle Man that would put both his acting and makeup skills (for which he was famous) to the test.

[6][7] During the film's run at the Orchestra Hall in Chicago, (where it broke all house records), airplanes dropped free tickets and brass coins which read "The Miracle Man is here" printed on one side and "Have faith, keep this" on the other.

Only in the drawings of Dore for Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame can such criminal monstrosities be found...Three of the performances in the picture are sufficiently meritorious to rank with any impersonation so far known to the screen.

---Photoplay[11] "It has been shown that thru the magic of the motion picture the people can be dazzled by pagentry, thrilled by magnificent spectacle and the simulation of dramatic perils.

It is when the secret places of the heart are opened to them that the response is greatest, as to this revelation of the silent power of faith and purity, in a story unfolding in the beauty and fragrance of a flower.

/ We would not envy the man or woman, however intellectual, who could see this simple drama unmoved, who would not confess deriving from it a new sense of kinship with humanity and a deeper understanding of the spiritual forces of existence.

The second clip that survives is part of a short promotional film called The House That Shadows Built (1931) made for Paramount's 20th anniversary of its founding in 1912.

[15] These fragments were featured in the 1995 documentary Lon Chaney: Behind the Mask, produced by Kino International and included on the 2012 DVD release version of The Penalty (1920).