The Unknown (1927, USA)

(Spoiler alert.) As to be expected from a silent film directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney, The Unknown is an odd, interesting movie. The movie opens with a title card stating that "they tell (the story) in Madrid and they say it is true," but in all likelihood, this factoid is based on effect, not fact. Mostly forgotten and seldom screened, most written references to The Unknown, aside from pointing out that the movie features a very young Joan Crawford in one of her earliest career building roles, also point out that the movie is considered as one of Browning's and Chaney's weirder projects. When viewed in perspective with The Unholy Three (1925) and some of Browning's later solo projects, however, The Unknown fits right in with the director's oeuvre and is, in any event, far less weird than the truly disturbing classic Freaks (1932), Likewise, it is much more interesting than the eternally overrated Dracula (1931). The Unknown is less a horror movie than simply an over-the-top, effectively perverse and disturbing drama with strangely camp undertones. (Ignore the weirder aspects of the movie and it could simply be described as a gypsy circus love triangle.) As is often in a film directed by Browning, the direction is less impressive than the subject, story or acting. Chaney, as always, is excellent. His face is amazingly expressive even if, due to the passage of time and changing attitude in regards to acting, he occasionally seems to over-emote. The ease in which he uses his feet as substitute hands is truly startling, and looks as if he had done so his entire life. And Ms. Crawford, decades before she had adopted children to whip with wire hangers and centuries before she developed her mutant eyebrows and lips, is extremely attractive. (But considering her later form, she seems oddly flat-chested.) In The Unknown she is cast as Nanon, the daughter of the director of a traveling gypsy circus who assists the "armless" Alonzo (Lon Chaney) in his knife throwing and shooting show. Malabar the (by today's standards muscleless) muscleman (played by the forgotten silent-film leading man Norman Kerry) is in love with her, as is Alonzo. But Nanon, due probably to late night visits from her Dad as a child, cannot stand the touch of men. As she says early in the movie: "Men! Men's hands! How I hate them!" (Nowadays the acceptable solution to that problem would be to become a lesbian, but back then the love triangle naturally remains heterosexual.) Unaware of Alonzo's love, Nanon simply sees him as her great confidant. Also unknown to Nanon—and everyone else but Cojo (John George), his midget helper—Alonzo actually has hands and arms, which he keeps strapped down and hidden. Alonzo uses his "armlessness" as a cover to permit his criminal activities to go undisturbed and undiscovered, especially since his deformed hands—he has double thumbs—leave such a tell-all clue. Alonzo ends up killing Nanon's father when the fat, obnoxious circus director wants to beat Alonzo for fraternizing with his daughter and, instead, discovers Alonzo's secret. The police are unable to find the two-thumbed killer and the circus moves on, leaving all three of the triangle behind. Alonzo realizes that if Nanon ever found out about his hands and thumbs she would know he was the murderer of her father. Hopelessly in love with her, he blackmails a surgeon with a dirty past to amputate his arms, but during the weeks he is in convalescence, the patient and loving Malabar works away at Nanon's phobia until she is not only a willing recipient of his touch but has agreed to marry him. (Back when this film was made, "marry" was naturally a euphemism for "bonk like rabbits," for there is no other logical reason for the guys' insistent desires to "marry" the gal instead of simply porking her.) Needless to say, Alonzo is more than shocked when he returns to her in his new, truly armless state…
The Unknown might have been somewhat frightening and suspenseful once upon a time, but today the movie scares less than it simply unsettles or amazes. Featuring an excellent Chaney and an effective Crawford, the movie is an interesting, strange blast from the past, but hardly a magnum opus. Its reputation as a "forgotten masterpiece" definitely relies more on its past general unavailability than on the actual film itself, but it is nonetheless both engrossing and entertaining. Now that it can occasionally be found on late night television and on DVD, it is definitely worth watching.