The Show (MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, November 13) I ran my husband Charles a couple of unusually interesting films on YouTube posts. One of them, The Argyle Secrets, I’d seen before on Turner Classic Movies via Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show; the other, The Show, had been on TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” a week ago Sunday but I hadn’t watched it. The Show was a 1927 late-silent production directed by Tod Browning – indeed, his name was considered enough of a “draw” he got two credits, “A Tod Browning Production” and “Directed by Tod Browning” – starring John Gilbert, French actress “Renée Adorée” (one of the most ridiculously phony screen names of all time, though she was actually French and was born either Jeanne de la Fonte or Jeanne de la Fontein, sources differ) and Lionel Barrymore in a script by frequent Browning collaborator Waldemar Young based on a novel from 1910 called The Day of Souls (which would have been a better title for the movie, too!) by Charles Tenney Jackson. It’s set in Hungary, apparently during World War I (there’s a reference in one of Joseph Farnham’s intertitles to a soldier allegedly receiving the Emperor’s Cross, and during World War I Hungary was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and it opens at a carnival where Cock Robin (John Gilbert) is a barker – as Tod Browning had been himself before he got into filmmaking. But he’s more than a barker: he’s also a participant in the acts, including a re-enactment of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils in which he plays Jokanaan (a.k.a. John the Baptist). Renée Adorée plays the girl who portrays Salomé – if she has another name, it’s not given in the credits – and she’s got a crush on Cock Robin, while “The Greek” (Lionel Barrymore, when he was still relatively young and could walk) has a crush on her and is jealous of any other guy who pays attention to her.

“The Greek” is also a robber, and in the opening scene he watched a country shepherd named Konrad Driskai (Russ Powell) being paid a substantial cash bankroll for a flock of sheep he’s driven to Budapest. Naturally “The Greek” is after that money, and he kills Driskai for it – only the money isn’t there. It turns out Driskai left the money with his daughter Lena (Gertrude Short), who’s not bad-looking but is heavy-set. Cock Robin has been courting her, though less out of any real interest and more after her money; they go on at least two dinner dates in which she pays (and he’s quite blunt about it: he asks her, “Where will you pay to feed me tonight?”), and when he learns that her dad is dead and there are a lot more sheep in his herds than just the one he sold already, Cock Robin determines to marry Lena to get his hands on the sheep and the money he can make from them. There’s also a subplot dealing with the carnival’s freak show, including an exhibit that includes a poisonous lizard and a liniment supposedly made from its oils and advertised as a cure-all. Only the lizard gets loose during one of the shows and kills a patron; at first both Charles and I assumed this was a fake – a Miracle Man-style sham in which the victim only faked death so the super-liniment could revive him – but no-o-o-o-o, he’s really, most sincerely dead. The cops are pretty clueless and don’t make any sort of connection between Driskai’s murder and the “accident” at the carnival. Cock Robin absconds with Lena’s money after Lena flees the scene, having been warned by Salomé that Cock Robin was only after her money.

Then an old blind man identified in the cast list only as “The Soldier” (Edward Connelly), who lives in the same building as Cock Robin and Salomé, turns up and asks Salomé to read him a letter, ostensibly from his son. Salomé makes up an heroic story about the son, who’s supposedly been awarded the Emperor’s Cross for his heroism in the war, but is actually in prison less than 50 feet away and is scheduled to be hanged the next morning. (We’re not told for what crime, but it really doesn’t matter.) The next morning the blind soldier is awakened by the sound of marching-band music from the street below – he thinks it’s the army returning victorious and his son is with them, but it’s really just the annual St. Stephen’s Day parade (acceptably dramatized here but vividly brought to life in Erich von Stroheim’s contemporary film The Wedding March) – and just after his son is hanged, the old man (who's also Salomé's father) has a heart attack and dies as well. Meanwhile, “The Greek,” who’s already attempted to murder Cock Robin by using a real sword instead of the fake one with which he’s supposed to sever Jokanaan’s head in the act (Salomé realizes it and stops him in time) has stolen the poisonous lizard (ya remember the poisonous lizard?), intending to sic it on Salomé as revenge for her disinterest in him. But the lizard ends up biting “The Greek” and sending him to his grave just before the cops empty four bullets into it, blessedly killing it before it can take out any more cast members. Cock Robin assumes he’s going to be arrested for stealing Lena’s father’s money – there’s even a tearful parting scene between him and Salomé reprising the ending from two years before of Browning’s silent version of The Unholy Three with Lon Chaney, Sr. and Mae Busch – but in the end, since he returned the money to Lena, he isn’t prosecuted and he and Adorée return to their gigs in the carnival, with this time her surreptitiously kissing his supposedly severed head at the end.

Though The Show might have been even better with Lon Chaney in Gilbert’s role (Gilbert would later replace Chaney after the latter’s death in a 1931 MGM film called The Phantom of Paris, which MGM developed for Chaney since it was based on a story by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, which had been one of Chaney’s biggest hits), it’s quite a movie. The high points are Browning’s direction and John Arnold’s cinematography, which though The Show isn’t a horror film is appropriately Gothic and darkly atmospheric. Indeed, Charles suggested that The Show was a film noir before film noir became a “thing,” and it certainly deals with the dark side of human nature and is presented in an appropriately shadowy manner. Gilbert’s rambunctiousness got annoying under lesser directors, but Browning successfully tames him the way King Vidor and George Hill had in The Big Parade and Erich von Stroheim had in The Merry Widow (both from 1925, and unquestionably John Gilbert’s finest films). Renée Adorée is merely serviceable as usual – and I’m surprised MGM’s promotion didn’t make more of the fact that this film reunited her and Gilbert from The Big Parade, the second highest-grossing silent film of all time (after The Birth of a Nation) – but Lionel Barrymore is excellent and doesn’t try to inflate his character from a petty crook to some sort of symbol of evil. (Boris Karloff worked with both John and Lionel Barrymore and said he thought Lionel was by far the better actor.) Though I had my doubts about whether The Show would be watching without Lon Chaney in it, it turned out to be a great movie and an important precursor of both horror and noir – and there’s a marvelously ironic title in which the carnival manager chews out the people playing in his freak show and says, “You’re supposed to be freaks, not vampires!” I was struck by the irony that in effect this title referenced Browning’s two most famous films to modern audiences (though both weren’t made until after The Show), Dracula and Freaks!