The Unknown (1927)

Originally posted to Facebook on 6/15/2018

The Unknown was our seventh film from 1927, and our fourth starring Lon Chaney. It co-starred a very young Joan Crawford, and was directed by Todd Browning, later famous for directing Dracula and Freaks. After the relatively normal Tell It to the Marines (from 1926), Chaney again plays a bizarre protagonist in a film obsessed with disfigurement, revenge, and humiliation -- playing his role with characteristic charisma, serious but also vigorous. In this case he plays a supposedly armless circus performer who throws knives with his feet. In reality, though, he is not armless, and has somehow concealed that from the rest of the troupe, including Joan Crawford, with whom he is in love. She does not reciprocate, and in fact ends up falling in love with another circus performer played by Norman Kerry. Crawford holds up her corner of the love triangle well enough, though nothing about her performance particularly prefigured her subsequent long and successful career. She was, like almost every other actor in Chaney's movies, overshadowed by the man himself -- and in fact she later credited Chaney as an influence on her acting.

The plot takes a few bizarre twists that I won't spoil, but it is in keeping with Chaney's earlier movies in that it is surprisingly dark, and would probably be rated PG-13 even today. But the darkness is quite unlike, for instance, the dark cynicism of the German films we've seen, which usually at least gestured in the direction of having some sort of intellectual pedigree. Chaney's films are much more visceral, and make no apologies for showing the grotesque or fetishistic, and do so without suggesting that we are actually watching an allegory about the modern world, or anything so high-minded.

This film is a little pulpier and less polished than his other three films, and probably the least well-made, but they are all in the same neighborhood, quality-wise. The Unknown would probably appeal to the same audiences entertained by 1920's The Penalty or 1924's He Who Gets Slapped. I think Tell It to the Marines showed that he easily could have portrayed normal roles as well, had that been his desire, and perhaps had he lived we would have seen him in more of those types of parts. He died only three years later, though, at the age of 47, so it is impossible to know what he would have achieved (or not) in the sound era (outside of 1930's The Unholy Three, his only talkie), or under the Hays code.

Next week we'll see our eighth film from 1927, Chicago, which comes from the same source material as the stage and screen musical of the same name. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT