UNKNOWN, THE

The Unknown USA with live score by Ernesto Maurice Corpus

Truly macabre. Truly a masterpiece. Welcome to Tod Browning's 1927 unique tale of lust, obsession and murder. The Unknown will screen at the Melbourne Town Hall and will be accompanied by master musician Ernesto Maurice Corpus, performing an improvised score using the 10,000 pipes of the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ.

The masterful Lon Chaney plays Alonzo the Armless, a gypsy circus performer capable of astonishing feats of knife-wielding skill, all done using only his feet! Alonzo keeps dark secrets: he is in fact a killer on the run from the police and is not the amputee he makes out to be. With enormous cunning, Alonzo keeps his true identity, and his arms, hidden from the world. He becomes infatuated with the stunning Nanon (a young Joan Crawford in her breakout role), his assistant in the spellbinding knife act, who has a pathological fear of men touching her. Alonzo believes he is the perfect man for her, and in a drastic and illegal operation decides to have his arms removed for real, but not before strangling Nanon's father Zanzi who has discovered his secret.

Allegedly based on stories and incidents drawn from Browning's own experiences as a circus performer, The Unknown possesses the singularly weird mix of the realistic and the fantastic that makes his horror films so memorably creepy. Pioneering cinematic techniques, Browning suffuses Alonzo's scenes with a dark and smoky look, while utilising a kind of translucent canvas-textured gauze for the photography of love scenes, giving them the appearance of an oil-painting tableau.

D Tod Browning S Waldemar Young WS BFI L Silent w/English intertitles TD 35mm/B&W/1927/60mins

Tod Browning was born in Louisville, USA in 1882. Films include: London After Midnight (1928), Dracula (1931), Freaks (1932).