For those (like me) - who have always wondered about his films beyond Dracula, Freaks and London After Midnight: Tod Browning’s Spooky Silent Films Although most famous for ‘Dracula’ and ‘Freaks,’ the director did his best work earlier in his career, including two Halloween-ready films in a new set from Criterion: ‘The Unknown,’ featuring Lon Chaney, and ‘The Mystic.’ By David Mermelstein - Oct. 23, 2023 5:54 pm ET - WALL STREET JOURNAL
[https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/8798/BDJvTY.jpg?trnonsuspmrk=1&trfcallwremmrk=1] Lon Chaney in ‘The Unknown’ - Photo: Criterion Collection Before his pivot to movies, Tod Browning, who was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1880, worked as a performer in carnivals and vaudeville. The experience made him uniquely suited to direct pictures set in milieus beyond the mainstream—as the freighted sound film “Freaks” (1932), which essentially ended his career, surely attests. But his best work lies in silent cinema, where he honed his craft and established his reputation. Two such pictures, “The Mystic” (1925) and “The Unknown” (1927), have just been released in welcome new 2K restorations, part of a small collection from Criterion titled “Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers.” Available on either Blu-ray or DVD, the two-disc set also includes a restored “Freaks.” But it’s the earlier silents, which are at times genuinely spooky, that make perfect viewing during Halloween season, when reminders of Browning’s most famous film, “Dracula” (1931), are ever-present. Browning—whose given name, spelled just like the German word for death, wasn’t “given” at all, but rather taken under circumstances now mysterious—was a master at developing disturbing themes and images. Yet none of his other movies outstrip “The Unknown” for cumulative creepiness—something we can now appreciate all the more given that the 2022 reconstruction here making its home-video debut restores roughly 10 minutes of footage to the film’s 67-minute running time. The sixth of 10 films in which Browning collaborated with Lon Chaney, the protean silent star still known as the Man of a Thousand Faces, “The Unknown” is set primarily in a Madrid circus, where the actor plays Alonzo, whose feats of dagger-throwing and sharpshooting are all the more impressive for his being armless. (Despite Chaney’s renown as a cinematic contortionist, a genuinely armless carnival performer, Paul Desmuke, was artfully engaged as his body double at various points in this film.) [https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/3504/WFiw2Q.jpg?trnonsuspmrk=1&trfcallwremmrk=1] Joan Crawford in ‘The Unknown’ Photo: Criterion Collection Alonzo is in love with his beautiful assistant, Nanon, played by a sympathetic Joan Crawford in her first important screen role. That Nanon can’t bear the touch of any man’s hands would seem to make them ideally suited, but there are two impediments: Alonso isn’t actually armless (he’s just pretending to be), and Nanon has another, far more handsome suitor, the strongman Malabar, played by the suave Norman Kerry—the third and final time, following “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” that Kerry would act as Chaney’s rival on film. What lends the picture its especially ghoulish cast is how Alonzo perversely opts to overcome these obstacles—“There is nothing I will not do to own her! Nothing. . . . do you understand? Nothing!” flashes a prescient title card. And Philip Carli’s lively new solo-piano score only enhances Merritt Gerstad’s evocative cinematography. (Shortly thereafter, Gerstad shot Chaney again, in Browning’s “London After Midnight,” now among the most famous “lost” films of the silent era.) Far less familiar than “The Unknown” (let alone “Freaks”), “The Mystic” is released here for the first time on home video. And it is a boon not just for Browning fans, but also for those partial to silent films generally. At 74 minutes, it briskly tells of a trio of Hungarian Gypsies—Aileen Pringle as Zara, the movie’s title character; Mitchell Lewis, the paternal Zazarack; and Robert Ober, the hot-headed, knife-throwing Anton—brought to the U.S. by an enterprising American conman, Michael Nash (played by Conway Tearle), convinced their talents are wasted in the European hinterlands. [https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/4487/Xbi3gv.jpg?trnonsuspmrk=1] Aileen Pringle in ‘The Mystic’ Photo: Criterion Collection After establishing Zara, transformed thanks to lavish art-deco costumes by an uncredited Erté, as a spiritualist to the rich and vulnerable, the foursome ultimately set their sights on a woefully naïve young heiress, Doris Merrick (the thoroughly endearing Gladys Hulette). But love intervenes, with the previously steely Nash inconveniently falling, in different ways, for both Zara and Doris. Though the film increasingly traffics in romance and melodrama as it progresses, the carnival milieu that opens the picture and, particularly, the séance-like atmosphere that pervades Zara’s New World communions with the dead provide the movie its Halloween bona fides. The picture, which includes an inventive new score by Dean Hurley, was atmospherically shot by Ira Morgan, whose most famous credit, from roughly a decade later, was “Modern Times,” Charlie Chaplin’s last silent. Those who savor Hollywood’s darker side won’t miss the uncanny similarities between “The Mystic” and the noir classic “Nightmare Alley”<https://www.wsj.com/articles/nightmare-alley-a-restoration-to-dream-about-11621681203?mod=article_inline> (1947), in which Tyrone Power, cast against type, plays an ambitious carny roustabout whose greed provokes his ruin after a spectacular climb. Though the latter film, and the novel by William Lindsay Gresham on which it was based, are better remembered, Browning got there first. The director, who died in 1962 after decades out of the limelight, may never recover the reputation he had in his heyday, as a probing cinema artist unafraid to examine the human psyche’s dark corners while daring viewers to tarry with those on society’s margins. At present, the twin poles of “Dracula” and “Freaks” continue to define his career for most film fans. But the renewed visibility now afforded “The Mystic” and “The Unknown” could ignite some sort of reappraisal of Browning and his work. And that prospect shouldn’t be frightening. 𝘔𝘳. 𝘔𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘪𝘯, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭’𝘴 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤, 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘮. Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [email protected] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
