The Unknown (1927)

Up until yesterday, I'd never heard of this wonderful late Hollywood film, directed by Tod Browning and starring Lon Chaney Sr and Joan Crawford, together at last. And it is a thing of dark beauty.

Sadly, ten minutes or so of the film are apparently missing; given the poor survival rate of films from this era, I suppose we're lucky to have it at all. Because this isa deliciously dark bit of black humour that's recognisably Tod Browning and certainly has DNA in common with the great Freaks. Set in a circus in "old Madrid", at first it seems to concern a love triangle between Alonzo, a man with no arms who uses his feet to shoot bulletsand throw knives at his beloved Nanon, who is also loved by Malabar, the kind strongman. At first it seems as though this is to be a straightyforward love triangle... but all is not what it seems.

Slowly, we learn of Alonzo's secret, and his true nature. We learn the extremes he will go to in order to win his lady's love, with body horror and cruel irony played on that very edge between tragedy and comedy.

The three main performances are superb. Lon Chaney is, of course, magnificent, but so too is the very young Joan Crawford. I particularly love how Alonzo is seen doing all sorts of things with his feet- smoking a cigarette, drinking a glass of wine, playing the guitar. 

This is, in short, superb. I have perhaps neglected silent cinema a bit lately. This sort of film is the reason why I shouldn't.

Freaks (1932)

"One of us. One of us..."

I can see why this film has been so controversial for so long. It may be a straightforward morality tale about the exploitation of those who look different, but in its very existence in parading its "freaks" as performers it exploits them itself. This is a film that could never be made today, a relic of the "freak shows" of the early twentieth century. Still, morally dodgy though it may be, it`s hard to look behind Freaks the historical curiosity and see Freaks the film.

 There`s nothing particularly exciting about the script or the way it`s shot and made by Tod Browning, a rather uninspired director here as he was with Dracula. The subject matter, and the freaks on screen, are the movie`s only selling point. And the straightfowrard plot means that a film of only sixty minutes feels over-long. I dread to think how it would have dragged with the thirty minutes of excised footage, now lost.

We are introduced to thevarious freaks one by one, all of them real and most using their "real" names. The film revolves around Cleopatra, the trapeze artist, and her cruelly cynical seduction of the dwarf Hans, mockingly marrying him for his money and then trying to kill him. Her comeuppance is suitably horrific, and I smiled at the clever way the meaning of the first scene is revealed at the end, after what the "freaks" have done to Cleopatra. The pursuit scenes, and especialy the "one of us" chants are genuinely scary, but is it right to portray the "freaks" as something to fear?

This isn`t a particularly good film, and it is somewhat troubling to watch, but as an historical document it is ghoulishly fascinating.

Dracula (1931)

“Listen to them: children of the night! What music they make!”

I wasn’t too impressed with this one. It’s slow, stilted, and awkward- a far cry from the style and humour of Universal’s own Frankenstein from the same year. Still, there’s a significant redeeming feature in Bela Lugosi, who is simply fantastic.

The opening scenes are well done, building up the suspense and giving us the context before we meet Dracula. The first line is spoken by Carl Laemmle’s daughter Carla, who is still alive and will be 102 this month, but we then move to a lot of ominous mutterings by local peasants towards Renfield. Interestingly, the setting seems to be firmly established as Transylvania, with all the signs in Hungarian, rather than the vague Mittel-European setting of the later Hammers.

There’s a certain style to the lighting of Lugosi’s face at some points, I suppose, but the direction is strangely lacklustre. Lugosi aside, the performances are not too good, either. The initial scenes with Renfield (conflated here with Jonathan Harker) at Castle Dracula only work to the extent they do because of Lugosi’s performance, although I like the presence of the various animals. I’m not sure there are too many armadillos in Transylvania, though.

The scene soon shifts to England, and becomes oddly and claustrophobically studio-bound for the rest of the film. Dracula is seen to carry out a few murders, but there are rather too many scenes of him politely conversing to Mina, “John” Harker and Van Helsing to be plausible, in spite of the fact that Van Helsing has his measure from the start. All the working-class characters speak a kind of absurd Dick Van Dyke cockney, too, and keep pronouncing the word “crazy” in a most peculiar fashion.

The plot proceeds in a way which owes rather more to the novel than the later Hammer film would. Lucy doesn’t have much screen time before abruptly dying, though, and the plot thread of her killing lots of people as a “woman in white” seems to just trail off. The rest of the film consists of Dracula gradually drinking Mina’s blood at night while she spends her days being patronised by the men who surround her. The sexual subtext is barely there at all, except for Mina’s scenes with John towards the end of the film.

Interestingly, the tropes of vampirism are rather different from those we know. Wolfsbane is used instead of garlic, and Dracula is able to turn, off-screen, into (unseen) wolves as well as ridiculously unconvincing bats. He presents very little sense of threat, though, for all his charisma, giving no indication of violence or strength in his interaction with the characters.

The film just ends with no real dramatic tension; Van Helsing simply stakes Dracula, with no confrontation of any kind beforehand. The whole thing simply falls flat, with no flair, dramatic tension, narrative clarity or humour. My overall impression was disappointment, although my expectations had not been high. Still, at least I can now say I’ve seen it.