The Unknown (1927) - film review

Alonzo the Armless is the main attraction in a Spanish circus with his knife throwing act, which he performs with the use of his feet.   Only Alonzo’s assistant Cojo knows that he is a fake, that he really has two perfectly intact arms.  However, Alonzo profits from his supposed affliction to win the sympathy of circus girl Nanon.  Knowing that Nanon hates being touched by men, Alonzo encourages his rival, the strongman Malabar, to fondle her.  Cojo warns his friend that he cannot marry Nanon because on their wedding night she would discover his secret and reject him.  Realising the truth of this, Alonzo coerces a surgeon into amputating both of his arms.  When he subsequently learns that Nanon intends to marry Malabar, Alonzo is consumed with rage and resolves to destroy his rival...

The best of the eight collaborations of director Tod Browning and legendary star of the silent era Lon Chaney, The Unknown is also Browning’s darkest and most disturbing film, several orders of magnitude more chilling than his subsequent horror classic Dracula (1931).  What makes this macabre tale of unrequited love, self-mutilation and grisly revenge so potent is the unbeatable combination of Browning’s restrained but highly effective direction and Chaney’s remarkably intense performance.  The abject darkness of Chaney’s portrayal is all the more striking when set against the lightness which is brought by Joan Crawford, here playing the femme fatale in one of her earliest major film roles.

One of the greatest actors of his generation, Lon Chaney had a particular talent for playing villains convincingly.  He manages to bring to his performance not only a genuine impression of raging malevolence but also an acute sense of pathos, and nowhere is this more evident than in this film.  The character that Chaney portrays in The Unknown is a murderer masquerading as a man with no arms.  On the surface, there is nothing likeable about Alonzo, and yet Chaney plays him with such emotional force and poignancy that he becomes the character the audience most identifies with.   We want him to succeed in winning the girl he has fallen for, even if it means his rival dying in the most horrible way imaginable.  

Given its sadistically dark subject matter, it is hardly surprising that The Unknown was not well-received when it was first released.   Even today, it still sends a shiver down the spine and is definitely not one for the squeamish, although, interestingly, there not one frame of explicit horror.  This is a film that poses an intriguing question: can an evil act that is performed for noble, albeit misguided aims, ever be seen in a sympathetic light?  "No" will probably be your immediate response.  Watch this film and you may have a different answer.

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