100 Years Ago Today: The Unholy Three (1925)

August 16, 1925 was the release date of the Tod Browning’sThe Unholy Three.

Browning had been directing in Hollywood for over a decade when he got a green light to direct his second picture with Lon Chaney, who was then fresh off of a streak of horror hits that included The Hunchback of Notre Dame(1923), He Who Gets Slapped(1924), The Monster (1925) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Though he was from a carnival and vaudeville background, most of Browning’s directing assignments heretofore had been melodramas starring the likes of Priscilla Dean. He seized this chance to adapt a novel by Tod Robbins (also the author of the story Freaks was based on) about renegade circus performers who go on a crime spree. The film is a perfect storm of the titillating, bizarre, and lurid, the kind of stuff we associate with B movies, but producer Irving Thalberg gave it a shot. It’s really the movie on which Tod Browning became Tod Browning.

The plot, if you can believe it: Chaney is a ventriloquist who works at a pet-shop making parrots seem to talk.

He also goes around dressed as an old lady, and is in cahoots with a little person (Harry Earles, later of Freaks) who pretends to be a baby. (I’m pretty sure he’s the original cigar smoking baby.)

These disarming disguises allow them to gain the trust of the suckers whose houses they burgle.

The third partner, the muscle, is a loutish brute of a circus strong man (Victor McLaglen).

Complicating matters is the presence of a sexy vamp (Mae Busch) and the young man who is sweet on her (Matt Moore). Eventually, remorse, romance and the law combine to stop The Unholy Three in their criminal careers.

The Unholy Three is technically a crime thriller but it’s nightmarish enough that it seems to verge on horror. It did well enough at the box office that Chaney and Browning made several more movies together, and Browning was allowed to make similarly personal films for the rest of his career, including but not limited to The Mystic (1925), The Show (1927), The Unknown (1927), London After Midnight (1927), The Thirteenth Chair (1929), Dracula (1931), Freaks (1932), Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Devil Doll (1936) and Miracles for Sale (1939).

The Unholy Three was remade as a talkie just five years later, with Jack Conway directing (Browning was busy with his talkie remake of Outside the Law at the time). This version is notable for being Chaney’s only talkie, as well as the last film he ever made. A month after its release he was dead of cancer.

For more on silent movies please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.