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Tod Browning was a singular director in many ways. He didn't have a first-rate plastic imagination -- his images are rarely
memorable for their purely cinematic power -- but he had an eye for pictorial oddities that are hard to forget. His narrative
style was often sloppy, yet he had a knack for creating stories that are engaging as surreal fantasies despite their outrageous
implausibility or clumsy development. Because of this, and because his stories were often perfect vehicles for Lon Chaney,
he must be regarded as the central director in the silent era's genre of the grotesque -- even though he lacked the capacity
to elevate the genre to its full potential as a poetic art form, in the way a Seastrom or a Brenon or even a Worsley (at his
best) could.
As Michael F. Blake points out in his commentary on the recent TCM release of "The Unknown" (part of "The
Lon Chaney Collection"), Browning liked to start with a compelling central character -- in this case a man with no arms
-- and then build a story around that character. "The Unknown" displays the virtues and drawbacks of such an approach.
Chaney's character in the film is deprived of the use of his arms for much of his time on screen, and further circumscribed
physically because his feet were often doubled by another actor. In a singularly insightful comment in the Brownlow documentary
on Chaney, included in the TCM set, Blake compares Chaney's use of his hands to music -- and indeed there is a musical, dance-like
element to all of Chaney's movements on film. In most of "The Unknown" Chaney's ability to "dance" is
muffled. Which means he must rely most of the time on his face. For Chaney, and the movie, it is enough.
In a sense, the whole picture as a drama exists to set up the final moment when Alonzo realizes he has had his arms amputated
for nothing. And this moment -- an extended passage in which Chaney executes a little symphony of grand emotion using his
face and eyes alone -- is one of the most astonishing in all of silent cinema. Blake reports Burt Lancaster's admiration of
the scene, and tries to elucidate the source of its power, but there are really no words for what Chaney does here. It's over
the top, certainly -- but a character in that situation would be -- and extremely complicated, nuanced, brutal and elegant
all at the same time. Chaney's commitment to the moment and to his choices as an actor is absolute, and the result is a stunning
tour de force.
Norman Kerry, as Alonzo's rival in the typical Chaney love triangle, is a decorative dud. Joan Crawford brings a breathtaking
sexual presence to every frame she's in -- she was a truly luscious creature in the days before her face became an exquisite
stone mask. The rest of the cast is filled out with marvelous, wondrous types. No one is asked to do much but plausibly inhabit
the mad world of Browning's fable -- to make a space for Chaney's art, which redeems everything by the end.
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