Noir Diary # 13 / Thoughts on… Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

I.

Ever since I decided to start writing up my viewings of ‘40s/’50s Film Noir a couple of years ago, I’ve found myself bedevilled by the question of where, precisely, the boundaries of ‘noir’ lie. It’s an issue I’ve wrestled with to some extent in pretty much every one of these Noir Diary posts to date, and, with every critic, fan, reference book and blu-ray label on earth drawing their preferred demarcation line somewhere entirely different from all the others, it is not a debate which seems liable to be happily resolved any time soon.

In trying to find a workable way to define ‘noir’ therefore, my current thinking is that, though we may treat it as such for the sake of convenience, noir is not a genre, in the conventional sense of the term. In some ways, this is a pretty obvious point to make - after all, no one in the USA prior to about 1975 ever sat down and said “I’m gonna make a film noir” - but I think it bears repeating.

Instead, I believe noir can probably be best understood as an ineffable essence - a kind of aesthetic virus, if you will - which infects a wide swathe of cinema and literature to a greater or lesser degree. As irreducibly ‘noir’ as the canonical classics of the form may seem, it’s worth remembering that they all simultaneously belong to other genres as well. To the people who wrote and directed them, the 40s/50s films we now categorise as noir were gangster movies, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, murder mysteries, or, in this case, even a quote-unquote ‘women’s picture’.

The germ of what we now call ‘noir’ is something which crept into them from outside, changing and perverting the material it infected; eating away moral clarity, tilting camera set ups and dimming the lights like some celluloid Dutch elm disease. And, like everyone’s favourite virus here in the second decade of the 21st century, the effects of this bug were varied and unpredictable in the extreme.

Some films emerged so slathered in the thematics and visuals of noir than their root genre almost shrivels up and dies; for others, noir simply hangs in the background, barely perceptible, like some eerie seed of doubt. Then, there are movies in which the noir is spread unevenly - confined to certain scenes or sub-plots, or hitting full strength in some reels whilst completely disappearing from others. In spite of its storied position in the noir canon, ‘Mildred Pierce’ fits perfectly into this latter category.

II. 

Considered as a standalone short film, opening fifteen minutes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ are as vivid and intoxicating an invocation of the 1940s So-Cal noir aesthetic as has ever been conjured before the cameras.

Straight out of the opening credits, the sound of six gunshots is foleyed over an exterior shot of a luxurious yet lonely Malibu beach house with a shiny black sedan parked outside. Cut to the interior, where a man in formal dress spins to face the camera, clutching his chest. He just has time to gasp the name of the movie’s titular heroine(?) before he hits the floor, as inert as the remains of the chic standing lamp he pulled down with him.

Cut to a breath-taking crane-shot of (a studio recreation of) a rain-sodden Santa Monica seafront, water gleaming on the wooden boardwalk in the light of neon hoardings for bars and seafood restaurants as the unmistakable figure of Joan Crawford - looking like a Cossack officer in her wide-shouldered fur coat and hat - strides away from us toward the pier. 

As she stares at the black waves below, her contemplation is broken by the sound of a beat cop’s baton tapping on the iron railings. The first words spoken in the film if we discount the murder victim’s final utterance, the cop’s ensuing lines (“if you take a swim, I’ve gotta take a swim. Is that fair? Because you feel like killing yourself, I gotta get pneumonia?”) give us a brilliant example of the approach to dialogue which will remain consistent throughout the film. Most readily attributable to sole credited screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, these lines are simple and to the point, lacking the literary self-consciousness of many post-war noirs, but are nonetheless attention-grabbing, memorable and devoid of cliché. (1)

(It is only on repeat viewings that we might note that, a few years prior to this in the film’s chronology, Mildred’s beloved younger daughter did indeed die from pneumonia after “taking a swim”, instigating a fatal shift in her mother’s psychological make-up.)

Anyway, the cop’s well-chosen words seem to do the trick, turning Mildred (for of course it is she) away from her watery grave and pointing her in the direction of a loud, claustrophobic seafront bar, where she immediately falls in with the lecherous, fast-talking Wally Fay (Jack Carson), an old friend who seemingly owns the joint. Clearly an inveterate hustler, Wally is suspicious when Mildred - who, we are given to understand, has routinely rejected his crude advances since time immemorial - invites him back to her pad for a quiet drink.

Mildred is clearly in an unsettled state of mind, but, like every noir fall guy, Wally prides himself on keeping his eye on the prize, never looking a gift horse in the mouth, etc etc. So, before we know it, he’s propping up the sleek, chromium bar back at that accursed beach house, boastfully bantering to himself, as Mildred slips out, ostensibly to change, and locks the door behind her.

By the time he finds the corpse, it’s too late. Careening around the increasingly labyrinthine beach house, Wally ascends winding, disorientating flights of stairs, dense lattices of shadow thrown by the house’s baroque / art deco accoutrements hemming him in from all sides, as he too cries Mildred’s name.

Photography by Ernest Haller, whose CV includes ‘Gone With The Wind’, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and 183 other top-flight flicks, and art direction from Curtiz’s regular collaborator Anton Grot (also see: Doctor X), are, of course, fiendishly superb here, briefly bringing a touch of Orwellian nightmare sci-fi to proceedings.

Eventually making his exit by crashing through the French windows, Wally briefly staggers across the sand - inevitably reminding us of the unforgettable finale to Robert Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a decade later - before he is frozen in the beam of a searchlight, trained on him from the road above by the cops Mildred presumably called.

Soon regaining his wise-cracking composure once he’s back amongst other men, he tells them, “you know, this is a pretty big night for you guys; yeah, lots of excitement - there’s a stiff in there”. “Izzat so? And I suppose you were running right down to the station to report it?” retorts the younger cop, who’s clearly got Wally’s number.

Amazing. Just amazing. Really, if you’re in search of the condensed essence of ‘noir’, it doesn’t get much better than that my friends.

The subsequent scenes, in which Mildred is picked up from the opulent mansion she apparently shares with her adult daughter and informed that her husband(!) has been murdered, are equally great. The limbo-like inertia of the police squad-room - where thick-necked cops sit around, smoking, eating sandwiches or desultorily typing up their nightly reports as Mildred is forced to sit amongst them in her Cossack finery, awaiting the attention of the investigating officer, is brilliantly conveyed. (“Would you like a paper, lady?” some toad-like brute asks her, as if the wife of a murder victim might want to catch up on the sports pages or something.)

As she is eventually ushered into the strangely inviting environs of the interrogation room (incongruously low-lit, as if by firelight) and disconcerted by the smooth, logical and ingratiating tone taken by the detective within (“even his more courteous, somewhat friendlier types gave one pause for concern,” begins the IMDB bio of actor Moroni Elson), we know we’re sliding headlong toward extended flashback territory, as Mildred is coerced into recounting her sorry tale.

Even as we cross that one off our “Film Noir signifiers” bingo card however, first-time viewers expecting to file this one alongside Double Indemnity and ‘The Big Sleep’ are liable to be taken aback by the extent to which the film takes a stylistic handbrake turn as soon as the fairy-dust of noir glamour disappears in the flash of a back-in-time dissolve, leaving us adrift in the flat, sit-com greyscale of the (then novel) surroundings of pre-fab suburbia, where a somewhat fresher-faced Mildred Pierce exchanges her furs for apron and oven gloves, thoroughly immersed in the drudgery of domestic routine.

III. 

When I first watched ‘Mildred Pierce’, around twenty years ago(!) at this point, I didn’t get it. I was in the process of discovering Film Noir for the first time via a Film Studies module I was taking in college, and as such, my expectations of the “genre” chiefly revolved around gun-toting gangsters, scummy tenement apartments, crumpled fedoras and weary P.I.s striking matches on their unshaven jaws.

By failing to deliver on these hallowed signifiers of the hard-boiled idiom, ‘Mildred..’ fell flat for my younger, dumber self. I mean, not only does it feature only a single murder, which we see in the opening minute, but it then has the audacity to follow the day-to-day travails of somebody’s freakin’ mother - and like, who’s got time for that, right?!

Returning to the film as a respectable, wage-earning adult however, greater life experience and (I would like to think) more mature tastes have allowed me to engage far more deeply with the tale being told during the - entirely noir-free - central hour of their movie’s run-time.

Admittedly, I’ve not been through a painful divorce, raised a hateful harridan of a daughter or gone into the restaurant business during the interim, but what can I say? I suppose I can now at least relate to such quintessentially ‘grown-up’ concerns, meaning that, when Mildred’s extended confession begins, I no longer tune out.

At 114 minutes, ‘Mildred Pierce’ is a long film for its era, and it packs a hell of a lot into that run-time. Full of ostensibly repetitious character encounters, melodramatic contrivances and mountains of detail concerning the titular heroine’s property deals, legal transactions and business plans, this material could, in clumsier hands, have become a colossal bore. Indeed, one suspects that it is only the prestige Curtiz was still enjoying a few years downstream from the success of ‘Casablanca’ that prevented Warner Bros from scything through the screenplay in no uncertain terms.

But, thank god, they didn’t. And at the risk of stating the obvious here, ‘Mildred Pierce’s final cut is a fast-moving, thoroughly engrossing, friction-free joy to sit through - an example of ‘40s Hollywood artistry raised to its absolute zenith.

Always a gifted director, Curtiz brings both a steady hand and an unparalleled mastery of visual storytelling to proceedings, whilst MacDougall’s writing is, as mentioned, exceptional. Haller, Grot, editor David Weisbart and composer Max Steiner are also all at the top of their game, and in front of the camera, Crawford is - of course - magnificent, whilst the rest of cast is packed out with carefully chosen, lesser-known players who inhabit their roles just perfectly.

Basically - this crew could have made a film about the history of Battenberg cake and it would have been worth watching, so seeing them take on an inspired adaptation of a second tier James M. Cain novel is just dandy, thank you very much.

IV. 

The nebulous concept of the ‘women’s picture’ represents a distinct category within studio era Hollywood filmmaking - one which, predictably enough, been largely overlooked by the male-dominated critical / Film Studies establishment.

Being just as in thrall to the whims of said establishment as anyone else, I’m not really sufficiently familiar with the form to judge how indicative ‘Mildred Pierce’ is of its overall conventions, but certainly one suspects that many (now largely forgotten) movies aimed at female audiences must surely have followed the same basic trajectory seen in the film’s central hour; a steadfast, hard working wife/mother overcomes the obstacles life throws at her, negotiates her relationships with men, fights her corner in assorted melodramatic conflicts and misunderstandings, and so forth.

The big difference of course is that, in the regular run of things, one supposes that these stories would most likely have ended with their heroine finding true (legally sanctioned) love, securing a bright future for herself and her children, etc etc…. which is where the shadow of our old friend ‘noir’ begins to creep in once again.

One of the masterstrokes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ is the complex characterisation of the three men who play a role in its heroine’s life. Though all of them are eventually found severely wanting on the scales of the film’s moral schema, they are all somewhat fascinating characters in their own right, and, crucially, none of them are portrayed as entirely irredeemable. This adds a note of moral ambiguity to proceedings which takes us beyond the realm of boilerplate melodrama, even as Mildred is weeping into her oven gloves in her suburban kitchen as first husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) walks out on her.

Openly conducting an affair with the oft-mentioned “Mrs Beiderhoff”, Bert Pierce is initially depicted as a cruel and gloomy sad-sack who refuses to acknowledge his own culpability for the failure of the couple’s marriage. But as the film goes on, and the machinations of the plotting become more complex, he emerges as something of a paragon of plain-spoken honesty, offering Mildred his heartfelt apologies and best wishes when she proves him wrong by achieving success on her own terms, and attempting - in a characteristically vague sort of way - to protect her from the sharks who are circling.

Significantly, Bert is also the only character in the movie who is not entirely fixated on making money. Unemployed when the flashback segment of the movie begins, he remains glum, dishevelled and content with with relatively lowly position in the economic hierarchy. Even after a brief bit of exposition informs us that he has eventually found work in (where else) the aerospace industry, he remains uninterested, it seems, in signing up to the crazed pursuit of the dollar which motivates the rest of the cast.

Framed more-or-less as Bert’s polar opposite meanwhile, the aforementioned Wally Fay is a ruthless opportunist, a loud-mouthed braggart and a shameless lecher who, as he repeatedly demonstrates, is willing to throw his business partners under a bus at a moment’s notice in pursuit of his own interests. But, despite all this, his fondness for Mildred seems genuine, he works hard to help make her business a success, and despite his boorish conduct, he never forces himself upon the female characters in the movie after they’ve rejected his overtly cartoonish advances.

Armoured against ethical doubts by the same spiel employed by carpet-baggers and capitalist ultras to this day (hey, it’s just good business, nothin’ personal, etc), against all the odds, we kind of end up liking the guy. There are even moments here when, fleetingly, Mildred and Wally seem to be operating as a pretty tight team - a kind of proto-power couple almost - until his roving eye for some amoral side deals inevitably gets the better of him.

Which just leaves the most fascinating gentleman of all, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Gifted with a name worthy of an Iberian dragon-slayer, this fellow has sometimes been likened by critics to a gender-reversed femme fatale (homme fatale?), but personally I’m not sure that glove really fits.

In stark contrast to the raw sexual magnetism generally assigned to yr average ‘femme fatale’ in fact, the root of Monte’s seductive charms remains rather elusive. With his receding hairline, cleft chin and skinny build, Scott leaves us with the impression that Joan Crawford could probably break him over her knee and send his remains wafting away on the ocean breeze, leaving him a far weaker, more compromised, figure than the ‘black widows’ who routinely preyed upon the protagonists of male-orientated noir.

Given that Beragon is also stony broke - and everyone in the movie seems to know it - it is presumably only his intangible aura of old world, aristocratic glamour which keeps a steady stream of debutantes and wealthy widows heading back to his heavily-mortgaged beach house. (Though the script is reluctant to address Beragon’s promiscuity directly, references to his notoriety in the ‘society pages’ and a running gag about the multiple bathing costumes he keeps on hand for his many ‘sisters’ make the point clearly enough.)

And, in good time, we get a first-hand taste of his talents too, as, thanks to Curtiz’s proven talent for handling romantic material, the scene in which Monte eventually gets Mildred alone in his ‘lair’ zings with more of a sense of inter-personal chemistry and genuine human warmth than the rest of the movie put together… even as bad news and piled up IOUs combine to douse their passion more or less immediately.

Between them, these three fatally-flawed suitors then add up to far more than mere shooting gallery ducks for Crawford’s world-beating super-woman to knock down, allowing the film to chart a surprisingly complex (if resolutely cynical) cross-section of the relationships between the sexes in the competitive, hot-house environment of post-war America. (2)

As Mildred’s loyal right-hand-woman Ida (brilliantly played by a scene-stealing Eve Arden) remarks at one point as the pair raise a lunch-time glass of bourbon, effectively cutting the crap and compressing a fair share of the complex machinations of the film’s plotting into a single sentence: “to the men we’ve loved… the stinkers”.

V. 

Though the relentless fixation on acquiring wealth which triggers the bulk of the conflict within the script could lead some to label ‘Mildred Pierce’ an ‘anti-capitalist’ film, several factors - not least the movie’s refusal to elevate Bert Pierce to a higher plain for his prioritising of emotional honesty over material gain - suggest that a slightly different moral dynamic is actually at work here.

If anything, the film functions primarily as a kind of unabashed celebration of the Protestant Work Ethic, promoting hard graft as the engine through which the put-upon proletariat can improve themselves and take revenge upon their social ‘betters’; a theme which I assume must go all the way back to Cain’s source novel, as such messages were often close to the writer’s heart, in spite of the nihilistic air which defines his best-known material.

Thus Mildred becomes an almost Christ-like figure for those who strive to better themselves and their families through hard work - an avatar perhaps for the overlooked female labour force brought to the fore during WWII - whilst the scenes demonstrating the success of her restaurant chain convey the sheer exhilaration of post-war American prosperity better than anything else in the era’s movies; a seething world of polished chromium, gleaming glass, imitation leather and bubbling grease, every inch of space filled by voluminous, big-spending customers whose gigantic automobiles idle outside, ready to send them roaring off to the next fashionable destination, amid the not-yet-polluted air of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Meanwhile, true evil within the film’s moral schema is reserved for those refined, Luciferian layabouts - as represented by the tag team of Monte Beragon and Mildred’s spoiled elder daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) - who scrounge their living off the hard work of others whilst mocking the honest toil which underpins their wasteful, dissolute lifestyles.

Stretching right back across the Atlantic and down through the annals of antiquity, this particular class-based dynamic can be traced through the whole deathless lineage of Europe’s debauched aristocracy, from the fall of Rome to the French and Russian revolutions, to the gout-addled, rotten borough squires of British popular fiction (an archetype splendidly lampooned by Charles Laughton in ‘Jamaica Inn’ (1939)), and, more pertinently, the related lineage of ‘Jane Eyre’-derived gothic heartthrobs who were busy menacing and abusing their pure, proletarian maidens in vast swathes of the celluloid which followed in the wake of that rather more celebrated Hitchcock/Du Maurier joint, 1940’s ‘Rebecca’. (3)

It is in in imitation of this legion of sub-Byronic cads - along with a touch perhaps of the aristocratic affectations of the silent era Hollywood elite - that Monte Beragon was presumably moulded, and in this sense, ‘Mildred Pierce’ becomes less of an anti-capitalist parable and more of an all-American class war diatribe, in which evil and corruption ultimately derive, not from capital itself, but from snobbery and laziness, from refined manners, bohemian self-indulgence and any remaining hint of old world entitlement.

A very different prospect from the kind of native-born, inherently American, corruption routinely unpacked in the literary noir of Chandler and Hammett… but, having said that, the rot lurking at the heart of the American dream can certainly be seen elsewhere in the film - if not in the figure of the foreign-coded Monte, then certainly in that of his protégé, and the movie’s ultimate villain, Veda.

VI. 

If I suggested above that man trouble accounts for a fair share of Mildred’s woes, it is the remainder which ends up being both far more significant and far more uncomfortable, ultimately swinging the picture firmly in the direction of Film Noir - and for better or for worse, it’s a very female pile o’ trouble indeed.

In general, I try not to make a habit of hurling misogynist insults at the screen whilst watching films, but if you can get through the first half of ‘Mildred Pierce’ without yelling “you BITCH” in the general direction of Ann Blyth’s Veda, well, your olde world manners must be more refined than my own, let’s put it that way.

Arguably the most memorable character in a film packed full of memorable characters, Veda functions as a magnet for audience hatred right from the outset. A full-on, ‘Bad Seed’-level monster whilst playing younger in her earlier scenes, the toxic snobbery and insincerity which seems to have taken possession of her - traits not obviously inherited from either of her parents - seems so inexplicable, it almost pushes the movie in the direction of horror. (Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine that the producers of the aforementioned 1956 film didn’t have Veda in mind to some extent.)

Beyond mere vindictive, bad-kid nastiness though, there is something so perversely vile, so cruelly idiotic, about the idea of a child attacking her own mother for her perceived low class breeding (“..you never talk about your people, or where you came from, do you mother?”), that Crawford’s inchoate reaction to her daughter’s behaviour can’t help but mirror our own.

In a more conventional, more sentimental story, it would be easy to imagine Veda learning the error of her ways as she grows up, redeeming herself as time goes by and becoming less of a conceited, duplicitous cow as a result. But - thankfully - that’s not the film we’re watching here. The essence of ‘noir’ has sunk deep into the bones of ‘Mildred Pierce’.

And so, under the questionable tutelage of Monte Beragon and Wally Fay, the teenage Veda is soon a fully signed up apprentice femme fatale - a Phyllis Dietrichson or Cora Smith on training wheels, complete with a side-gig as a night club bawler (clearly the money mummy spent on all those music lessons didn’t go to waste) and the future of at least one promising young man already crushed beneath her wheels.

There is a sense here that we’re supposed to see Mildred’s parenting - spoiling her daughter with gifts and luxuries whilst failing to put the time aside to actually build a relationship with her - as being somehow responsible for Veda’s beastly conduct, but to be honest, this intended bromide on child-raising is one element of the screenplay which never quite lands, which is perhaps for the best.

Better by far I think to just see Veda as some Satanic anomaly - a force of nature capable of bringing down her indomitable mother the way no mere man ever could. And indeed, it is the warped, rather obsessional nature of this mother / daughter relationship which really steers the movie back toward darkest noir territory during its final act.

As has often been noted, once Veda has flown what’s left of the family coop, Mildred - perhaps still mourning the tragic loss of ‘good’ daughter Kay - dotes on her as if she were a lost lover rather than an errant daughter, going to what we in the audience recognise as absurd, self-destructive extremes to try to win back her tarnished “love”.

Things proceed to become outright queasy, as the sequences depicting the eventual reunion of mother and daughter are shot more like passionate love scenes than parent/child interactions. There is some freaky, co-dependant kind of shit going on between these two we realise, altogether too late, and the result is… pretty weird, to be honest, bringing the sense of intoxicating gothic perversity which has been lurking deep beneath the surface of his story gasping, finally to the surface.

In cultural / symbolic terms, the extent to which Veda dominates the action in ‘Mildred Pierce’s second half causes the film to sometimes plays more like a prequel / precursor to the full-blooded Film Noir tradition than a fully fledged example of it. Through no fault of her own (?), Joan Crawford’s paragon of hard-working American motherhood, pursuing the American dream for all it’s worth, has given birth to a witch the boys back in Salem never dreamed of, ready to scour the underbelly of her mother’s rotten dream, devouring its losers and rejects with a relentless cruelty.

As critics Molly Haskell and Robert Polito joke in the discussion included as an extra on Criterion’s blu-ray and DVD editions of ‘Mildred Pierce’, you just know, when the cops lead Veda away to the cells at the film’s conclusion, that she’ll be running that damn prison in a couple of weeks.

And as soon as she gets out, well… she’s gonna be heading straight for the nearest Robert Mithum or Fred McMurray, and the whole terrible cycle begins a-new; evil slouching toward Malibu to be born.

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(1) Although Ranald MacDougall takes the sole on-screen credit for ‘Mildred Pierce’s script, and I’ve assigned authorship to him in this post just to make everybody’s life a little easier, authorship of the screenplay is, as with most studio era movies, highly contested.

So - deep breath. First off, Warner Bros apparently commissioned no less than eight writers to produce treatments based on Cain’s novel (including an unused draft from William Faulkner), making it unlikely that everything except MacDougall’s effort went straight in the trash. Secondly, quoth IMDB trivia; “writer Catherine Turney [who wrote a number so Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis pictures at around this time] was credited on some release prints, but chose to have her name removed.” Thirdly, producer Jack Wald (who instigated the project) has taken credit for devising the opening sequence and the murder-based flashback structure. And finally, also from an anonymous posting on IMDB: “due to script problems, some of the film was improvised by the actors together with Michael Curtiz”! So in conclusion: who the hell knows who wrote this thing.

(I will at least say though that, if that last claim is to be believed, the cast must really have been improvising at the top of their game, because, as mentioned, the dialogue in ‘Mildred Pierce’ is consistently excellent, and seems (to my mind at least) to suggest the work of a single authorial voice.)

(2) As an aside, it’s interesting to note that, despite it being filmed whilst WWII was still being fought, the script for ‘Mildred Pierce’ does not address the war, or its potential effect on the lives of the characters, in any way whatsoever. Instead, the film seems to take place during the kind of exciting economic ‘boom’ period we’d retrospectively tend to associate with the recovery of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s - a fact apparently not lost on Warner Bros, who seem to have deliberately delayed the film’s release until October 1945, when the war was safely in the rear view mirror.

(3) Seriously, it seems like you couldn’t hurl a brick in ‘40s Hollywood without hitting a few of these ‘Rebecca’-type gothic romance movies. Just off the top of my head, you’ve got ‘Dragonwyck’ (1946), ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ (1947), ‘The Spiral Staircase’ (1946), ‘Jane Eyre’ (1943), ‘My Name is Julia Ross’ (1945), ‘Gone to Earth’ (1951)…. and no doubt many others which I’ve not bothered to watch, as I don’t particularly seek these things out.

Pre-War Thrills: The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

A title card at the very start of Tod Browning’s ‘The Unknown’ informs us that, “this is a story they tell in Madrid… it’s a story they say is true”. I have no idea whether or not the genesis of ‘The Unknown’ actually lay in such folkloric roots (somehow I doubt it), but it wouldn’t seem an unreasonable assumption, given that, over ninety years later, the story Browning and Waldemar Young concocted here remains one of the most extraordinary tales ever put on screen. (1)

This is the kind of perfectly formed yarn – rich in unfeasibly circular dramatic ironies and almost unbearably bleak melodrama - that one could easily imagine enthralling audiences in pretty much any era or context, whether presented through the lips of some soused storyteller in a disreputable Castilian bar, dramatised for the Elizabethan stage… or indeed adapted into a motion picture.

Even if you’ve never seen ‘The Unknown’, if you’ve been reading around the subject of old movies or horror films for a few years, you probably will have encountered some writer or other gleefully summarising the film’s storyline, and thought to yourself, “wow, that sounds like one crazy movie, I should definitely track it down”, or words to that effect.

Indeed, such is the ingenuity of ‘The Unknown’s scenario that it is practically impossible to write about the film without immediately lapsing into ‘plot synopsis’ mode. Whilst I normally try to avoid this in my reviews, hearing the story of this one recounted never fails to make me happy, so in this case I’m more than happy to follow suit. (Perhaps I should have added “some chancer writing about movies on the internet” to my list above?)

So, settle in folks - it’s story time. (If you’d rather not have the plot details of a near century old movie spoiled for you, please skip to the end of the italics below.)

Alonzo (Lon Chaney Sr.) is an armless gypsy knife thrower employed by Zanzi’s Travelling Circus. As part of his act – memorably portrayed in the film’s opening scene – Alonzo uses his feet to hurl knives and fire bullets at the circus owner’s beautiful daughter Nanon (a twenty-one year old Joan Crawford). As is traditional, Nanon is tied to a wooden wheel for this performance, and Alonzo lets his projectiles pass so close to her body that that her dress is cut off, leaving her exposed in a delightful flapper-era bathing costume.

As it transpires, Alonzo is desperately in love with Nanon, making his feelings so plain that her father, Zanzi, is inspired to viciously beat him, insisting that he does not wish to see his daughter subject to the amorous intentions of a ‘freak’.

Nanon herself however sees things a little differently. Opening her heart to Alonzo, she confesses that, “..all my life men have tried to put their beastly hands on me... to paw over me. I have grown so that I shrink with fear when any man even touches me.”

As a result of this implied abuse in early life, Nanon has developed a pathological fear of men’s arms, and as such feels herself condemned to a life of loneliness. When Malabar (Norman Kerry), the circus’s lovably hapless strongman, tries to woo her (encouraged by Alonzo’s duplicitous, faux-brotherly advice), she flees from his muscular embrace as if he were a grotesque monster, subsequently weeping for her inability to accept his love.

“You are the only man I can come to without fear,” Nanon tells Alonzo, and, armed with this knowledge, you’d think our hero’s chances for romance would be looking pretty good… but unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as that.

You see, Alonzo does actually still have his arms, and furthermore, they’re still attached to him too. He keeps them hidden, tied across his torso in a constrictive leather corset - a deception he has devised in order to distract attention from his former (or perhaps continuing?) life as a thief, gangster and (so it is implied) a serial strangler. (2)

Alonzo’s only genuine physical deformity in fact is a vestigial second thumb on his left hand – an additional digit that would no doubt have brought a swift end to his strangling career, were it not for his armless disguise.

As Alonzo’s loyal dwarf servant Cojo (John George) points out to his master, the moment Nanon embraces him, she will feel the shape of his arms and learn his dark secret – a possibility rendered all the more disastrous by the fact that Alonzo has by this point throttled her father to death in order to stop him standing between them. (3)

As a result of this rash action, the circus has been forced to shut down by its deceased owner’s creditors, and, more pertinently, the police are leaving no stone unturned in their hunt for the mysterious killer with an extra thumb. (To add an extra frisson to the murder scene, poor Nanon actually sees the mutated fingers that put an end to her father through a caravan window, missing a fatal glimpse of Alonzo’s face by mere seconds.)

So, it’s quite a pickle for old Alonzo. He determines however that, whatever happens, he cannot live without Nanon’s love, and so resolves to take drastic action. Never a man to do things by half measures, he tracks down a crooked surgeon whom he had previously met through his contacts in the criminal underworld. By threatening to expose the doctor’s nefarious activities, Alonzo persuades him to carry out a fairly extreme form of elective surgery, the nature of which you can probably guess.

Whilst Alonzo is busy recuperating from this (no doubt pretty traumatic) operation however, Nanon and Malabor are left kicking their heels in the town in which the circus made its last stop, where the strongman is making plans for a spectacular new stage act.

In Alonzo’s absence, Nanon feels herself increasingly drawn to the blandly good-natured Malabar, to the extent that she eventually overcomes her revulsion toward his arms and succumbs to his naively chivalrous advances.

Falling head over heels, the couple vow to marry as soon as possible, but agree to put off the big day until their good friend Alonzo – whom they respectively regard as a protector and a kind of benevolent uncle figure, unaware of his inner torment – has returned from wherever he’s gone to, in order that he may share their happiness by witnessing their union.

[Dramatic pause.]

So yes -- you’d perhaps be forgiven for not feeling much sympathy for Alonzo up to this point, but… Jesus Christ, surely no one deserves a fate like this, even if it’s largely the result of his own cracked decision-making and generally nefarious behaviour. How many characters can you think of - outside perhaps of the realm of some particularly obscure and blood-thirsty ancient mythology – who have been driven to cut off their arms in the name of love, only to find themselves cuckolded?

As you might well have expected, the reunion between Alonzo and his friends is far from a happy one, and the lengths Browning goes to to draw out his protagonist’s gradual realisation of the awful truth still stands as one of cinema’s most excruciating demonstrations of emotional sadism.

But, I’ll leave my plot synopsising there for the moment, merely noting that, in case you were wondering how a story like this could possibly end, well… as it happens, Malabor’s new stage act involves him testing his strength by harnessing his arms to two horses galloping in opposite directions on mechanical treadmills. What would happen if something went wrong with the treadmills, Alonzo asks him. Why, my arms would be torn from their sockets, he cheerily responds. It’s all just too beautiful.

For those who have taken the time to approach Tod Browning’s work from an auteurist perspective, ‘The Unknown’ can’t help but stand out as something of a Rosetta Stone in his surviving catalogue, despite the truncated fifty minute run time of the surviving print.

With its lovingly realised circus milieu, its fascination with physical deformity, its bottomless reserves of melodramatic perversity and its deployment of enough overlapping layers of castration anxiety to give a convention of Freudians a collective migraine, this is about as thorough an exploration of what are generally considered the director’s ‘key themes’ as could possibly be wished for. (4)

Browning may never have been much celebrated as a cinematic stylist, but the surviving cut of ‘The Unknown’ is nonetheless a model of narrative efficiency, hitting each and every beat it needs to to tell this story well, with the director’s talent for ensuring his imagery hits hard when it needs to in full effect throughout.

As you’d expect given his background and recurrent interest in such subject matter, Browning has a wonderful feel for the romanticism of the gypsy travelling show setting (in particular, the male characters all look really f-ing cool in their wardrobe of paisley bandanas, gaucho riding gear, hoop earrings and wide black hats), and the mixture of set and matte painting that creates the opening establishing shot of the circus exterior is a very impressive bit of work (blink and you’ll miss it).

Elsewhere, the extremely high ceilinged, brightly lit operating theatre set makes for a striking contrast to the sawdust-floored rural environs of the rest of the picture, momentarily recalling the kind of sinister, modernist interiors filmmakers like Fritz Lang were cooking up on the other side of the Atlantic, and the staging of Malabar's big stage act during the finale is absolutely extraordinary.

Complete with the sight of a scantily-clad Crawford standing atop a podium, gleefully whipping the seemingly gigantic white horses (directly recalling Alonzo's earlier confession that “it was just something in [my heart] that stung like the lash of a whip” as he struggles to explain his extreme reaction to discovering she and Malabar are lovers), I think this would remain unrivalled as a deranged spectacle of implied S&M until Alejandro Jodorowsky took elements of this story to even wilder extremes in ‘Santa Sangre’ (1989).

There are a few eccentric stylistic choices elsewhere (the curious decision to shoot several scenes through what looks like sackcloth is often mentioned), but for the most part, the remainder of the film is very plainly presented. I’m pretty sure the camera remains static throughout, and likewise, the editing of the narrative is strictly linear in its presentation, with master shots, two shots, shot/reverse shots etc all handled strictly by the book.

Nonetheless though, this grounded/fixed perspective allows Browning’s close ups and tableaux to achieve an intensely vivid pictorial quality that is often captivating. Like good paintings, these shots carry within them a depth of feeling that heightens the film's emotional power immensely.

Such is the ingenuity of the story Browning and his collaborators have devised here, I’m tempted to say it would have been difficult for them to go wrong however they chose to frame the action, but perhaps even more crucial to the success ‘The Unknown’ is its casting.

Had merely adequate performers been cast in its central roles, it is likely ‘The Unknown’ would never have risen above the level of a particularly bizarre theatrical melodrama, forgotten by all but a handful of silent/pre-code era archivists and fanatics. With Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford on hand however, it’s a whole different story… and not merely on account of their (contemporary or subsequent) fame either.

Crawford’s performance, it must be said, is excellent. Such is the strength of her presence on screen that it feel entirely believable that a man of Alonzo’s wide and bitter experience should become obsessed with Nanon, even as her damaged, brittle mannerisms simultaneously provide a surprisingly raw portrayal of an abused/victimised woman for this era of cinema; “Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!” she exclaims in impotent fury after Malabar initially tries to embrace her.

And, speaking of Malabar, even Norman Kerry acquits himself well here, despite initially seeming lined up to be a complete waste of space. Blank-eyed, empty-headed and perpetually grinning, he provides a complete contrast to the ancient, deep red claret of Alonzo’s uniquely troubled character, making us feel our anti-hero’s humiliation all the more keenly once he discovers he has lost out in love to the human equivalent of an unflavoured biscuit.

Mainly though, we need to talk about Lon Chaney.

It may have become a bit of a truism to point out that silent film acting is a different beast from sound acting, but rarely has that point been more clearly demonstrated than by Chaney’s performance in ‘The Unknown’.

In a sound context, his facial gymnastics and heavily made up features would have been regarded as intolerably OTT, but, denied a voice, it is through these kind of gestures that silent characters gain live – and all the more so when they’re even denied the use of their arms for most of the picture. The way that Chaney methodically builds Alonzo up as a character, entirely through his facial tics and eye movements, his mode of dress, his sudden shivers and lunges, is absolutely remarkable. (5)

The figure of the “sympathetic monster” would of course go on to become a cornerstone of American horror cinema as it developed through the rest of the 20th century, but in ‘The Unknown’ Chaney delivers a very different, and considerably more challenging, recipient of our sympathies from the kind of sad-eyed, agency-fee automatons derived from the lineage of Conrad Veidt’s Cesare, Paul Wegener’s Golem and, eventually, Karloff’s monster and it’s descendants.

Unlike those critters, Alonzo is unambiguously a villain – one who neither seeks nor receives any pardon for his maleficence. A criminal, liar and murderer, he cheats, deceives and manipulates everyone he meets through the course of the film, including the woman he professes to love. He upturns the foundations of the essentially benign world in which the drama begins, brings doom upon his own head with admirable efficiency, and basically behaves in the most tyrannical manner imaginable. And yet…

Scanning reviews online, I have often seen ‘The Unknown’ described as a “classical tragedy”, but in reality Alonzo represents something closer to the opposite of a conventional tragic hero. Rather than noble character with one fatal flaw, Chaney presents Alonzo as a tangled mass of flaws and neuroses, from behind which a redeeming spirit of nobility somehow still shines, daring us, for want of a better word, to feel love for him, as well as pity.

It is possible that Vincent Van Gogh’s infamous sacrifice of his ear may to some extent have distantly inspired the story of ‘The Unknown’, and I would go so far as to say that Chaney imbues Alonzo with what I can only describe as an ‘artistic’ sensibility. We don’t doubt for a second the sincerity of Alonzo’s love for Nanon, even as we recognise that his ability to differentiate reality from fantasy hangs by the very thinnest of threads.

Rather than just an intimidating heavy, he serves as a rich, over-powering presence in the lives of the younger characters, giving generously of himself, in spite of the self-interested machinations cloud his honesty. He may, we swiftly learn, be more or less insane, but his is not the kind of insanity that can easily be written off, and his companionship with both Nanon and Cojo (even with Malabar) is seen to be real and compassionate, even as his conduct is shaded by a strain of misanthropy that we feel is birthed more from bitter experience than from mere ingrained nastiness. (“You are wise, Nanon”, he says early on the film when Crawford confesses her hatred of men’s touch, “always fear them, always hate them.”)

Chaney’s big moment of course is Alonzo’s post-amputation reunion with Nanon and Malabar. This takes place - where else - on the stage of a theatre, and, as noted, is handled by Browning as a scene of excruciating emotional torture, extended well beyond the point of audience discomfort.

Shock, frustration, sorrow, rage, menace, terror, hysteria, despair, self-hatred and all-out howling madness - all of these are powerfully felt as they shift, meld and mutate across Alonzo’s visage in what amounts to a harrowing tour de force of silent emotional devastation. It may seem melodramatic to speak of seeing a man's heart smashed into a million pieces live on screen, but you'll feel pretty sure you know what that looks like after watching Chaney here.

In fact, the only rationale I can think of for this film being named ‘The Unknown’ relates to the unimaginable combinations of errant emotions that Chaney manages to dredge up here, verging into states of being that remain entirely nameless, and concluding only when he works himself up to the point of seizure.

“I'm all right now,” an inter-title assigned to Alonzo reads just a few a few moments later, as he regains his composure, his mask back in place and his plan of vengeance already taking shape.

Before watching ‘The Unknown’, I’d always assumed Chaney’s “man of a thousand faces” legend was coined in reference to the effects he achieved with his famous make up box, but, from watching his performance here, it’s clear he could cycle through those faces live in front of the camera with the ease of a martial arts star demonstrating his/her training moves. It is an incredible sight to behold – perhaps the very zenith of a form of acting that would be rendered obsolete mere months after this film’s release.

I had been all set to herald Alonzo as the progenitor of his own lineage of doomed, sociopathic anti-heroes within horror cinema, but, to be honest, I can think of very few characters within the genre who actually lived up to the example Chaney sets here. Peter Lorre’s Dr Gogol in Mad Love perhaps comes closest, with Karloff’s Imhotep in ‘The Mummy’, Price’s Phibes and Usher, and perhaps an unusually affecting mad scientist turn here and there all lurking distantly in the background – but really, Alonzo the Armless stands alone.

We will never really know how Chaney might have adapted to the coming of sound, but, as far as America’s silent cinema goes, he remains a performer without peer, and ‘The Unknown’ is perhaps his strongest surviving vehicle. An unforgettable viewing experience, it is not so much ‘haunting’ in the genteel sense of the ghosts more commonly encountered in the era’s mystery stories, but a raw, emotional wound of a picture that lodges itself in your mind and refuses to leave you be, like a scab you just can’t help but scratch.

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(1) Browning and Young respectively take credit for “story” and “scenario”, whatever that’s supposed to mean, in addition to which we should also mention Joseph Farnham, whose work on the text for film’s inter-titles is wonderful. We should note at this point that various online sources claim that ‘The Unknown’ was adapted without credit from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1915 novel ‘K’. As I can’t find a detailed plot synopsis of the novel though, and certainly can’t be bothered to track down a copy and read it, I’ll have to refrain from further comment on this for the time being.

(2)If the precise details of Alonzo’s criminal career remain frustratingly vague, this seems to be due to the fact that no less than fourteen minutes of footage, reportedly dealing largely with this subject, have been excised from all surviving prints of ‘The Unknown’, and are now – tragically - assumed lost.)

(3) Browning’s notorious ‘Freaks’ (1932) - which, as you will have surmised, directly rehashes a few key plot elements from ‘The Unknown’ – may be similarly personal, and similarly memorable, but for my money the earlier film is by far the greater achievement. (More on this perhaps when I get around to reviewing ‘Freaks at some point in the future.)

(4) If you’re thinking that actor John George looks a bit familiar, that’s probably due to the fact that he appeared in upwards of two hundred Hollywood productions prior to his death in 1968, and, as was so sadly often the case for dwarf actors, suffered the indignity of going uncredited in almost all of them. Such is the range of his filmography, chances are you must have seen him in something over the years, although oddly enough he apparently didn’t appear in ‘Freaks’, which you’d think would have been a shoe-in given his work for Browning here.

(5) I was originally going to take some time here to lavish further praise upon Chaney for his astonishing dedication to this role vis-a-vis learning to drink wine, smoke cigarettes, wipe his eyes with a handkerchief and throw knives, all using his feet. I have read elsewhere however that at least some of these accomplishments were doubled for Chaney by Paul Desmuke – a genuine armless man apparently famed for his performances on the violin.

Although we ostensibly see Chaney perform out these actions in single shots with his face clearly visible, after watching the film again I can’t rule out the possibility that some of them may have been cleverly faked – eg, with Desmuke concealed beneath a table, or just out of frame, extending his legs upward toward Chaney’s face.

Given that there is almost certainly no one left alive who can give us a definitive answer either way though, I didn’t want to clog up the main text of the review with such conjecture. Naturally I’d love to believe that it was Chaney himself getting busy with his feet (as if the performance he gives with the rest of his body wasn’t impressive enough), but… who knows.