West of Zanzibar (1928)

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

In a telling scene toward the end of the movie "Dead Legs" (Lon Chaney) face shows the insane rage that 18 years of vengeance has reduced him to, but as he learns the horrific truth he becomes pitiable, then very protective. No other actor could show such a range of emotions. The story is exactly what you would expect from a Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaboration - a macabre, grotesque, completely over the top melodrama. With any other star it would have been a freakish curiosity but Chaney makes it magnificent!!!As Phroso, a renowned English magician, Chaney gives him many of Chaplin's graceful movements, finishing with a cheeky back kick. He is hopelessly in love with his wife but she is having doubts. Crane (Lionel Barrymore) is the man she plans to runaway with. There is a terrible fight between Crane and Phroso, ending in a shocking injury which leaves Phroso a cripple in a wheelchair. Time passes and Phroso finds his wife dead in a church with a little girl crawling about. He vows terrible vengeance on Crane and his "little brat".Eighteen years later his threat is being carried out. He has bought the little girl with him to Zanzibar and left her in the care of a brothel owner. He has emerged as "Dead Legs", leader of a motley band of misfits and hoping to be King of all the natives some day. Mary Nolan gives a very stirring but believable performance as Maizie. Mostly remembered, if at all, for her many Follies scandals, she was a very fine actress and her scenes of hysteria in this film were quite grim. Warner Baxter was also excellent as "Doc", one of the men in "Dead Legs" power. His scenes when he is high on "kerosene" are quite eye-popping, especially when I had only seen him as a staid and solemn leading man of the 30s.Crane is now an ivory trader and "Dead Legs" is poaching it. He plans to entice Crane to his jungle quarters and show him how he has turned Maizie, Crane's daughter, into a drug addict and prostitute. Of course the shock announcement is that Maizie is in reality Phroso's daughter, and that Anna, when she realised what Crane had done to Phroso, did not run off with him. The last scene shows Maizie and "Doc" sailing off to find a cleaner, better way of life, while the natives pick "Dead Legs" pendant out of the ashes. All this in just 65 minutes. Amazing!!!Highly Recommended.

Saturday, December 12, 9:15pm The Castro, San Francisco "Gee, but you're a strange man." A Limehouse magician loses his wife to another man and seeks his revenge on the girl (Mary Nolan) he believes is their child.Based on the Broadway play Kongo, by Chester deVonde, West of Zanzibar (1928) was the sixth of ten films directed by Tod Browning, starring Lon Chaney. Crippled in a fight with his rival, Phroso (Chaney) discovers his dead wife and the child one year later and takes her to a malarial, booze-soaked sub-Saharan hell infested with society's rejects and bloodthirsty cannibals, where the story picks up "eighteen years later." A combination of familiar Chaney themes, West of Zanzibar is noteworthy for the performance of former Ziegfeld Follies star Nolan as Mazie, the ruined girl, and Warner Baxter as Doc, the drunken slob, pulled back from the brink to save her. Lionel Barrymore is sadistically indifferent as the other man, and Chaney delivers a typically earth-shaking emotional performance.Lon Chaney's West of Zanzibar opened at San Francisco's Warfield theatre on Saturday, December 1, 1928 for a one week run. "Rube Wolf and a company of Fanchon and Marco entertainers are featured today in Stairway of Dreams on the stage." The program also featured Fox Movietone Talking News and a Charlie Chase comedy.

The movie begins with Lon Chaney and his wife doing a stage magic show. Shortly after they finish, the wife runs off with her lover AND the lover attacks Chaney and leaves him paralyzed from the waist down--and all this occurs in the first few minutes of the film! Several months later, Chaney finds his wife dead in a church with a baby that he assumes is her lover's child. What an odd coincidence, huh?! The movie then picks up about 18 years later. What has Chaney done with his life in order to get revenge on his wife's lover? Yeah, exactly what any other man would do--follow the guy to Africa, start a cult among the natives so you can be their chief and bring the now addicted baby (who is now 18 and going through DTs) there to torment her in front of her biological father, naturally! This is all very creepy and convoluted and just plain weird. In a way, it's very entertaining but also pretty ridiculous. This story is one of the more bizarre tales I have seen in a silent film, though pretty consistent with director Browning and Chaney's styles. And while many of the story elements are quite scary and unsettling, the pacing of the film is a real problem--particularly at the end of the film. Instead of wrapping everything together and dealing with the suspense, the movie just starts to bog down and becomes rather plodding. This is a real shame, as it tends to lessen the dramatic impact and slow the movie to a crawl. A truly interesting and creepy relic, but far from Lon Chaney's best film, though his ability to mimic a disabled man and pull himself along with floor with "dead legs" (also his nickname in the film) was incredible--a fine job of acting on his part.

Crippled during a confrontation with his wife's lover, Phroso, a famous English magician (Lon Chaney, Sr), vows to exact terrible revenge on wife and lover. A couple of year's later when the wife, fatally ill, returns to London with a young child, Phroso's plans are put into action. After she succumbs to her illness, Phroso emigrates to Africa with her child, where the wife's lover is an ivory trader, a vocation also undertaken by Phroso. Now known as Dead-Legs he becomes the most feared and degenerate backcountry ivory trader west of Zanzibar. He raises his daughter, who he presumes is not his own, to be a drug-addicted prostitute. With his wife's child debased, he waits like a spider in his web for the man who cuckolded and then paralyzed him. Dark stuff, this.It's a morbid although entertaining little tale, and Lon Chaney gives his usual top-notch performance, transitioning from the big-hearted Phroso to the crippled (in both body and sole) Dead-Legs. The movie is worth watching just for his performance. Tod Browning is in his element and delivers up a dark, creepy tale. So what that the plot twists are telegraphed from a mile away, and the portrayal of Africans is negatively stereotyped. If these shortcomings can be overlooked, this is a good example of the Browning-Chaney collaborations. Not bad for a silent film, which has a recorded soundtrack, coming as it did on the cusp of the transition to sound.