Saturday Night Cinema
The Unholy Three

Tonight's feature comes to us from the masterful and the macabre Tod Browning, who directed a series of bizarre, almost surrealistic melodramas. Having been to a Todd Browning film festival this week down at the film forum (with the most excellent Steve Sturner playing the score live on the piano), I wanted to share the thrill.

Tonight we kick off the Todd Browning Film festival .…………. there will be more Browning features in the weeks to come.

Browning's career spanned the silent and talkie eras. Best-known as the director of Dracula (1931), the cult classic Freaks (1932), and classic silent film collaborations with Lon Chaney, Sr., Browning directed many movies in a wide range of genres.

Browning moved back to New York in 1917. He directed two films for Metro Studios, Peggy, the Will O' the Wisp and The Jury of Fate. Both starred Mabel Taliaferro, the latter in a dual role achieved with double exposure techniques that were groundbreaking for the time. He moved back to California in 1918 and produced two more films for Metro, The Eyes of Mystery and Revenge.

In the spring of 1918 he left Metro and joined Bluebird Productions, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, where he met Irving Thalberg. Thalberg paired Browning with Lon Chaney, Sr. for the first time for the film The Wicked Darling
(1919), a melodrama in which Chaney played a thief who forces a poor
girl from the slums into a life of crime. Browning and Chaney would
ultimately make ten films together over the next decade.

The death of his father sent Browning into a depression that led to
alcoholism. He was laid off by Universal and his wife left him.
However, he recovered, reconciled with his wife, and got a one-picture
contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer. The film he produced for MGM, The Day of Faith, was a moderate success, putting his career back on track.

Thalberg reunited Browning with Lon Chaney for The Unholy Three
(1925), the story of three circus performers who concoct a scheme to
con and steal jewels from rich people using disguises. Browning's
circus experience shows in his sympathetic portrayal of the antiheroes.
The film was a resounding success, so much so that it was later remade
in 1930 as Lon Chaney's first (and only) talkie. Browning and Chaney
embarked on a series of popular collaborations, including The Blackbird and The Road to Mandalay. The Unknown (1927), featuring Chaney as an armless knife thrower and Joan Crawford as his scantily-clad carnival girl obsession, was originally titled Alonzo the Armless and could be considered a precursor to Freaks in that it concerns a love triangle involving a circus freak, a beauty, and a strongman. London After Midnight (1927) was Browning's first foray into vampire film and is a highly sought-after lost film which starred Chaney, Conrad Nagel, and Marceline Day. The last known print of London After Midnight was destroyed in an MGM studio fire in 1965. In 2002, a photographic reconstruction of London After Midnight was produced by Rick Schmidlin for Turner Classic Movies. Browning and Chaney's final collaboration was Where East is East (1929), of which only incomplete prints have survived. Browning's first talkie was The Thirteenth Chair (1929), which was also released as a silent and starred Bela Lugosi.

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