by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the “Sunday Silent
Showcase” on TCM: The Unholy Three, the
1925 vehicle for director Tod Browning and star Lon Chaney (Sr.) that marked
their reunion at MGM after having originally worked together at Chaney’s
previous studio, Universal. It’s a typically wild Browning script (based on a
story by Tod Robbins, whose “Spurs” later provided the plot basis for
Browning’s most infamous film, Freaks) in which Chaney plays Echo, a ventriloquist in a carnival sideshow.
Actually the film might more accurately have been called The Unholy
Four, since Echo’s entourage includes
little-person performer Tweedledee (Harry Earles), strong man Hercules (Victor
McLaglen, one actor who got more
hammy — not less — with the advent of sound) and pickpocket “Sweet” Rosie
O’Grady (Mae Marsh, who usually was the “other woman” both on screen and in
real life — her brief affair with producer Mack Sennett broke him and Mabel
Normand up — but here is quite personable and good in the female lead).
Browning’s background in carnivals led him to the “carny” world for a subject
again and again, and here the opening reel showing Rosie working the crowd and
sharing her ill-gotten gains with Echo and Hercules being ballyhooed as an
example of how strong you can get if you don’t smoke — just before he turns
away from the crowd, goes behind his backdrop and lights up — are not only
entertaining but are quite amusing for a film that has the reputation of a
thriller.
After a fight with the management the Unholy Four bolt the carnival and
put into action a plan that Echo thinks will make them millions: he will pose
in drag as O’Grady’s aunt and open a pet store, where he will sell “talking”
parrots to rich customers. Since the parrots only appear to talk because Echo
is using his skills as a ventriloquist, the customers will complain — and Aunt
O’Grady will offer to come to their homes, with his “niece” and her baby
(Tweedledee disguised as a baby
and being pushed around in a baby carriage), to see what’s wrong with the
parrot. Actually, of course, they’re there to case the place, and later on Echo
(in male dress), Hercules and Tweedledee will break in and steal the owner’s
jewels. Only things start to go wrong when Hector MacDonald (Matt Moore, who
goes through the entire movie with a look that makes him seem slightly nauseous
and is one of the least attractive silent-film leads even though in general
silent movies didn’t value physical attractiveness quite as much as sound films
did) and Rosie fall in love — and they go further wrong when, after casing the
home of John Arlington (Charles Wellesley), Echo decides he’d rather stay in
with Rosie than go out on the robbery (he’s hoping his physical presence will
keep her from transferring her affections to Hector), and so Tweedledee and
Hercules do the crime alone, surprise Arlington at home and kill him — and in a
very Browning-esque touch they
return to the pet store and mock Arlington’s pleadings for his life. Echo,
needless to say, is furious; he’d planned his crimes meticulously so the Unholies
would never risk facing a murder rap, even forbidding them from carrying guns
on the job.
The Unholies hatch a new plot to frame Hector for both the robbery
and the murder, and in order to keep Rosie from coming to court and backing up
his alibi (which is that he was working late at night in the pet store with her
and her “aunt”) Hercules and Tweedledee kidnap her and hold her in a mountain
cabin. Echo is in on the kidnap plot but he offers Rosie a choice — he’ll
return to the city and alibi Hector if she’ll agree to leave Hector and stay
with him instead — and in the courtroom, in the middle of the prosecutor’s
closing argument, he tells Hector’s attorney to ask the judge for permission to
put Hector on the stand and tells Hector that when he testifies he should say
nothing — just mouth the Lord’s Prayer on the witness stand — while Echo, using
his ventriloquist skills, will literally put words in his mouth, admitting the
existence of the Unholy Three and how they actually committed the robberies.
Eventually Rosie escapes her kidnappers with the help of Echo and his pet ape
(actually played by a three-foot chimpanzee instead of the usual actor in an
ape suit — you can tell because the chimp opens its mouth and bears its teeth,
whereas ape suits have always been problematic because there’s no way to get
the mouth to open realistically — and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster,
in order that the ape and Echo would appear to be the same size Browning had
Harry Earles double for Chaney in the scenes with the ape and Echo together),
and Echo makes a personal confession that apparently lets both him and Rosie
off the hook legally — since the final scene shows him gallantly giving up
Rosie and sending her back to Hector (though the exposure of the Unholy Three
has led to the closure of the pet store they were using as a front and one
wonders how Hector and Rosie will get by financially now that they’re both out
of work), while he returns to the carnival and hands out the same spiel he’d
been doing at the start about how life is sometimes a laugh and sometimes a
tear (a line Robbins and screenwriter Waldemar Young obviously ripped off from Chaplin’s The Kid — and indeed Chaney’s performance in the final scene
is surprisingly Chaplinesque given his reputation as an actor who explored the
grotesque) just before he offers to sell his audience members a joke book.
The
Unholy Three had at least one direct remake
and quite a few films drew on it; two years later Harry Earles once again
played a little-person thief who masqueraded as a baby in the early Laurel and
Hardy film Sailor Beware (the
high point of his performance is his big gag scene with Laurel, in which Earles
is a grown little person impersonating a baby while Laurel is a baby in a
full-sized adult male’s body; when Earles gets what he wanted from Laurel and
abruptly breaks up their game, Laurel turns to the camera and whines, “But I
thought it was all in fun!”). In 1930 MGM did a talkie remake of The
Unholy Three (directed not by Browning but
by Jack Conway) which turned out to be Lon Chaney, Sr.’s only sound film (he
died of throat cancer shortly after it was finished — ironically, he lost his
voice in his last days and could only communicate with the sign language he had
learned from his deaf-mute parents) and which altered the ending considerably:
in the sound version Chaney shows up to testify at the trial in drag but is
exposed when he inadvertently slips out of his falsetto into his normal
masculine voice (whose striking resemblance to James Cagney’s may have led to
Cagney’s casting as Chaney in the
1957 biopic Man of a Thousand Faces),
and at the end he’s actually taken into police custody for the robberies but he
makes it seem to Rosie as if he is leaving to rejoin the carnival, when he’s
actually going to prison. (That’s the difference between the so-called
“pre-Code” era of 1930-34 — the Production Code was actually written in 1930
but it wasn’t until the Roman Catholic Church’s “Legion of Decency” campaign
against sex, violence and horror in movies that it was strictly enforced and
the head of the Code Administration, Joseph Breen, was given the power to
censor films both in script form and once they were in otherwise final cut —
and the real pre-Code silent
period in which Browning, Robbins and Young could actually have both Echo and
Rosie escape any legal punishment
for their crimes.)
The Unholy Three
also got semi-remade as The Devil Doll in 1936 — there the story source was supposedly Burn, Witch,
Burn, a novel by A. A. Merritt, but
Browning, once again in the director’s chair, and his writers (Garrett Fort,
Guy Endore, Erich von Stroheim and Richard Schayer) remodeled it to resemble The
Unholy Three, with Lionel Barrymore as a
mad scientist who discovers a way to shrink people to doll-size and uses his
doll-people, rather than a normal little person, to sneak into houses and help
him rob them: Barrymore’s character also sets up a shop as a front for his
crimes and runs it in disguise as a woman. (It was the second time Lionel
Barrymore remade a Chaney role for Browning: the first time was The
Mark of the Vampire, a remake of London
After Midnight.) The Unholy Three holds up quite well (though I find the more bitter
ending of the sound remake works better), not really a horror film but a quite
good criminal melodrama with endearingly quirky characters, the sort of oddball
story Tod Browning did well. Both Browning and Chaney were more comfortable
with films that stayed within the realm of normal physical possibility than
with out-and-out supernatural horror or science fiction — which may be why Dracula (which Browning directed at Universal with Bela
Lugosi after Chaney’s death necessitated an emergency recasting) is relatively
dull and it’s probably just as well the projected Chaney Frankenstein never came off.
