Book Club of Desolation #20: The Unholy Three (1917), by Tod Robbins

Now for something a bit closer to type. This year has seen me show off my love of Lon Chaney Sr., and while it is not strongly remembered today, one of Chaney's big hits was a movie called The Unholy Three. Well, technically two of his big hits were movies called The Unholy Three: Todd Browning directed a silent version in 1925, while a talkie remake was shot in 1930 by Jack Conway, both starring Chaney as the ventriloquist Professor Echo. The films were based off of a 1917 novel by Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins, who also wrote "Spurs," the short story which Todd Browning would adapt as Freaks. I found both versions of the movie to be an awesome showcase of Lon Chaney's talents, but the story always threw me. It's a confusing tale, not because of any particular complexity, but because the character's personal decisions are...weird. As it happens, it looks better on paper. The Unholy Three is a surprisingly good crime pulp with enough idiosyncrasies to it that it overcomes some of its notable flaws. It's a great book to continue our Bookvember reading experience with.

We open at a circus, where a performance is being held starring Tweedledee the midget, Hercules the strongman, and Echo the ventriloquist. Tweedledee is a genius but prone to a violent temper, and when he is insulted for his height too many times he attacks his heckler, and the three are forced to escape. Tiring of an existence as sideshow freaks, the three decide to pool their unique talents as Mind, Body, and Voice to take life by the horns and be free. This amounts to them opening a pet shop supposedly owned by Echo, who disguises himself as an old woman named Irene Blake. Tweedledee poses as her infant grandson Willie, but actually runs the show, while Hercules takes care of tasks around the shop as Cousin Harry. They make a small fortune selling cheap birds that seem to be talking parrots, thanks exclusively to Echo's ventriloquism. However, Tweedledee also has a practice of encouraging families to adopt him so that he can kill them and take their valuables. Such is what befalls the family and family-to-be of Hector McDonald, a young man who earns the Little Person's ire by blowing cigar smoke in his face. First he attacks Tommy, the nephew of Hector's fiance Dorothy Arlington; then, he frames Hector for the murder of his Uncle Tobias. In the end, Echo has had enough--this life of crime is not the adventure promised to him. He betrays his Master and calls upon the Voice of God Himself to save the day.

This is basically a Villain Pulp--see the Valley of the Zombies review for what I mean by that. We have our title characters, and they are evil, and the book sympathizes with them just as surely as it does with their victims. The Three are indeed very interesting. Tweedledee suffers from a rather stereotypical case of Little Man Syndrome, but at the same time he really does live up to his title of "the Mind." The film makes it clearer that the plot the trio undertake is eccentric primarily because such a scheme would be unbelievable in the eyes of the police; I suspect that's why Tweedledee chooses the modus operandi that he does in the book as well. He goes back and forth between a cold, philosophical predator and a manic storm of raw emotion--while his body is far from helpless, he is most unfettered in the mental realm. It's fascinating to me that he is the mastermind in the novel, while the two films place leadership of the trio on Echo's shoulders--probably because Echo was played by Lon Chaney, who is much more believable as a master villain than the high-pitched/German-accented Harry Earles. Echo is reduced to an almost child-like role as Tweedledee's servant, and he may be intended to be mentally disabled in some way. His ventriloquist dummy, "with legs like a goat and a face like an old man," apparently talks to him. (This may be one of the earliest "demonic" ventriloquist dolls I know of, as it predates Hugo from Dead of Night by almost thirty years; even if Echo's doll probably isn't really possessed.) The idea of a ventriloquist using their talents to impersonate God is a great idea and I'm disappointed I didn't think of it first. This is a pretty clever deus ex machina, in a rather literal sense. Book!Echo is also much more sympathetic than movie!Echo, who is much more sinister but still gets off easy. Really, a lot of the issues I had with the plots of the films come from the fusion of Tweedledee's character with Echo's. Hercules is the least fleshed-out of them, which is also a fact in the movies, but he presents some interesting enigmas. He's extremely loyal to Tweedledee almost to the point of seeming child-like, as Echo does, but he's also well-spoken. His idealism, the source of his loyalty to his Master, contradicts the brutal nature of his base strength. In some ways you can feel bad for him, because he's the one Tweedledee scams the most.

Unfortunately, the middle third of the book doesn't focus on its eponymous figures as much as we'd like, meaning that their confusing plan becomes even more random-seeming due to the fact that we see it from the perspective of their victims instead. It doesn't help that Hector, his uncle, and the Arlingtons are not particularly interesting characters compared to the Three. They also don't really possess any unique skill or trait that helps them overcome the Three--it takes Echo turning on Tweedledee to secure the victory of our "heroes." Fortunately, the entire book is very well-written. Robbins busts out the finest pulp purple prose to produce bombastic and memorable imagery. It gets a little cloying at times, much in the same way that you can get poisoned from too much Lovecraft, but it's hard to dislike the long description near the beginning of Tweedledee viewing his body as a grotesque cocoon, hoping that someday he will climb out of himself as a giant, with the strength to destroy his foes. We also get some pithiness through Echo's parrot-ventriloquism in a long bit which contains such gems as, "The worms are our fondest friends even when we are cold to them." Despite the complexity of his metaphors at times, Robbins leaves the plot very easy to follow, so it seems a little unnecessary that The Events Thus Far are summarized by Echo at the end.

There is racism in the book. There are a few descriptions of Jewish characters which might be antisemitic. In the early carnival scenes, too, the Wild Man of Borneo is described as a "half-wit Negro," which highlights the fact that these sorts of carnival shows were hugely exploitative. We need look no further than Nightmare Alley for this, but the low-budget nature of these shows meant they had to cut corners, which meant enslaving, abusing, or otherwise taking advantage of their performers. Hiram W. and Barney Davis, the two Little People who are the most famous historical examples of people exhibited as "Wild Men of Borneo," were mentally disabled--whether or not their act under P.T. Barnum and other show heads was exploitative is open to debate. In any case, the book's racial politics are uncomfortably dated, but there is nothing shriekingly hateful compared to what I've read recently.

The Unholy Three is definitely an imperfect book. It's a pulp, so I'd expect no different. But if you are a pulp fan and/or an enthusiast for extremely unusual crime thrillers, this will not let you down. Plus, you can probably get a kick out of the movies, as well, which differ substantially from the book. I'll return to this book somewhat when I finally get to Todd Browning's movie The Devil-Doll, as you'll see an echo of Professor Echo in that film's lead. This book once left powerful ripples in pop culture--maybe it's due for rediscovery.

If you want early access to reviews like this one, help me pay the bills on Patreon! Plus, you can like the A-List on Facebook to get updates!

---

Image Source: Amazon

West of Zanzibar (1928), by Tod Browning

...huh. It's not every week I get to start out with sepia.

But this isn't a usual week, is it? Oh no. This is the start of SPOOKYWEEN '17. This month, we'll be examining no less than twelve horror films taking us from the 1920s to the 2010s to celebrate the Halloween spirit. Kicking things off is a return to Tod Browning and Lon Chaney with the unbelievably brutal 1928 feature, West of Zanzibar--a silent horror film matched only by the uncanny strangeness of The Unknown. West of Zanzibar does its best to break every single taboo in the book, and given its early release date that makes it remarkable, though one finds that the film's age has also given it some truly reprehensible qualities.

Phroso (Lon Chaney) is a magician at a carnival, because this is a Tod Browning movie; he has a beautiful young wife named Anna, whom he loves more than anything. However, Anna's attentions stray and she takes a lover--said lover, a man named Crane, wants to take her out to his ivory plantation in Tanzania, but she realizes who she really loves and doesn't really want to go along. While arguing with Crane, Phroso gets knocked over a railing and breaks his back, and is unable to stop the two from leaving.

Time passes, Phroso discovers that Anna has returned to the city, but she's come here to die. She abandons her daughter, doubtlessly sired by Crane in Phroso's mind, inside a church. Phroso takes her and over the course of several years he commences his lengthy revenge scheme against the ivory-trader. First of all, he uses his stage magic to take over a Tanzanian tribe, and begins directing that tribe, with both authority and performer's tricks (including a fake voodoo monster), to break up Crane's ivory trade. (At this point the ex-performer has taken on the name of rather appropriate named of "Dead-Legs.") As this happens, one of Phroso's minions is busy raising Maizie, Anna's daughter, in her shabby seaside bar/drug house/brothel. Maizie has long desired to escape this place, with its boggy marshes of cheap income and illicit substances, but fortunately, a man has arrived who claims to know who Maizie's father is. We already know that this man is another of Dead-Legs' minions. He takes her out to Phroso's village of horrors, where it is revealed that her happy fate was all a lie, a cover for the world of drugs, drinking, starvation, and rape that Phroso has been setting up all this time. Sure, the former magician's doctor henchman takes pity on her...but this is only the beginning. At last it comes time to capture Crane, and reveal to him the truth; he then intends to kill Crane, which will in turn force the natives to enact their traditional ritual of burning a dead man's family members to join him in the afterlife. Except...well. Crane isn't Maizie's father. Anna never went away with him. She hated him for crippling her husband, so why would she? So who's Maizie's real father, I wonder...?

Yes, West of Zanzibar is very effective. It takes an oddly progressive approach towards using intensified sleaze as a source of horror, predating movies like Bloodsucking Freaks and the H.G. Lewis canon by decades. Sometimes you can get scary out of slimy. We humans don't like our rules broken--we don't like seeing young women left to dry out after being forced on a months-long drinking binge, for instance. We don't like seeing something that was once love turn to hate, and we are terrified of so much of our relationships with our children. All over and throughout, the movie breaks taboos, showing us nary a clean house or tidy city street. Its characters, from their faces down to the clothes they wear, are bitter and gruesome. Tod Browning drives home the fact that grotesquery is the name of the game by showing montages of enormous spiders rising from the waters or tangled in their webs, alongside worms, grubs, and lizards writhing in river mud. It's unpleasant.

But unpleasant is just the first layer. There's one more taboo that Browning decides to break, and that's the race taboo. The exploitation of black people for horror value in movies starts at the beginning of the history of movies and carries on into the present. This is some of the worst racism I've ever seen in a movie. The Africans depicted in the movie embody the most despicable "jungle native" stereotypes white people have ever come up with; they dance wildly, speak broken English, run screaming from "evil spirits," rape white women, and engage in meaninglessly violent religious rituals. For all the likable qualities of this movie, the movie should absolutely be condemned for its attempts to exploit racial fears of its era in an attempt to ramp up its horror elements. Period.

There are still reasons, of course, as to why I reviewed this movie--even besides the fact that there are almost no other '20s horror films appropriate for the site that I like enough. We get to see some glimpses of 1920s carny life, including a strange comedy fire-eating act where a man started smoking both ends of his cigarette, then eats it, decides he likes the taste, and starts gobbling down lit matches. I dunno, the other carnies seem to think it's hilarious. Phroso's act, what little we see of it, is pretty neat as well. But of course, that's because the man playing Phroso is a genius.

Lon Chaney Sr. gives one of his best performances here. He manages to perfectly capture a magician's theatricality in the same rhythm as his petty, mirthful cruelty, and he's more than capable of convincingly turning that cruelty into flat-out barbarism. The Phroso we meet at the beginning is a handsome, well-groomed man dressed in a tux; by the film's end he's wearing greasy rags, shaved himself bald, and worn his face down to an angry snarl. His former soft-spokenness is replaced with the tongue of a cynical dock pickpocket. My favorite part of watching silent films is lip-reading the performances. If you do it with Chaney, I swear you can hear him talk. Chaney's costar, Lionel Barrymore, has seen his performance heavily criticized in the wake of the Internet, but I thought he did fine here as an asshole with basically no redeeming qualities. Browning would get a chance to direct Barrymore in a more complex role in The Devil-Doll, which I'm sure I'll talk about on here at some point.

I also do have to give credit to Edward Rolf Boensnes, who made the soundtrack to the version I saw on Web Archive, available here. The music is catchy and fits the movie's tone of mind-warping horror. If you're going to watch this movie, I definitely recommend the version with Boensnes' music on it.

West of Zanzibar is a tough movie to praise because of how thorough its bigotry is. It's not something we can dismiss easily, either--I can't just tell you to skip past the racist bits and watch the good Lon Chaney parts instead. What should be done is that we should talk about this movie, and learn from it what our society once did wrong and what it's still doing wrong. That this still happens is the scariest Halloween horror of them all! Well, rest assured. Things for the rest of this month are going to be notably less controversial.

If you want to get the rest of the Spookyween reviews early, now's a good time to subscribe on Patreon! Plus, like the A-List on Facebook to get cool updates.

The Unknown (1927), by Tod Browning

Much like Noah, The Unknown is a well-received film made for a decent amount of money that appears to have been successful at the box office, made by an established director and featuring famous and beloved actors. And like Noah, The Unknown has made it onto this site because its premise and presentation are too strange for me to exclude it. As I've said before, I'm glad to know that this stuff has always existed. That it was sometimes the big institutions that manufactured it fascinates me. If you like movies, you should know their history, including the weird bits. And The Unknown, starting with and extending far beyond its non sequitur of a title, is one of the strangest films of the silent period, hands down.

We've kind of talked about silent films before: Sins of the Fleshapoids basically functions as one, even emulating the particular acting style required for the silent medium. But this is one of the original silent films, from before it could have sound, and we're in luck, because it stars Lon Chaney! The original Lon Chaney, that is--the Phantom of the Opera, rather than The Wolf Man. While Lon Chaney Jr. had a...wide mix of performances throughout his occasionally depressing career, Lon Chaney Sr. was almost equally depressing, but for the opposite reasons. Simply put, Chaney the elder had more talent than any of us will ever be blessed with. From what I understand, if a skill was required of his character for a movie, he would learn it without messing up the film's schedule. In the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame he crawled along an insanely tall wall with hundreds of pounds of prosthetics on his back; for The Unholy Three in 1925 (and its 1930 remake) he taught himself ventriloquism; and for almost all of his movies, he did his own makeup in ways that combined stunning simplicity with shocking effect. Really, if you look at what he did for his trademark Phantom of the Opera appearance, you can see that he predicted how it would look on camera and then let the camera do a lot of the work. He pinned his nose back (some saying he also pinned his eyelids open), painted dark circles around his eyes and nostrils, put in some false teeth and messed up his lips with a dark color, emphasized his wrinkles, and found an appropriate wig. That sounds like a lot, but I've seen people convincingly imitate it, and I could do a lot of the raw makeup work with what I've got in my purse. Of course, that's where the acting comes in, and Chaney thrived in the silent era because, just as he knew how to maximize makeup effects with the lighting of the camera, he knew how to convey emotions completely without audible dialogue. Silent acting always looks really hammy at first, but when you recognize that the only thing you'll be hearing is a classical score, these sorts of ultra-physical performances really help you hear the dialogue in your mind. If you want to see this at its best, there's a scene in The Unknown to look forward to. You'll know it when you see it.

About that weird plot I promised, then. Well, Lon Chaney plays circus performer Alonzo the Armless, who predictably lacks arms, and does tricks based around that. With the exception of throwing knives with his feet, all the feet-for-hands tricks are ones that Chaney actually picked up for the movie. Alonzo is in love with the circus owner's daughter Nanon, and as such is jealous of the seemingly-brutish Malabar, the strongman, who alternatively abuses and loves Nanon--there's a special emphasis put on how he's jealous of his "strength" (I'm sure that doesn't have a second meaning to it or anything, especially because...well, I'll get to it). Nanon has spent her life being groped by men like Malabar, and as such is repelled by the sight of men's hands. Because Alonzo doesn't have arms, she lets herself get close to him. Except...Alonzo does have arms, and hands at the ends of 'em. What's more, he has this weird double-thumb on one hand that can identify him to the police, which is of serious concern because in addition to being a circus performer, Alonzo really likes killing people! Not like he does a great job of hiding it. First he has this weird Emperor Palpatine moment where he straight up tells Nanon that people with arms are evil and she should absolutely hate them. Then, he kills her father, and while she sees him do it, she doesn't see his face, just his double-thumb. Because of his meddling she begins to fall in love with him, but his little person assistance Cojo points out that if he ever gets nekkid around her (as we assume he intends), she'll not only see that he has arms and hands, but that he is the mutant killer of her father. But he also points out that he has forgotten he has arms, even when they're not pinned to his body with a straightjacket. Too late does Cojo realize what he's suggested to Alonzo, and suddenly it seems as though Alonzo's lust for Nanon exceeds even his desire to continue having arms. One blackmail letter to an illicit surgeon later, and soon Alonzo's title of the Armless is finally cemented. Of course, during this time, Nanon has found true love with Malabar, who finally understands her hand-based trauma and becomes a changed man for her. When Alonzo returns, it leads to some of the most stinging dialogue set to film, when Nanon says:

"I'm so glad you're back, Alonzo--now we can be married!"

See, previously, we saw that Nanon wanted to wait till Alonzo was back before she could marry Malabar. You know shit has truly hit the fan when Nanon adds, "Remember how I used to be afraid of his hands? I love them now!" As those hands run all over her body...and as she virtually makes out with them. I don't want to spoil this moment for you: it's the best in the film, and honestly one of the best in film history. And it doesn't let up from there--every remaining second to the end is just as entertaining as what came before. This is a wonderful 50 minutes, a virtual dream come true...

I don't know what to say aside from "read that premise again." This is about a serial killer who becomes so obsessed with a woman that he literally chops off his own arms. Take that, van Gogh! Not only can people pronounce Alonzo's name correctly, but Alonzo didn't do something weak like just taking off an ear. Sure, Alonzo didn't exactly present his severed arms to Nanon, but what if though. That is honestly the only way this movie could get better. Too often do studio films with weird concepts have tendencies fall on their faces in ways that are completely non-entertaining, but The Unknown was made during the silent era, which was a Wild West of a time. Before the Hays Code stepped in and forced us to swallow neutered crap like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, we got some truly bizarre and disturbing shit. Remember, exploitation cinema got its start as early as 1919, with movies like Wild Oats, which shows closeups of venereal disease, and the birth reel subgenre, which offered a personal look at the act of childbirth. When the unfettered limits of silent cinema was put in the hands of a studio and given a plot, miracles could happen--sick, bizarre miracles. The Unknown is one such miracle.

I have nothing else to add aside from the hope that I find other silent films with the same power as this one. If I do, I'm sure I'll talk about them on here at some point. I've heard that another Browning production, 1928's West of Zanzibar, features Lon Chaney in the role of a killer who doesn't have functioning legs! My bar is high now. As for you--if you can't fit this movie into 50 minutes of your day, I have no words for you. The Unknown is full of magic and surprises.