The Unholy Three (1925)

Perfectly adorable

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Co-produced and directed by Tod Browning, this above average silent crime drama was later remade as a sound picture with two members of the original cast, Lon Chaney and Harry Earles. Based on the novel by Tod Robbins, with scenario by Waldemar Young, Chaney plays Professor Echo, a ventriloquist, who teams with dwarf Earles, dubbed Tweedledee, and strongman Victor McLaglen, who's called Hercules, to scam unawares customers into buying parrots from their pet shop.Initially, all three were in a sideshow during which Echo used Rosie O'Grady (Mae Busch) to pickpocket its customers. After a police raid, Echo convinces Tweedledee and Hercules to join him, forming "The Unholy Three", who along with O'Grady and an innocent, unsuspecting employee Hector MacDonald (Matt Moore) set up shop.Echo uses his gift to make the parrots appear to talk to him, dressed as an old woman and pretending to be O'Grady's 'Granny', in order to fool their customers into paying high prices for the otherwise ordinary birds. Echo is therefore in charge of the trio though Tweedledee, who pretends to be an infant around others, later connives with the dimwitted Hercules to exclude Echo from a jewelry robbery on Christmas Eve, during which they kill Mr. Arlington (Charles Wellesley, uncredited), who'd been an unsatisfied parrot customer.The three then decide to pin the murder on their ignorant employee MacDonald, with whom Rosie had fallen in love, much to the dismay of Echo who'd wanted her for himself. However, the trio's mistrust of one another and a personal plea from Rosie, who'd been taken against her will to their mountain hideout, to Echo eventually unravels things. A pet shop gorilla figures in the outcome. The film effectively ends with MacDonald's trial, during which Echo uses his gift to satisfy an agreement with Rosie.Matthew Betz, who plays the detective, Edward Connelly, who plays the judge, William Humphrey, who plays MacDonald's defense attorney, and E. Alyn Warren, who plays the prosecuting attorney, also appear.

Murderous anomalies from the circus sideshow were "old hat" by the time director Tod Browning Helmed the infamous FREAKS picture in 1932, which almost single-handedly brought on 81 years of film censorship in America (and counting). In 1925, Browning put out this silent--THE UNHOLY THREE--in which one thing leads to another, potentially posing a very sticky wicket for what an Intertitle card here labels "the grim machinery of the law." Sure, you can modify an American snuff chamber with his and her electric chairs (complete with a "cry room" for the young children, as in the Rosenberg Case). But how the dickens do you construct a triple-hanging scaffold for a strong man, a ventriloquist, and a 20-inch midget? The former's neck strength and the latter's lack of weight probably would leave both dangling and thrashing about indefinitely, while the man in the middle's dummy would be screaming bloody murder! Many spectators would die laughing--just the opposite of the desired outcome! Browning solves this conundrum by having a gorilla kill the strongman and the midget (off-screen, of course). Since the voice thrower sings for the court, he gets off with a song.

It's a tribute to Tod Browning that his THE UNHOLY THREE manages to have such holding power as you watch it. The story is strange and very unique. At the same time, there are so many implausible elements thrown into the mix that you must suspend disbelief in order to sit back and enjoy the excellent performances.While LON CHANEY is undoubtedly at his best as the old Granny who runs a bird shop for talking parrots, the attention is compulsively drawn to the evil dwarf (HARRY EARLES). Later on, he served as one of the Munchkins for THE WIZARD OF OZ, but here he's a grown man able to pose convincingly as a baby--a very conniving infant who instigates the robbery and murder of a wealthy store patron.Since Echo (LON CHANEY's ventriloquist name), throws his voice whenever the parrots talk, the ventriloquism device is used for effect in the climactic courtroom scene where Chaney decides to help an innocent man wrongly accused of the murder. It's here that Chaney gets a chance to show us (in reaction shots) the great actor he was simply by using various facial expressions. Even though the device of throwing his voice at a trial is completely beyond belief, he manages to convince the viewer that such a thing was entirely possible.Chaney is very effective as the smiling Granny, Earles is scary as the psychopathic dwarf posing as a baby between puffs on a cigar, and MAE BUSCH is effective as the woman Chaney loves.Although slowly paced, it's well worth watching, drawing the viewer from the start with its strange and incredible story, an entertaining triumph for all concerned. It's been years since I saw the later sound version from 1930, but I believe this has a slight edge over the other.

I had an afternoon free so I decided to watch the two versions of this Lon Chaney classic back to back, beginning with this one -- Tod Browning's silent original. It's the story of a crooked carnival ventriloquist (Lon Chaney) who teams up with the midget (Harry Earles) and strong man (Victor McLaglen ) for a series of robberies. Chaney dresses as an old woman and Earles plays a baby to perfect their scheme. In many ways this was a precursor to the popular Little Rascals/Our Gang short subject FREE EATS, where a couple of gangsters act as parents to a couple of little people dressed as infants, mistakenly referred to as "fidgets".Whether it's the silent version or sound remake, I thought this was a wildly entertaining story either way, though it's difficult to fairly judge one film or the other when they're viewed together so closely like this. There are pros and cons to both movies for me. The strength of Browning's silent version was that in many ways it felt much more stylish and better crafted, possibly with better production values... but I found I preferred Lila Lee as Rosie O'Grady (from the sound version) to the silent actress here, Mae Busch. The 1925 original perhaps feels a little too long, which is the only thing which kept it from being perfect for me. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if most fans prefer the silent film simply because it was directed by Tod Browning. My advice is to see them both! ***1/2 out of ****