The Unknown!

Now that's a movie! The Unknown, a 1927 silent movie starring Lon Chaney was thought for some time to have been lost. Thank goodness it was rediscovered. I've read that it is an outstanding early "horror" outing by the great man. I got a chance to see this last night and again this morning and I was simply blown away by the overwhelming power of Chaney's performance as "Alonzo the Armless". His intensity is utterly fascinating. I cannot frankly remember a more powerful performance on film. Chaney's face is able to communicate the finest of shifts in mood and thought, making him ideal for the silent form.


This is a tale of old Spain and a circus which fall on bad times after the murder of its owner. The central tale is about the obsessive love Alonzo has for Nanon, the daughter of the owner who doesn't realize that Alonzo is quite literally madly in love with her. She on the other hand seems quite the catch for an armless man since she has a dread of being groped. Another member of the circus, a strong man named Malabar loves her too and that's the rub.


I don't want to say too much about this absorbing and intense movie. Rather let me just show it. Here in six segments is the complete movie. If you've seen it before, I'm sure you'll know what the great surprises are, and if perchance you haven't, the less said the better.

Here is The Unknown directed by Tod Browning and starring Long Chaney and a very fetching Joan Crawford.








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The Unholy Three!

Turner Classic put on a gaggle of Lon Chaney flicks last week and I was able to capture most of them on DVR. I began plowing through them yesterday and picked the first Tod Browning and Lon Chaney match-up for MGM called The Unholy Three.

If you want a pretty good summation of this 1925 movie check out this link. For my purposes, I'll just assume most of you have seen it and plow ahead. Spoilers are in effect.


Lon Chaney as the ventriloquist Echo is pretty interesting at first. The scheme between him and Harry Earles and Victor McLaglen is daffy as can be. Their standing as outsiders seems to make them criminals, or that's the suggestion I take from it. Also their souls are pretty dark, and that's likely less a comment on their physical natures and the result of same than the universal nature of man. We're all pretty shabby critters according to this flick.

I was disappointed in how much of the action of the story was off screen. This is a heist movie in which we never see an actual heist. That's a problem, as it's the physical natures of the men which allow them to commit crime, but we never actually see them physically do it.

Some of the scenes in this movie also drag terribly. Long after the essence of a scene has been communicated we get minutes of rather pointless exchanges between less than compelling characters while apparently off screen very intriguing things are going on. Some strange storytelling choices are made in this one for sure.


Echo's transformation at the end is not very convincing actually. He overcome by guilt for what he and his cohorts have done, but he doesn't actually have to pay the price and that undermines his transformation. The narrative seems to demand he pay a greater price, but inexplicably he doesn't.

The less said about the "giant ape" the better. It's a clever attempt at a solution but the scale work doesn't succeed actually.

If the point of this movie was to present a cache of peculiar images, it does so, but when those images are required to assemble into a compelling tale, they alas fail to comply.

This silent version of The Unholy Three is interesting for Chaney enthusiasts, but it's not really a very grand movie at all.

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