The Skinny On... The Unknown

Before he launched the first horror boom with Dracula (1931) and made the all-time cult classic Freaks (1932), director Tod Browning made a series of silent melodramas with decidedly macabre overtones. Many of them, including The Unholy Three (1925), The Road to Mandalay (1926) and London After Midnight (1927), starred genre legend Lon Chaney, and possibly the best of these is The Unknown (1927), a dark tale of obsession and sexual frigidity that takes one of the most twisted turns in film history.

The Unknown tells the story of Alonzo (Chaney), an armless knife thrower in a traveling circus who is secretly in love with the beautiful Nanon (a very young Joan Crawford), the target of his knives as well as his obsession. Nanon cannot stand to be touched by the hands of a man, which seemingly works in favor of Alonzo, especially since the circus strongman Malabar also has designs on her. Alonzo feigns a friendly interest in Nanon as she rebukes the advances of Malabar, and when she reciprocates with a hug one day, he mistakes her affection for love.

Alonzo has a secret or two, however. First of all, he’s not armless at all. He binds his arms in a painful contraption to create the illusion for his act, and moreover to escape detection for a violent criminal past. When his ally Cojo points out that Nanon will someday discover his secret and probably hate him for it, Alonzo takes the most extreme imaginable action – he blackmails a doctor into actually amputating his arms. Unfortunately, Nanon conquers her phobia and accepts Malabar’s proposal of marriage while Alonzo is recovering from his operation. When Alonzo finds out, he is driven completely insane and plans a horrible retribution for Malabar and Nanon.

Browning was a pedestrian director when it came to the technical aspects of film, but his movies abound in perverse themes that make them intriguing to this day. Taking place in the grimy circus subculture with which Browning was so familiar (he worked in a circus before turning to film), The Unknown is one of his most tightly-paced, well directed films, with excellent performances by Chaney and Crawford. Chaney’s reaction to learning that he has mutilated himself for nothing is a mesmerizing tour-de-force, as his expressions alone vividly evoke the emotional journey from shock to depression to utter insanity. This scene alone cements Chaney’s reputation as perhaps the greatest actor of the silent era. Cinematographer Merrit Gerstad provides a professional enough palette, although Browning would get much better support from the likes of Karl Freund and James Wong Howe on future films. The Unknown can’t quite be considered a horror film, but its twisted themes are every bit as dark as any the genre has offered. It’s a genuinely disturbing film.