West of Zanzibar

West of Zanzibar (1928)

Runtime: 65 minutes

Directed by: Tod Browning

Starring: Lon Chaney, Sr., Mary Nolan, Warner Baxter, Lionel Barrymore, Tiny Ward

From: MGM

I was glad to have some silent horror to talk about this month, along w/ a film from Lon Chaney, Sr., directed by Tod Browning. This belongs in the category of late silents that featured a score alongside various sound effects (including laughter + applause) but there are still intertitles displaying all the dialogue. 

What an opening act this has. Chaney is a magician who is paralyzed from the waist-down after a dispute with the dude (Lionel Barrymore!) who steals his wife. They flee, but a year later she returns w/ baby... she dies in a church and father/daughter head on over to what is now the country of Tanzania; after a time-jump of 18 years, he rules the “superstitious natives” via his magic tricks.

This is all in the first 10 minutes. To address the elephant in the room, the depiction of Black people is as dated for a 98 year old film as you'd expect. Alas... Lionel Barrymore is now an ivory trader (wild if you only know him as the evil SOB Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life. If you want a mind-trip, view Barrymore in Browning's The Devil-Doll. He spends long stretches dressed as an old woman!) while Warner Baxter is Chaney's personal doctor who loves the booze.

What a sordid tale this is, a heated story set in the jungles which involves revenge, prostitution, other taboos, and a tale where Chaney is the true villain of the piece with his behavior. I mean, he truly played the long game with his plan. This was remade a few years later as Kongo; now, that apparently was a really wild Pre-Code effort, with a lead character that was far more vile than what Lon, Sr. presented here.

I dare not reveal more except that a key moment involved a human skeleton. Apropos, given that just a few hours ago when I was on the road, I viewed a first... a random dude in an old Volkswagen Jetta had a human skeleton in his passenger seat! Was he doing it as an HOV scam?