Yearly Archives: 2011

Matter of fact, it’s all dark.

“One of these days I’m going to write a song that makes someone want to cry.”
– Neil Diamond, Teen Screen Magazine, March 1967

When The Neil Diamond Collection arrived in the mail last month, I had forgotten I ever ordered it. For most of my 39-ish years, Neil Diamond was simply never on my radar except as a familiar cultural presence, some dude I heard twice a year on the radio but knew nothing about.  Yet something lead me to order that Neil Diamond CD. Curiosity, maybe, or an accident of random firing neurons. Perhaps it was the booze. Oh, did I mention I had consumed half a bottle of Machete before ordering The Neil Diamond Collection? Because I had consumed half a bottle of Machete before ordering The Neil Diamond Collection. My only memory of this is peering at the Amazon screen through eyes gummed up from drink and 12-hour-old mascara. It was a proud moment.

Roughly one week later, sober and trusting that every package delivered to the house contained either happiness or fun or, on really good days, both, I opened the box to find Neil Diamond staring at me.

That photo bothered me, induced an unidentifiable, inexplicable, but very real disturbance. A few days later my husband, who knew I was in the throes of some weird ennui-induced thing improbably triggered by a greatest hits album, kindly turned the album cover around. Now it was a slightly older photo from Diamond’s Greek Theater engagement in 1972. Young, lithe, gorgeous, confident, godlike hair and sad eyes.

That didn’t help.

When I saw these photos, I realized I was not familiar with the Neil Diamond that existed before the beaded blouses and glamour shots album covers. At the same time, I was overwhelmed with the realization that 40 years had passed since I was born and since that greatest hits album photo was taken and holy shit that has been a long time. Time will not stop, loss is inevitable, and what was will never be again.

These are basic concepts, things I figured out decades ago; why was I suddenly having so much trouble accepting them now?

Re-acceptance was not easily had, and after several very shaky days I was nearly unglued. The unidentifiable ennui-induced thing had turned into an unwavering sense of loss and grief. It was an unstable situation, tragicomic in retrospect but mostly frightening at the time. In an effort to ferret out what was happening and with an ill-defined feeling of having forgotten something important, I searched out early Neil Diamond performances and interviews.

It was in that state that I stumbled across a 1971 BBC “Top of the Pops” performance by Neil Diamond.


Please, if you have a spare 38-odd minutes of time, watch this. I don’t ask this because I wish gut-wrenching emotional turmoil on you, because I acknowledge that I am odd and different and what happened to me will not likely happen to you. Normal people do not suffer irrational headspins after watching a 40-year-old “Top of the Pops” episode. But I think you will be surprised, maybe even a bit moved, by Diamond’s performance. Within one minute of the show opening he is expressing pure, unadulterated joy at performing with the string section. He’s confident and happy and very much in control of his art. Even when his untrained fingers get tangled in an arpeggio or the lead trumpet cracks on an important high note, he’s completely together. As much as he wants to hide those gangly arms behind his guitar, as hard as it is for him to force his eyes open and face the crowd or finish a particularly raw lyric, he does it.

Neil Diamond has said songwriting is the hardest part of his work, performing the easiest, but I am not convinced that live performance has ever been easy for him. There are numerous early television appearances where Diamond is obviously uncomfortable. Watch his eyes on this 1970 “Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” clip at about 4:25 where he momentarily freaks out after glancing directly at the camera. When he’s not waylaid by nerves, it’s emotion. In the 1971 BBC appearance, he visibly cringes at the end of “I Am…I Said” and very nearly goes silent without finishing the song. Manufactured or genuine, that’s pain writ large upon his face. He’s offering up his soul, and when an artist does this, they ask for your soul in return. At least some of it, at least for a while.

People will forever argue about when Neil changed, but there is no denying that there was a change, a walling-off of emotion coupled with a growing propensity to shake his moneymaker on stage.  Sometime in 1976, after the Thank You Australia Tour in March yet before The Band’s “Last Waltz” concert on Thanksgiving, Neil went from offering his soul to merely displaying it like a museum piece. Yet while he relied on little more than past glories and sex appeal, he continued to expect fans to keep up their half of the artistic soul exchange. The sublime had turned to kitsch, embraced mediocrity to save itself, abandoned its art for the soul-numbing safety of its 17th greatest hits compilation, this time with a bonus demo reel and tiny pictures in the liner notes.

I combed through any interviews, TV appearances, or concert footage I could find from the mid-70s and beyond just for one small sign of the Neil Diamond that used to be. There are tiny little winks of light scattered amongst the decades of debris, but that is all.

It felt more like a betrayal than a revelation, and at random moments over the course of a few days, bits of Diamond’s BBC performance would pop into my head. It was never a welcome memory, instead making me feel as though I just been given some very bad news. More than once I risked giving way to a debilitating scream, a powerful noise that would alter time, change reality, correct the past, destroy evil, win bets and fell a nearby shepherd and his flock.

So I went back to that BBC concert footage to face it, straightened myself up, shoulders back, steeled myself and stood in front of that 1971 Neil Diamond and looked him right in those soft fucking eyes. I was Randolph Fucking Scott and I was not going to run, and man, if you are going to kill me, then you are going to have to do it now.

I did not die, of course. Broken hearts don’t kill.

I’m fond of saying that art which affects me to the point of shredding my emotions has ruined my life, and I’m fond of saying it because it’s the goddamned truth. When this happens, my emotions, philosophy, and spirituality are demolished, the pieces scattered, never put back together the same way again. Sometimes it’s wonderful and exciting, like watching Milton Glaser in To Inform and Delight, or listening to Laurie Anderson narrate Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, or hearing Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage/Eclipse” or that Handel sarabande in D minor I love so much. Sometimes, though, it really fucking hurts. The Bad Sleep Well hurt, as did Brave New World and The Sound and the Fury. Rick Danko’s “It Makes No Difference” in The Last Waltz destroys me every time, and I’m certain my sworn lifelong nemesis Elton John wants to kill me dead with the 1977 live “I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford)” — even though he and Ray Cooper fuck up about two minutes in. Especially because they fuck up. Goddammit, Elton. I will get my revenge, you be-sequined bastard.

Once this whole Neil-induced pseudo-breakdown simmered down, there were a lot of things I had to acknowledge. I may imagine myself as a gunslinger facing down evil, beating the bad guys to the draw and saving my own life — soul, really — but that’s not true. At best it’s metaphorically true; all my conflicts are artistic and all the duels one-sided and internal.

Last year I briefly touched on The Bad Sleep Well and how it ruined me. I hesitated for months before posting that entry because I was scared, and frankly I’ve been scared and a little bit lazy my whole life, at least when it comes to writing. And I’ve never honestly examined these Stendahl-like reactions that bite my neck and get tangled in my hair every six months or so. Is it appropriate when I say The Bad Sleep Well killed any lingering hope for humanity I had left? Is it merely drama queening? Is it even real?

Yeah, it’s real. It’s real for me, at least. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe I shouldn’t get so caught up in fictional corruption or Quentin Compson or a “Top of the Pops” performance. But I do get caught up in it, and I’m tired of pretending as though I don’t and avoiding the subject in my writing.

I want to write and I want to be good at it. Writing is not easy for me. When I started this blog, I thought it would afford me practice and experience that would turn me into someone who could produce quality work on a regular basis. Four years on, it was obvious I had not become that magical creature.  As banal as it sounds, all that time spent digging through Neil Diamond interviews inspired me when I didn’t realize I even needed inspiration. He has said that “I Am…I Said” took four months to write, that he’s not an inherently good songwriter and he has to work hard at it. I knew I wasn’t working hard enough at my own writing, digging deep enough, or even doing enough research. Again, it’s banal, but I decided if Neil Diamond can change himself from that goofy scared kid on the “Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour” into the modern day troubadour on the BBC a year later, then maybe I can transform into a decent writer, someone who is respected amongst my peers.

Of course, Neil kept transitioning and didn’t stop, flying in spectacular fashion through a series of phases: Larger-than-life panty-dodging sex god, attention-starved bead-covered sell-out, and finally respected and loved showman who gets to smack the shit out of Jimmy Kimmel. That’s his thing, and though right now I am disappointed in him, I am also sane enough to know that it’s not my place to judge.  Still, I plan on taking his career path as a cautionary tale, although I don’t imagine I’ll ever get to the point where I need people to throw their knickers at me to prove that I’m worthwhile.  Panty throwing is always optional. (It’s not optional.)

After spending about an hour laying in the hallway, staring at the ceiling and tightly hugging Dark Side of the Moon because I failed to get a firm hold on this post — it took me weeks to manage the final sentence — I wonder how hard this is going to be. It’s easy for me to say I should work at writing. It’s not going to be easy for me to actually do it, but I have to, and that means less posts on the blog.  I will still post here because the only thing I’m moderately good at writing is film and cultural criticism, but it will mean less overall posts and hopefully less of the half-formed almost-critiques that I’ve been just barely getting away with. And when I’m not struggling over some epic screed on how Ginger Rogers’ ostrich feather dress represents fascism and the decline of the bourgeoisie, I will still be posting important Regis Toomey updates via The Phantom Creeps recaps, photos, schedules, my Projects and screencaps, because those things are fun.

And now the final sentence that took me so long to write: Wish me luck.

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The Italian Horror Blogathon: Dario Argento’s Jenifer and Pelts

Italian director Dario Argento is known for his giallo films featuring excessive style, bloodshed and sex. His surrealist and controversial horror thrillers of the 1970s are often cited as some of the most influential films by modern horror filmmakers. In the mid-2000s, Argento directed two episodes of the Showtime “Masters of Horror” series. While not strictly Italian horror, the influence and signature style of Argento is unmistakeable.

Argento’s first short film for “Masters of Horror” was Jenifer based on the graphic novel by Bernie Wrightson and Bruce Jones.

Police Detective Frank Spivey and his partner are on a boring stakeout. When Spivey accidentally stumbles across a man taking a cleaver to a woman he has dragged under a bridge, Spivey shoots the disheveled man and kills him. At first thought beautiful, when the woman’s blonde curls pull away from her face as Frank rescues her, he sees that she is quite disfigured. Spivey is immediately obsessed, unable to forget the woman he has just saved.

Spivey is put on administrative leave pending psychological counseling after killing the suspect. He returns home to a distant wife, irritating teenaged step son, and even a hostile cat who hisses at him every time he approaches. The next day he follows up on the girl. Her name is Jenifer, he is told, and she has no family, no information is in the system for her, and she is unable to speak. They assume she is mentally challenged and place her in a poorly-run state institution, from which Spivey rescues her again. The wife and stepson are not amused when he brings her home, although the stepson is not completely freaked out as he had a chance to see Jenifer’s impossibly beautiful naked body.

Frank has noticed this as well, and after Jenifer is kicked out of the home for killing and devouring the family cat, he tries to find a place for her to stay. No one will take her, so he attempts to abandon her at the pier near where he found her. Pale, sweaty, shaky and sporting a thousand-mile stare, Frank barely attempts to resist Jenifer as she unzips and unbuttons him in short order. After some rousing car sex, Frank is back at home with Jenifer insisting she has to stay.

Jenifer attempts to eat Frank’s wife’s face, at which point his wife and stepson leave for good. Things continue to deteriorate in a horrific manner until the inevitable denouement; the fun of this film is the ride, not the conclusion, as there is simply only one possible conclusion to be had.

Directed by Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, this film is a one-hour episode of the “Masters of Horror” series that aired on Showtime from 2005 to 2007. Sixty episodes were filmed but only 59 aired in the U.S., the first-season Takashi Miike film Imprint having been held back because of its extremely graphic violence. The other first-season film that had issues with its graphic nature was Jenifer, edited for Showtime and also in the DVD release. The removed scenes were sexual in nature as well as gory, and can apparently only be found as DVD extras.

In Jenifer, it is obvious the director is having fun, injecting psychological horror into the old “butterface” joke and relishing the results, particularly notable in his many lingering close-ups of Steven Weber’s wrenching “I am so fucked” face. A few allusions to horror classics such as Frankenstein and Freaks also add a lighthearted tone, while the audience meanwhile is properly horrified by Jenifer’s actions. Much of the film’s conflict comes from the discrepancy in perspective between the director and the audience, making for a rather odd feel to the film that nearly punctures the fourth wall.


What is notably missing in this film is Argento’s signature extravagant lighting and cinematography, replaced instead with competent but mostly mundane television camera work that would not be out of place in an episode of “Law & Order.” Visuals are often lifted directly from the classic comic this story is based on, I presume in an attempt to stay true to the source material. The source comic, by the way, is fantastic, a tight and disturbing little number by Bruce Jones and Bernie Wrightson, originally published in Creepy #63 in July of 1974.

One of the most interesting facets to this film is how the major crimes go unnoticed, how people caught up in Jenifer’s destruction remain so stubbornly silent. People disappear and are attacked, yet no one seems to notice enough to call authorities. The man early in the film who tries to kill Jenifer turns out to have recently had a good job and a normal life, but his family now refuses to even claim his body. It’s this silence that allows the horror to continue, and it’s a fascinating addition to the story.

On the surface, the original “Jenifer” does not seem to be the kind of source material that Argento would be attracted to. With the male lead adapted to a police detective who ultimately finds himself covering up heinous crimes and living on the lam, it becomes almost a giallo film but never reaches that designation, not for want of trying on the sex and blood fronts, but due mostly to its uninspired visuals. Adding a giallo feel to the story is moderately interesting, but mostly unnecessary.

 

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For the second season of “Masters of Horror,” Argento filmed a much more stylish, intense, and bloody thriller entitled Pelts. Meat Loaf Aday stars as furrier Jake Feldman, a very angry, desperate, egotistical man who feels he can take anything he wants. Jake is obsessed with Shanna (Ellen Ewusie), a beautiful lesbian stripper whom he attacks and tries to rape after paying for a lap dance. She fights him off and he leaves with a warning, that he will return with the kind of money and power that she will be unable to resist.

Meanwhile a local trapper (John Saxon) and his son go out to check raccoon traps they have set on Mother Mayter’s property, without permission of course. In the dead of night they wander into the fenced-off area and are confronted with the sight of dozens of raccoons, even trap filled. The traps are set amongst ruins that neither the trapper nor his son realize depict raccoons. The animals are fighters, one even chewing its own foot off to escape, but they are of course no match for the violent greed of the trapper who bashes their heads in with a bat. They take about a dozen dead raccoons back to their home and skin them, only to find the pelts are a beautiful silvery fur, hypnotizing and ethereal, and all identical.


The beauty of the fur possesses the son, who is compelled by forces unknown to bash his father’s head in with a baseball bat, then to put his own head into a raccoon trap.

Jake and his partner find the pelts and the bodies the next morning, recognize the value of the gorgeous, ethereal fur, and hardly hesitate before stealing the pelts and then calling the police. Jake’s plan is to make a unique coat out of the fur and enter it into an international exhibition with Shanna as the model. As his undocumented and abused workers begin to assemble the coat, Jake goes makes his way to Mother Mayter’s, hoping to get her to agree to let him trap on the land.

What she tells him shocks him, but not enough to quell his greed. It’s too late to save Jake. His workers and partners are slowly killing themselves off in gruesome ways, but he myopically sticks to the plan to achieve both success in the industry and possess Shanna as his own. Things, as they say, do not end well.


Argento’s direction and Attila Szalay’s lush cinematography are unqualified successes in this film. Heavily saturated colors and impossible shadows abound. Gorgeous, languid nature shots punctuate quietly unnerving interiors that mimic cages, traps, and abattoirs. The violence is intensely graphic, making Pelts one of the few films that has made me physically ill.

The ultimate lesson of Pelts is not a unique one, as it speaks to the perils of succumbing to greed, abuse of nature, and the underlying philosophical idea that humans are merely animals, “beasts with big brains” as Agent Mulder might say. Again, as with so many of Argento’s works, the fun is in the drive and not the destination. Outstanding performances from Aday, Saxon, and especially Ellen Ewusie elevate this short film from mere television shock thriller to a very compelling piece.

 

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The Torture in Store: Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986)


Gothic is a wild mix of the beautiful and the grotesque, intriguing philosophical questions and empty MTV-era visuals, cloaked in an impossible melange of cobwebs and goats and sex and leeches. The film borrows thematic styles at whim, everything from David Lynch to Fellini’s exquisitely debauched Casanova (1976) to Hammer studios’ signature colorful lighting palette.


The film opens with giggly residents on the non-Byron side of Lake Geneva, peeping at the poet’s home through a spyglass and gossiping about his sexual exploits and resultant exile. As they watch, visitors to Byron arrive by water and, immediately upon disembarking, poet Percy Shelley is beset upon by shrieking fangirls. Shelley, Mary Godwin and her half-sister Claire Clairmont did indeed visit Lord Byron in the real 1816 just as they do in the cinematic 1816, staying with him and living near him at the lake for months; the film shows them there for only a single weekend.


During their real life stay, Vampyre and Frankenstein were born after nights of ghost stories and playfully competitive challenges. The summer of 1816 was known as “The Year Without Summer” due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year prior. The cold, rainy summer kept them indoors much of the time. In Gothic, this climatic claustrophobia is only barely hinted at, as the night and their inner passions are to blame for the resultant boredom and inevitable amusing seance.


The seance, at first a lark, ultimately launches a night-long debacle where individual fears join to become a single malevolent presence in the house, possessing and haunting them.


Lord Byron’s jealousy is a significant force within the semi-bodied malevolence. He wishes to control and possess everybody and everything. Byron cheekily plays with Dr. Polidori’s desires while simultaneously making advances on Percy, imploring him to “forget your women, poets are for each other.” The cast weave in and out of rooms and dialogues, languishing in their own singular hells before joining, somewhat unwillingly, to chase the evil away, but not until Mary has been shown that their fears are their futures.


As their hell-futures are revealed to them throughout the night, the plot of the film is slowly discarded like the veils on the Turkish dancing automaton, until the film descends into a series of grotesque tableaux with little to connect the images. It is a film out of control, curiously counterbalancing the characters so that their own uncontrolled mania seems reasonable by comparison.


The visuals are glorious, so do yourself a favor if you have a region-free DVD player and get the UK version with the proper aspect ratio. The US version is 1:33 open matte while the UK version is the original 1:85. You can see the differences in the two prints here, with grain and contrast differences as well as aspect ratio. If you’re going to watch this beautiful mess of a film, watch it in the most gorgeous print as you can find.

 

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Berserk (1967)

In 1962, the cult mainstay Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? launched a genre of campy horror films starring actresses known for their classic films two, three, even four decades earlier. Joan Crawford was one of the queens of that genre, starring in several B-grade horror flicks. Berserk (1967) was her fourth — fifth if you count Della — and one of her most glamorous.

Joan is Monica Rivers, owner and ringmaster of a financially struggling circus. During a matinee high wire act, a cable snaps and the tightrope walker falls, only to be caught by the snapping cord… unfortunately, it catches him around his neck. The movie shows this with tasteful subtlety, using the hanging dead man as a wipe-transition across the screen while revealing the wacky, colorful title:

Thus begins a spate of alternately boring and campy scenes depicting a series of gruesome murders at Monica’s circus, murders that just happen to be drawing more attendees and more money to her business — precisely as she predicted. Soon after the tightrope walker dies, Frank (Ty Hardin) just happens to arrive, just happens to be a tightrope walker himself, and just happens to want to work for Monica. He also just happens to wind up in her bed, upsetting her lover Alberto (Michael Gough). Alberto is not the only one upset, as evil-sexy magician’s assistant Matilda (Diana Dors) has disliked Monica for years and is now jealous of her newly-acquired side of beef. When Alberto and others conveniently turn up dead, both Monica and Frank are suspected of the crimes. A final complication arrives in the form of Monica’s teen daughter Angela (Judy Geeson) who has been expelled yet again from an expensive school.

The film cannot shake off its B-movie budget despite some undeniable cleverness in cinematography; the padding with circus footage and the hairstyles truly give this movie away. Between Joan’s pinned-in wiglet braid, Ty Hardin’s brush-in grey to make him appear as a more age-appropriate lover for Ms. Crawford, and Diana Dors’… er…


I don’t even know what that is. A fringed helmet? A stray hay bale that fell on her head? All I know is that hair does not work that way. The atrocity on Diana’s head reminds me of Julie Christie in post #1 of my “Wigging Out” series, only not frosted.

Significant time is spent watching circus performances in their entirety, and while it’s occasionally entertaining — I personally harbor a secret love for the intelligent poodles — it is undeniably padding. During the boredom that will ensue after too many minutes spent watching elephants mosey around, I recommend you start picking out easy-to-see individuals in the crowd shots. If you’re quick, you’ll notice the editor didn’t bother to match up the crowd shots, resulting in people with easily visible striped shirts moving from seat to seat during the act. Also, spend time pondering just how Joan managed to always have the Mildred Pierce light on her no matter where she stood.


A blandly typical motley crew of circus performers round out the cast, acting moderately goofy when called for, until it’s time to perform an embarrassing song to “honor” their boss Monica. It is so awful I cannot describe it. The love story is relatively insipid, but not because of the age difference between Crawford and Hardin. Many consider their romance to be part of the camp, usually with something dismissive like “Joan still had nice legs, but no guy Hardin’s age would want to sleep with her.” Yet this rather pedestrian complaint was handled well by the film, strangely enough, in part by making both Frank and Monica the type of person willing to use sex to get what they want.


Crawford’s performance is a delight, and am ashamed to admit I mean that in a subtly-mean hipster ironic way. She glowers a lot, emphasizes odd words, acts like she’s trying to orchestrate a hostile takeover of a Fortune 500 company rather than make a few bucks with her low-rent circus. Both she and Dors seem either angry or drunk throughout the film, possibly both. Gough, bless his heart, puts in a very good acting performance, as does Judy Geeson. Ty Hardin is Super Bland Man in a lackluster performance rivaling Mr. Bland himself, Donald Woods.

Berserk achieves its meager reputation by being a brightly-colored Joan Crawford film, a Hammer horror knockoff with too little substance to balance the moments of high camp. The camp, when it happens, is well worth the watch, and a reasonably high body count make the film worthwhile, especially for those who enjoy 1960s cheesy British horror.

Ty Hardin, Joan Crawford, Herman Cohen, Judy Geeson, Diana Dors.

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Note: Keen-eyed readers will notice that I have broken my own rule and posted screen captures from other websites. The first three screencaps are mine, the rest borrowed (ahem) as I had technical problems and simply could not salvage most of my own.

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The Unknown (1927)

Welcome me to 2009, kids, because I’ve finally gotten around to creating public online galleries of my movie pictures. Thrill as I reveal the first of what should be many Flickr sets: The Unknown.

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In June and December of 1997, TCM showed an amber tinted print of The Unknown that I really enjoyed. By August 1998 they had begun showing the black and white version we see today, which is the historically accurate version, or at least is probably the historically accurate version.

We had a nice discussion about it on alt.movies.silent several years ago. The black and white print on the DVD and on TCM is from a French copy that was basically lost for a while, filed away with unknown/unidentified films thanks to a confusion with the movie’s name. The titles on the current version were inserted in 1978 if I’m reading the Roman numerals on the copyright notice correctly, they are not original to the film. I believe the content of the titles are original, but I do not know, because someone on that alt.movies.silent thread indicated that his old 9.5mm print had significantly different titles.

Also, Joan Crawford’s name is different on the print I saw: She was Estrellita. According to Jon Mirsalis’ excellent website, the original cutting continuity lists the character as Nanon, but Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times saw her name as Estrellita in 1927. Not only did the amber tinted print I see exist, but there was a report of a sepia toned print shown in theaters in France in the 1970s. Though the consensus on AMS was that the film was originally black and white, there was some question as to whether MGM simply didn’t bother listing any original tinting/toning in film records by 1927. That might mean Unknown was tinted or toned but just not noted as such in MGM files.

I laugh every time I see this: Alonzo in a hospital recovering from major surgery… with his gypsy scarf still on his head.

I bring all this up not just because it’s interesting, but because these differences change how I perceive the film. My first viewings of The Unknown were the amber tinted Estrellita ones, much softer because of the condition of the film, and that’s the version I really came to love. It’s been well over a decade of nothing but the black and white, sharper, crisper Nanon version, and I just cannot warm up to it. The more modern title cards are jarring to me. Yes, if I see a font that doesn’t jibe with the era the movie was made in, it rattles my nerves. I’m delicate.

What I liked most about the amber tinted version was the trick of the gauze over the lens. It looked like straw and had a glow. This is how it looks in black and white:

Visually interesting but somewhat flat. Perhaps my memory is overwhelmed with nostalgia and the old TCM print wasn’t very good at all… but let me put out into the Internet ether again that if you have a copy of the old tinted/toned print, I would love to see it again.

As I’ve become older and, I hope, a more educated film viewer and critic, I see less to love about The Unknown. That’s not easy to say, because it is single-handedly responsible for my love of silent films and TCM. That amber tinted nasty old print got me hooked for good on old films; yet, I have to admit The Unknown has some flaws.

Chaney’s character of Alonzo is a psychopath, but for inexplicable reasons, he’s portrayed as a man who truly loves Nanon. My bestest movie reviewer boyfriend Mordaunt Hall noted this in his 1927 review, stating that Alonzo “deteriorates from a more or less sympathetic individual to an arch-fiend.” I disagree somewhat because Alonzo doesn’t deteriorate. He’s not revealed as a monster as the film progresses but rather wavers back and forth, at the end snapping because of circumstance and a broken heart.


We first see Alonzo gazing sweetly at Nanon with Cojo (John George) as the devil, making Alonzo look metaphorically saintly by comparison. When he kills Nanon’s father, it’s after we have learned Nanon has an intense fear of men touching her because, she says, men have wanted to paw her for her whole life. Since she’s roughly 20 years old when she reveals this, it’s safe to say she was “pawed” as a child, possibly by her drunk and brutish father. Nanon’s father’s death is not problematic; the audience figures he deserved it.

But we also see during this time Alonzo willing to trick Malabar into manhandling Nanon to thwart Malabar’s romantic advances.

A man willing to put his beloved through psychological torture is not a sweet, kind man. And when Cojo suggests Alonzo should leave Nanon alone because it will probably not work out anyway, his outburst suggests possession rather than love.

Cojo is frightened because he knows about Alonzo’s past, and we are given a brief glimpse into it with a note sent to a surgeon Alonzo once knew and the fact Alonzo is pretending to be armless to evade the law. These things in the past are revealed during the film to make it seem like his sweetness has turned to psychopathy, but I think most in the audience are going to do the chronology in our heads and realize this was a man with a problem before he even met Nanon. We see him screaming that he will do anything to own her. We know what’s what.

But then Alonzo acts sweet in Nanon’s presence, and he’s not a master manipulator faking emotions to possess the girl. He’s genuinely portrayed as the giddy schoolboy when he’s kissed by Nanon.

The attempt to turn overt evil into mere sinister undertones is not effective, and it’s a detriment to the film. We already get undertones with the reason Nanon cannot have a man touch her, with Malabar’s insistence on manhandling women, with the unspoken reason Cojo sticks with Alonzo despite his violence. We need big sloppy delicious evil, but sadly, Alonzo does not deliver.

A surprising, brief moment of art deco in the middle of The Unknown.

 

Paul Desmuke was an armless circus performer who doubled for Chaney and did many of the leg movements. As far as I can tell, the promotional material in 1927 claimed Chaney did all his own work with no mention of Desmuke. Read more about his life in the circus and his career as Judge Paul Desmuke, justice of the peace in Atascosa County, Texas.

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