Tod Browning’s film The Unknown (1927) was an inspiration to Burt Lancaster. Often, in interviews, Lancaster spoke about Lon Chaney’s performance in this film, particularly the moment where Chaney’s character Alonzo realizes he’s had his arms amputated for nothing. Chaney’s face alters immeasurably over the course of a long close-up from an expression of joy to a grotesque expression of despair. For Burt Lancaster that single moment in The Unknown was the very pinnacle of what an actor could achieve. Without sound and physical gestures Chaney conveys everything with just his face.
Even by Tod Browning’s standards The Unknown is a macabre affair. Chaney plays Alonzo a man with a physical deformity on his thumbs evading the law by hiding out at a carnival as a knife thrower without arms. It’s here that Alonzo meets and falls in love with Nanon (Joan Crawford). Nanon is also the object of Malabar (Norman Kerry) the Mighty’s designs, though she states that she prefers Alonzo because he has no hands with which to molest her. After murdering a detective Alonzo secretly flees the carnival and has his arms removed, only to then return and find Malabar and Nanon engaged.
The narrative of empty sacrifices and revenge schemes is a familiar one to Browning, as is the carnival location. Browning’s films at MGM in the late twenties all deal with some kind of interior horrors made manifest externally; as if the demons of the mind had struck out at the physical body. Alonzo’s deception made manifest is akin to the self-double-cross during the twist ending of his West Of Zanzibar (1928) the following year. The evil of the Lon Chaney character in The Unknown is what, ultimately, renders him a pitiful shell of a human being consumed by his desire for revenge.
There’s a heightened sense of realism to how Browning lights and blocks the scenes at the carnival that recall the silent films of Josef von Sternberg with their shadowy landscapes and gritty textures. These moments are juxtaposed with the more melodramatic and theatrical scenes in spaces away from the carnival. The melodramatic episodes recall the work of Browning’s mentor, D.W. Griffith, in their simplicity and practicality. The stylistic juxtaposition at work in The Unknown seems to suggest that the “real world” of consequence is Alonzo’s insular world of the carnival where the fantastic is commonplace and illusions are as real as the most tangible objects.
A child of the circus and the carnival himself, Browning’s films always managed to find more truth in the imagined than in fact. Freaks (1932) is surely Browning’s most famous film to support this claim, but The Unknown may just be the best. Lon Chaney and Tod Browning made so many films together, but of those that have survived The Unknown is their most uniquely striking work. Unlike so many films made in Hollywood at that time The Unknown is a horror film of psychological terrors.
