Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Unknown (1927)

Lon Chaney is at his peak in this odd collaboration with director Tod Browning. Chaney plays Alonzo the Armless, a circus performer who throws knives with his feet, who is in love with Nanon (Joan Crawford) his female assistant. A couple who is well-matched in Alonzo’s own mind, Nanon is deathly afraid of a man’s touch. Yet, she is pursued by strongman, Malabar (Norman Kerry).

Of course, Alonzo contrives to disrupt Malabar’s amorous advances. Along the way, Nanon’s father is murdered by a man with a malformed hand. And Alonzo is hiding his own secrets.

The film is full of characteristic macabre Tod Browning touches and twists of storyline that surprise audiences who see it for the first time.

A lost film that was never really lost. The apocryphal story goes, the last surviving print of The Unknown was found in the early 1970s at La Cinemathéque française in a few film cans marked “unknown.” Some minor lengths of footage did not survive in the print, but the film is largely intact, with no discernable gaps in the storyline. The film has probably survived only in a European release print that was originally shot from a B-camera position, but we are lucky to have the film — any print of the film — to enjoy today.

Recently, a second incomplete print with Czech intertitles has surfaced and the George Eastman Museum has conflated a new restoration version of the film. Not perfect and still not complete, this version of the film (originally struck from the export negative) expands some shots and adds some footage of secondary characters that were edited from the previous print.

Many reviewers of 1927 didn’t like the film, thinking it too morbid for the general public. But Chaney/Browning fans of today think that it stands as one of the best of the duo’s collaborations.

— Carl Bennett

This Blu-ray Disc edition has been mastered from a 2K high-resolution digital reconstruction from archival 35mm prints of The Unknown (1927) held by George Eastman Museum and the Národní filmový archiv film archives. Footage previously unseen on home video has been sourced from the Czech print to nearly complete the reconstruction to the film’s original 1927 length. The source material ranges in visual quality from very-good to excellent, with a light amount of dust, speckling, scratches, scrapes, mild but persistent vertical processing streaks, and other print flaws remaining. A few brief sections of footage have been lost to print breaks. While the source material is not pristene, the overall visual quality is very-good to excellent. As good as this Criterion edition looks on DVD (see below), this Blu-ray Disc looks even better with its higher image resolution.

The film is accompanied by a fine music score composed and performed on piano by Philip Carli. Another excellent score by maestro Carli.

Beyond our interest in silent films, the big question from collectors inevitably will be, “Is this presentation of Freaks better than the Warner Home Video DVD edition from 2006?” The answer is YES. We compared both editions on DVD and found a satisfying improvement in picture quality with nearly none of the noticable film grain that made the older Warner edition look a little rough. This BD edition looks even better. The greyscale ranges of both editions were close to being the same, that is well-balanced from highlights to shadows, with the occasional hot highlights that appear to be present in the source print material. (An example would be the face highlights of the carnival barker as he introduces the unseen Cleopatra to the gawkers around him.) Also, this Criterion edition does not windowbox the film’s opening credits (as was the common practice twenty years ago when CRT televisions with picture overscan cropping were still the main viewing device utilized in most households). For most collectors, the improvements in this Criterion edition will make the cost of upgrading Freaks well worth the set’s list price cost.

Supplementary material includes a 2K digital restoration of The Mystic with music by Dean Hurley; a 2K digital restoration of Freaks with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; audio commentary by film historian David J. Skal for The Unknown and Freaks; an introduction to The Mystic by David J. Skal (9 minutes); an interview with author Megan Abbott on director Tod Browning and pre-Code horror; an archival documentary on Freaks; a reading of “Spurs,” the short story by Tod Robbins on which Freaks was based; the 1947 prologue to Freaks, which was added to the film; a featurette on the alternate endings to Freaks; a gallery of portraits from Freaks; English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing; and an essay by film critic Farran Smith Nehme.

We highly recommend this Criterion edition as the best home video edition of the film that is available.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
United Kingdom: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.co.uk. Support Silent Era.
This Region A Blu-ray Disc edition is also available directly from . . .

This DVD edition has been mastered from a 2K high-resolution digital reconstruction from archival 35mm prints of The Unknown (1927) held by George Eastman Museum and the Národní filmový archiv film archives. Footage previously unseen on home video has been sourced from the Czech print to nearly complete the reconstruction to the film’s original 1927 length. The source material ranges in visual quality from very-good to excellent, with a light amount of dust, speckling, scratches, scrapes, mild but persistent vertical processing streaks, and other print flaws remaining. A few brief sections of footage have been lost to print breaks. The overall visual quality is very-good and is only surpassed by Criterion’s Blu-ray Disc edition noted above.

The film is accompanied by a fine music score composed and performed on piano by Philip Carli. Another excellent score by maestro Carli.

Beyond our interest in silent films, the big question from collectors inevitably will be, “Is this presentation of Freaks better than the Warner Home Video DVD edition from 2006?” The answer is YES. We compared both editions on DVD and found a satisfying improvement in picture quality with nearly none of the noticable film grain that made the older Warner edition look a little rough. The greyscale ranges of both editions were close to being the same, that is well-balanced from highlights to shadows, with the occasional hot highlights that appear to be present in the source print material. (An example would be the face highlights of the carnival barker as he introduces the unseen Cleopatra to the gawkers around him.) Also, this Criterion edition does not windowbox the film’s opening credits (as was the common practice twenty years ago when CRT televisions with picture overscan cropping were still the main viewing device utilized in most households). For most collectors, the improvements in this Criterion edition will make the cost of upgrading Freaks well worth the set’s list price cost.

Supplementary material includes a 2K digital restoration of The Mystic with music by Dean Hurley; a 2K digital restoration of Freaks; audio commentary by film historian David J. Skal for The Unknown and Freaks; an introduction to The Mystic by David J. Skal; an interview with author Megan Abbott on director Tod Browning and pre-Code horror; an archival documentary on Freaks; a reading of “Spurs,” the short story by Tod Robbins on which Freaks was based; the 1947 prologue to Freaks, which was added to the film; a featurette on the alternate endings to Freaks; a gallery of portraits from Freaks; English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing; and an essay by film critic Farran Smith Nehme.

We highly recommend this Criterion edition as the best DVD home video edition of the film that is available.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
United Kingdom: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.co.uk. Support Silent Era.
This Region 1 NTSC DVD edition is also available directly from . . .

Supplemental material includes the Photoplay Productions documentary Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces (2000); Rick Schmidlin’s lame 2002 photo reconstruction of the lost film London After Midnight (1927); audio commentaries by Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake; an introduction by TCM host Robert Osborne; and photo and memorabilia galleries.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

This DVD edition has been transferred from a 35mm fine-grain preservation print, which is marred by moderate dust, some emulsion scuffing, a little speckling, some rough edits, a few frames of ink writing on the print and some mild vertical scratches, but overall the print has a broad range of greytones (but still slightly flat) and the video transfer, originally released on laserdisc in the late 1990s, maintains the print’s image detail. A flaw of this older DVD edition that will be prominent on today’s widescreen monitors is a persistent vertical white line at the right edge of the picture (and occasionally also on the left edge) that would have been unseen on the old CRT televisions due to overscan masking; the white line can be quite distracting.

We feel that the restoration print does not need little speckles in the intertitles for authenticity since the typography of the restored English intertitles does not at all resemble the original intertitle cards. While, as viewers, we know that there will be speckles in the historic footage, it is nothing more than distracting in the new intertitles, with their white type and black backgrounds, and feels as though the processing of the restoration print was substandard.

The musical accompaniment is another nonstandard take by The Alloy Orchestra, with its emphasis on digital keyboards and percussion, more melodic than the band’s comedy scores and far more expressive. It was recorded in 1997 for TCM showings and was the soundtrack used on the laserdisc release. We were privileged to see the band peform the score live during a theater screening of The Unknown, and because of the laserdisc edition and the live show, we inextricably associate the score with the Chaney film.

The audio commentary by Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake is packed with little tidbits of production information about The Unknown, Chaney and Tod Browning. The information is related by a Chaney fan for the benefit of cinema fans, and does not have the sterile feeling of an academic reading. It is a commentary that is worth listening to more than once, unlike the over-intellectulized commentary of other silent film discs.

We recommended this edition of The Unknown for its visual quality, its unusual music score, and its audio commentary but the Criterion editions noted above present the film in more complete form and are more desirable.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
United Kingdom: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.co.uk. Support Silent Era.
This Region 1 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

The film may be accompanied by a custom music score.

We are curious as to why the running time is longer than other older DVD editions of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

Other silent era JOAN CRAWFORD films available on home video.

Other silent era TOD BROWNING films available on home video.

Other HORROR FILMS of the silent era available on home video.