The Wicked Darling

Tod Browning's gritty crime melodrama — an early collaboration with Lon Chaney that established the template for their extraordinary partnership. A young woman living in the slums is forced to steal for a petty criminal kingpin. When she lifts a wallet from a wealthy society woman, it sets off a chain of events that offers her a chance at a different life — if she can escape the underworld that claims to own her. Chaney, not yet employing his famous physical transformations, relies on sheer menace and intensity, and Priscilla Dean is electric as the tough, conflicted heroine. The film's unflinching look at poverty, crime, and the near-impossibility of upward mobility gives it a social realism unusual for the era, and Browning's affinity for society's outcasts — the theme that would define his entire career — is already unmistakable.