A giant stands in front of a log cabin. He carries a surprisingly dainty rifle in his hands, Next to him, there is a bald infant wearing a dress-like white garment. The infant urges the giant to shoot at a couple standing a dozen yards away in a soft-focus paradisiacal meadow. The couple consists of a beautiful girl and big brutish man who is dragging behind him a wooden mannequin, articulated so as to be limp as a corpse. Locked in a cage in the log cabin, there is a terrifying ape with long, sharp teeth. Thus, a sequence in Tod Browning's garish The Unholy Three (1925). The movie is pulp trash, but it's persuasive -- a fever dream mainlined into the audience. On the surface, the picture doesn't really make sense -- but the surface of a film like this is secondary to the seething obsessions and anxieties that Browning packages in this little, absurdly plotted picture.
We start in Freaks territory: Browning's picture about side-show performers and their revenge on the "normal" (who are physically fit but morally loathsome) was one of his signature films, a picture that was so fundamentally disturbing that it destroyed the director's career. Here the tone is lighter: we see a fat woman fanning herself, a skeleton man looking appropriately morose, a tattooed lady, conjoined twins, a hootchy-cooch dancer and, then, our three principals, Hector, the strong man (Victor McLagen), a raunchy midget who likes like one of the Katzenjammer Kids, and Professor Echo, the ventriloquist, played by the great Lon Chaney. While Echo does his act, his girlfriend, sweet Rosie O'Grady, circulates among the rubes, picking their pockets. It's all suitably sordid and closely observed -- the freaks sell post-cards after their shows, milking the side-show patrons for a few more pennies. A matron tells her son that if he doesn't smoke, he'll be as strong as the strong man -- who immediately lights up a cigarette as soon the crowd departs. (The midget favors big, fat cigars.) There's a fracas and the carnies join forces to fight the rubes. This is no life and, so, the strong man, midget, and Professor Echo form a criminal alliance to prosecute their larceny on a grander scale. The notion is that the three will form a sort of household and operate a pet store named after old lady O'Grady, the grandmother of the winsome pickpocket. Old lady O'Grady is played by Lon Chaney, an actor of amazing versatility who impressively impersonates a sweet old Irish granny. The midget, pushed in a perambulator or playing on the floor with toddler toys, pretends to be an infant. The big thug just stays out of the picture. This grotesque family's criminal enterprise is selling parrots to the wealthy. Echo makes the parrot seem to talk. But once the bird is ensconced in the wealthy person's mansion, the feathered friend becomes mute. The shop-keeper, the nice Mrs. O'Grady (Lon Chaney), then, makes a house call. During the house-call, the bird mysteriously starts speaking again and, while the rich people, are distracted, the mansion is cased, hidden gems located, and, then, stolen. All goes well until the midget and Hector the strong man attempt a home invasion on their own. They kill the tycoon and injure his three-year-old daughter. The "Unholy Three", then, decide to pin the crime on Rosie O'Grady's milquetoast boyfriend -- they put the contraband in his closet and, then, flee town, hiding in a cabin in the mountains. One the beasts for sale in the pet shop is a very nasty-looking chimpanzee -- what the primate is doing in a bird shop is a question the movie leaves unanswered. The boyfriend goes on trial, facing the electric chair. Rosie O'Grady loves her weakling boyfriend to the extent that she is willing to offer herself sexually to Lon Chaney (who secretly loves the winsome girl). Touched by her devotion, Chaney leaves the cabin, goes to the trial, and "throws" his voice to confess to the crime while the bespectacled and timorous boyfriend is silently mouthing the Lord's Prayer on the witness stand. (Why this is done is completely unclear to me.) Back at the cabin, the ape gets loose with predictably dire consequences for Hector, the strong man, and the malevolent midget. (Rosie escapes.) Rosie's boyfriend is acquitted and, improbably enough, Professor Echo is forgiven for his crimes. Rosie embraces her boyfriend while Lon Chaney suppresses a tear and shrugs off his own sadness, returning to the sawdust and tinsel of the sideshow. I've summarized the plot to show that it is completely idiotic. But, there are elements of this bargain-basement family melodrama that are deeply unsettling: Lon Chaney spends half of the movie cross-dressing -- he wears an apron and skirts even when he's not impersonating O'Grady's Irish granny. The midget is purely malignant -- we see him creeping up a rope and, then, crawling through the transom to rob a house or plant the incriminating evidence in the hapless boyfriend's apartment. There are several bravura suspense scenes that probably influenced Hitchcock -- in one, the midget pretending to be a toddler plays with a toy elephant that apparently dispenses peanuts (the elephant is also crammed with stolen rubies); this all takes place under the nose of dim-witted detective who gobbles peanuts from the elephant. In the court scene, Chaney sends a message to the feckless boyfriend's lawyer, but no one reads it -- everyone plays with the message, folds it drops it on the floor, waves it around but doesn't see the writing until, of course, the last possible moment. There's something filthy and subversive about the film's parody of the nuclear family -- the family's totemic creatures are the mindless parrot, an automaton repeating what the master of the house has said, and the vicious, brutish ape locked away in a cabinet, the spirit of misrule and anarchy and rebellion waiting to erupt.
Silent film audiences seem to have enjoyed interludes that I will call "facial arias" -- these are improvisations in which the actor demonstrates the depth of his distress or rage or fear by expressive facial contortions. Chaney, of course, was the great master of this art and, on several occasions, he warps his big ugly face into sorrow, then, fear, then, shame and, at last, rage -- it's a fantastic spectacle. Chaney specialized in playing tender brutes -- that is, sentimental monsters; he's too ugly to get the girl for whom he yearns, but his love is true and, so, in the end, we identify with him and feel sorrow for his character. (This is best demonstrated in another really excellent film 1926's Tell it to the Marines in which Chaney's tough drill sergeant loves the girl but, of course, can't win her -- the conventionally handsome hero ends up with the heroine; this movie has no make-up stunts but is still fantastically compelling on the strength of Chaney's acting). Most surprising, however, is Mae Busch playing the pick-pocket and, then, damsel in distress. I know Mae Busch, her hair platinum-colored, as the improbably beautiful but cruel wife of Oliver Hardy in a number of two-reelers and feature films from the 30's -- most notably the ineffable Sons of the Desert. In The Unholy Three, Busch sports a brunette bob, a bit like the sleek helmet coiffure of Louise Brooks and she is tremendous -- when she concludes that she will have to sleep with Chaney to save her boyfriend, her facial gymnastics are astounding. She grits her teeth, cries, twists her lips into expressions of pure panic, and, finally, adopts a beatific expression like the Virgin Mary. I've never seen anything like it.
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