There’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1954 called “Baby Buggy Bunny.” Maybe you’ve seen it? It’s the one with the extremely short bank robber who disguises himself as a baby and tricks Bugs into taking care of him while he searches for his lost loot.
It wasn’t until recently that I realized that the cartoon was, in part, a parody of a Tod Browning silent film called The Unholy Three. In this 1925 film, three circus sideshow performers go on a crime spree. In one sequence, a hypnotist, played by Lon Chaney, dresses up as a granny, while his partner with dwarfism (Harry Earles), is disguised as an infant in a pram so they can case a house they plan to rob. It’s a wonderfully unsettling and creepily hilarious bit, as the cigarette smoking tough-guy gangster is forced to pretend to be a cute toddler playing with toys under a Christmas tree, all the while simmering with a very adult look of humiliation and rage. Earles—who later starred in Browning’s Freaks—gives a masterfully malevolent performance.
People in 1954 would have probably gotten the reference. As a kid growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, I did not.1 The gangster baby was a funny bit in and of itself, so it never occurred to me that it had an antecedent. The Unholy Three, though an enormous success in its day, wasn’t widely available until it was released on DVD in 2010. I’d guess that many more people are familiar with “Baby Buggy Bunny” than they are with the film it’s parodying.
I did know who Lon Chaney was when I was a kid, though I’d never seen any of his films. I don’t remember when I first saw the image of Chaney as The Phantom of the Opera. Do you? That grimace—the bared teeth, the lips pulled taut, the wide, hungry hypnotic eyes: It’s an image that is so thoroughly saturated into our collective consciousness that we don’t even know how we absorbed it.
There’s a similarly iconic image of Chaney from Tod Browning’s 1927 film London After Midnight, though it’s less immediately identifiable. Go ahead and Google “Lon Chaney London After Midnight”: You’ve seen that face, right? The man in the beaver-skin top hat, his mouth full of sharpened teeth like a shark, his eyes popping and malevolently gleeful.2 Who is it? I always thought it was Mr. Hyde, but it’s actually just a free-floating collective nightmare. You might have seen it in a monster mag, or caricatured in a group of monsters on a Halloween poster or you might have collected a figurine. Director Jennifer Kent has said that the character was an inspiration for the monster in her film The Babadook.
But you’ve never actually seen the movie, since it probably doesn’t exist anymore. The last known copy was destroyed in the 1965 MGM vault fire, when an electrical short ignited the highly flammable nitrate film, destroying the only known copy of London at Midnight. All that remains are promotional still photographs. 3
It’s hard to wrap your mind around the idea that things can be lost forever. In these times of the instantly accessible, it’s hard to fathom that there could be only a single original, no duplicates. But at that time, the scores of silent films and early talkies were not considered treasures. They were warehoused, not archived, and there are very few left in pristine condition. Of the 10,919 films produced during the Silent Era, only 2,749 remain in some form or another.4 Of Browning’s forty feature films from the silent era, only 20 are known to exist; similarly, 102 of Lon Chaney’s 157 films are classified as lost.
Yet remnants persist. Images have a peculiar power to pass from one mind to another, transformed and yet recognizable, uncannily familiar. Even if we could magically destroy every single copy of Browning’s Dracula, the imagery it evoked is too deeply embedded in our cultural memory to stamp out. Ask someone to draw a vampire and elements of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 portrayal would inevitably emerge. The cape, the widow’s peak, the vulpine grin . . .
Such is also true with many of the films of Browning that we may think we’re not familiar with. Like the seminal Freaks, a number of Browning’s silent films feature sideshows, circuses, and magic acts, evoking a distinctively seedy, moody, gothic-noir palette. One of his particular innovative devices was to show the legerdemain from the point-of-view of the performer, pulling back the curtain and revealing the subterfuge and placing the audience in the morally murky position of the confidence man, rather than the mark. In The Show (1927), we are walked through the details of a beheading act—the trap doors, fake swords and mirror boxes that create the illusion of execution, followed by a harem girl dancing with a gasping “severed” head on a platter. The plot hinges on how easily such a trick might turn deadly, but perhaps my favorite moment is a close-up of a rueful clown, lighting matches from a matchbook and eating them like candy.
In The Unknown (1927), another collaboration with Lon Chaney, Chaney plays Alonzo the Armless, a circus performer who can use his feet like hands to shoot a gun, play a guitar, or throw knives at a very young Joan Crawford while she vamps against a target board on a rotating wooden stage in the middle of an arena. It turns out that Alonzo does actually have arms, he’s just binding them up in a truss as a ruse and is actually a criminal on the lam, keeping his hands out of sight due to the fact that he has a disfigured double thumb that would make him easily recognizable. He has romantic feelings toward Joan Crawford, but has to avoid close contact lest she discover his secret—but that’s okay, because she has a phobia of men’s hands touching her. What follows is utterly bananas, brimming with erotic body-modification fantasies that might’ve come straight out of a Cronenberg film, and yet also genuinely moving and full of pathos.
Even if you’ve never seen them before, these little-known films have an iconic familiarity, like a memory of something you dreamed—one can feel the way Browning’s peculiar obsessions and visuals would go on to influence generations of subsequent artists—from Ray Bradbury’s Dark Carnival to HBO’s series Carnivale, from Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley to David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. It’s a strange sensation, to look back on these films from a hundred years’ distance and to apprehend the strange, subtle, echoing signals they have been sending out—which have somehow found their way into the deep parts of our brains.
1. Looney Tunes was chock full of references to the pop culture of its day—which became increasingly obscure with the passage of time. See The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion: bit.ly/3UfBk8o
2. Chaney put spiral wire rings around his eyes to achieve this effect.
3. In 2002, Turner Classic Movies aired a “recreated” version, using the original script and stills from the film.
