The Unknown (MGM, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 18) I wanted my husband Charles and I to get back home from dinner soon enough to watch the “Silent Sunday Nights” program on Turner Classic Movies, which was featuring a really quirky movie: The Unknown, a 1927 film directed by Tod Browning and featuring Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, a circus performer who poses as a man without arms and manipulates objects with his feet, using his toes as fingers. He shoots a gun, throws knives, and smokes with his toes. Written by frequent Browning collaborator Waldemar Young from a story by Browning himself, The Unknown tells a story of Alonzo’s love for Nanon (Joan Crawford, cast in the film after MGM abandoned their original plan to have Greta Garbo in it, and quite effective), daughter of the circus’s owner, Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz). Alonzo has a sidekick named Cojo (John George) who’s the usual philosophical voice of reason trying to talk him out of his doomed attraction to Nanon. Nanon has a phobia against being touched by a man, courtesy of all the male assholes who’ve tried to paw her previously as a prelude to seduction or rape. Alonzo figures that with his armless act he’s got a shot at Nanon’s affections since she won’t have to worry about him trying to hold her. Cojo tells him that once she realizes he has arms, she won’t want anything to do with him again. Alonzo is “outed” when Zanzi attacks Nanon and Alonzo kills him to defend her. This also reveals that not only does Alonzo have arms, he has a quite obvious deformity: a doubled thumb on his left hand. Browning and Young hint that Alonzo is an escaped criminal on the run from something or other (blessedly they do no more than hint at this, though apparently some still-lost footage gave us more of the backstory), and that’s why he adopted the pose of an armless man and went to work for Zanzi’s so-called “Gypsy Circus.” Unfortunately Alonzo has a rival for Nanon’s affections: Malabar (frequent Chaney co-star Norman Kerry; he was in The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame and The Phantom of the Opera), the circus strongman, who’s determined to woo Nanon and break her of her phobia against being touched by a male.

Alonzo decides that [spoiler alert!] the only way he can ensure that Nanon will love him is to have both his arms amputated for real. So he blackmails a surgeon (John St. Polis) who used to be part of his gang to perform this bizarre operation, and while The Unknown would be an even kinkier movie than it is if Browning had shown Alonzo’s recovery from this procedure (having had some major surgeries myself I’m all too aware of how long it takes for the body to recoup from a shock like that!), he returns to the film’s Spanish setting in time to see Malabar and Nanon doing a theatre act. By this time Malabar and Nanon have become engaged – there was a quite clever scene earlier on in which Nanon and Malabar were bathing and Nanon panicked, leapt into Malabar’s arms, and decided being touched and embraced by a man weren’t so bad after all – and they’re just waiting for their old friend Alonzo to return and attend their wedding. They’re preparing to do an act in which Malabar will be fastened to harnesses hooked up to horses. The two horses will pull in different directions and Malabar will demonstrate his strength by being able to resist so his own arms won’t be pulled off. Alonzo shows up thinking that he’s got it made with Nanon now that he no longer has arms, but all too soon he realizes that he’s given up his arms for nothing. He determines to kill Malabar by sabotaging his stage act, throwing the switch that controls the treadmills the horses walk on so they’ll pull Malabar’s arms off and kill him, but in the end one of the horses stomps on Alonzo and kills him, so Malabar and Nanon end up together at last.

For years the only version of The Unknown known to exist was a 46-minute cut-down print released in England (we knew where it was from because it bore the name of Sir William Jury, head of MGM’s British distributor) until two much longer prints were found in France and the Czech Republic. Unfortunately these prints had titles only in French and Czech; fortunately a cutting continuity survived and contained the text of the titles in English. (A lot of silent films that survived in the archives of non-English-speaking countries have only badly translated titles, and it’s been a chore to figure out just what the actors should be indicated as saying. The titles of Oscar Micheaux’s surviving silents were sometimes restored from quoting the dialogue in Micheaux’s published novelizations of their stories.) The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York pieced together a nearly complete version of The Unknown from the French and Czech prints and redid the titles, putting the indication ‘GEM 2022” (for “George Eastman Museum” and the date they did the restoration) in the lower right corner of each title. They also created a new set of opening credits in the authentic style MGM used during the period instead of just slapping on the film’s name and credits onto plain black boards (good for them!). Joan Crawford later said that working with Chaney had been a major step forward in her career: “Lon Chaney was my introduction to acting. The concentration, the complete absorption he gave to his characterization filled me with such awe I could scarcely speak to him. … Watching him gave me the desire to be a real actress.” Not surprisingly, the film’s publicity stated that Chaney had taught himself the art of manipulating objects with his feet and toes, though modern sources indicate that he had a “foot double” for the close-ups, a real armless circus performer named Paul Desmuke. Desmuke was even advertised by the circus owner that employed him, Al G. Barnes, as “The Man Who Doubled for Lon Chaney's Legs in ‘The Unknown’.”

In her introduction to the film, “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart said that The Unknown was an outlier from MGM’s usual house style of sophisticated films set in affluent locations. It was and it wasn’t; I’ve long suspected that the whole idea of studios’ “house styles” has been way overblown by film historians. It’s true that certain studios gravitated to certain types of stories (Warner Bros. aimed a lot of their films at proletarian audiences because in 1928 they bought the First National theatre chain, and since the theatres that formed First National had been built in relatively middle-class parts of cities and rural areas rather than the upscale movie palaces of more affluent locations, that’s what the audiences who lived there wanted to see), but it’s also true that any of the major studios were prepared to make any sort of film as long as they thought it would make money. MGM heads Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg knew they’d inherited an effective and lucrative director/star collaboration in Tod Browning and Lon Chaney when they got them from Goldwyn Pictures after the 1924 merger. So they let Browning and Chaney continue to make the series of bizarre melodramas like The Unholy Three, The Blackbird (another story in which Chaney pretends to be disabled to carry out a criminal career: he’s posing as a kindly crippled bishop and his brother, a criminal mastermind called “The Blackbird,” only midway through the film we learn that “The Bishop” and “The Blackbird” are the same person, and in the sort of ironic twist Browning loved it turns out that by posing as a cripple for so long he’s actually become one), London After Midnight, and this. I’ve long thought that Browning’s career never recovered from the dual whammy of the coming of sound and Chaney’s death from throat cancer in 1930; the two were supposed to make Dracula together when Chaney died and Browning’s disinterest in the Dracula he ultimately made with Bela Lugosi is all too obvious in the final product. Asked by Thalberg to follow up Dracula with a film scarier than Frankenstein, Browning came up with Freaks (1932), in which he filled his cast with real circus freaks and made them the good guys and the normal people in the story the bad guys. Freaks was a notorious box-office bomb and it didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s (much too late for Browning, who made his last film in 1939 and died in 1962), and for the rest of the 1930’s he made just four movies, two of them remakes or reworkings of his previous hits.