Tod Browning's Underworld
Browning left Kentucky for the circus as a teenager and spent the rest of his career filming the people he had worked with: barkers, grifters, acts the respectable seats came to stare at. Five of these pictures are with Chaney. The Unknown is the one that still startles: a knife-thrower who has his arms removed for a woman who has already changed her mind. Watch the disguise more than the crime. Echo in a dress. Alonzo without arms. Phroso dragging himself through a swamp for a revenge that takes eighteen years. Where East Is East is the last silent of the partnership. Dracula and Freaks are not in the catalog. The appetite that made them is.
10 films
From the Reading Room
The Wicked Darling
1919 · Tod Browning
The first of ten with Chaney, and he is not yet in appliances. Stoop Connors is a walk, a face, and a grip on Priscilla Dean's arm. A pickpocket called the Gutter Rose, a lifted wallet, a decision to leave the racket. The print is battered. The partnership is not.
Outside the Law
1921 · Tod Browning
Chaney twice: the gangster who wants Molly back and the Confucian who talks her father down. Dean above the title, Wong in a corner. The last gunfight is staged in an apartment too small for the number of guns. Watch which of Chaney's two faces the camera believes.
Drifting
1923 · Tod Browning
Dean running opium in a China built at Universal and a week in Truckee. Matt Moore's mining engineer is not a mining engineer. The disguise is the plot, and Browning spends more care on the cover story than on the drug. Wong takes the frame whenever Dean lets go of it.
White Tiger
1923 · Tod Browning
The mechanical chess player with a man inside is Browning's carnival brain a year before The Unholy Three. Three thieves, one cabin, and each one waiting for the others to sleep. The heist takes a reel. The distrust takes the rest.
The Mystic
1925 · Tod Browning
A séance filmed from backstage. Browning had worked the carnival and shows every wire. No Chaney, and the con is the star: watch how long the film lets you admire the mechanism before it asks you to feel bad about it.
The Unholy Three
1925 · Tod Browning
Echo in a dress. Chaney as a bird-shop granny, McLaglen as the strongman, Harry Earles as the infant in the pram, and Mae Busch working the marks. Their biggest hit together and the template for the rest. Watch the pram, and watch who is watching it.
The Show
1927 · Tod Browning
Gilbert in tights as a Budapest barker doing John the Baptist nightly, with Barrymore hoping the sword slips. Adorée is the Salome. Browning fills the Palace of Illusions with the trades he knew: the lizard, the blind soldier's letters, the act that could go wrong. The disguise here is a whole profession.
The Unknown
1927 · Tod Browning
Alonzo hides his arms because the police want a man with two thumbs, then has them removed for a woman who has already changed her mind. Chaney throws knives with his feet. Crawford, not yet the MGM mask, flinches like she means it. The last reel is the hardest thing in the catalog to watch, and it is sixty-eight minutes in.
West of Zanzibar
1928 · Tod Browning
Phroso, lamed by a rival, drags himself through a swamp for a revenge that takes eighteen years and is aimed at the wrong person. Chaney does the whole picture below waist height. The jungle is the lot; the cruelty is a house. When the facts finally come out, they are worse than the revenge.
Where East Is East
1929 · Tod Browning
The last silent of the partnership and, for once, Chaney is the decent one. Tiger Haynes, a trapper marked by the work, and Estelle Taylor as the mother who comes back for her daughter's fiancé. A studio Indochina, yellowface, and a gorilla for the last reel. The disguise this time is a scar, and it is honest.