Movies - The Unknown

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	Movies - The Unknown

The Unknown (1927) was a silent horror film directed by Tod Browning and featuring Lon Chaney, Sr. as carnival knife thrower Alonzo the Armless and Joan Crawford as the scantily clad carnival girl he hopes to marry.

Plot

Alonzo the Armless is in fact an impostor - a fugitive who is hiding in the circus and who keeps his arms bound to his sides. When he realizes that Estrellita (Crawford) cannot bear to be touched by a man, Alonzo has his arms amputated, only to find that she is in love with the strongman.

The Unknown is by far the most intense and demented of director Tod Browning's films (which include Dracula
and Freaks
). Joan Crawford always said that she learned more about acting from working with Chaney in this movie than from everything else in her long career put together, and critics often cite Chaney's performance as one of the greatest ever captured on film. Burt Lancaster always maintained that Chaney in The Unknown offered the greatest acting he ever saw, and there is indeed nothing else remotely like it in the annals of film.

As with Freaks, contemporary reviewers were sometimes less appreciative. "A visit to the dissecting room in a hospital would be quite as pleasant," opined the New York Evening Post, "and at the same time more instructive."

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