“Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes if modern investigation, commonly enough fade away into mere dream; but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality.”
-T.H.Huxley; The Book of Beast

“Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!” –Nanon Zanzi

or… Mad Love Among the Limbless!

The Unknown (1927 USA 49mins)
Lon Chaney Sr as Alonso the Armless

Directed by Tod Browning with a screenplay by Waldemar Young (Island of Lost Souls, 1932). Story by Tod Browning, based on a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart. (The Bat 1959). Cinematography by Merritt B. Gerstad  (Watch on the Rhine 1943). Edited by Harry Reynolds and Errol Taggart. Art Direction by Cedric Gibbons and Richard Day (On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire) and Lucia Coulter, wardrobe.

Cast: Lon Chaney immortalizes the role of Alonzo the Armless, Joan Crawford plays Nanon Zanzi, Norman Kerry plays the strongman Malabar, John George is Alonzo’s sidekick Cojo, and Frank Lanning plays Costra—Nick De Ruiz as the circus owner and Nanon’s ruthless father, Zanzi.

The Unknown is a beautifully disturbing film that gains a savage momentum the more you peer into the face of its poetically ugly story. As writer/historian David J. Skal states of the stage contraption at the film’s climax, “the Unknown itself is a perfectly constructed torture machine and arguably Browning’s most accomplished film.”

I want to use the term “gothic embodiment” from Lina Wånggren’s May 22, 2013 article Gothic Embodiment: Lon Chaney and Affective Amputation because of her astute insight into the overreaching theme of The Unknown, which taps into the fear of castration and the horrific aspect of this bizarrely sensational L’amour Fou, which is both grim and grotesque.

For me, it was an unnerving, disquieting piece of the puzzle when I first watched Alonzo enter the stark surgical room to blackmail the surgeon into amputating both his arms and thereby cutting off his ability to embrace Nanon, his arms an extension of his maleness—the castration anxiety – fulfilled.

 Lina Wånggren asks what is a Gothic body? Here she cites a few examples-

“Various scholars have theorized Gothic embodiment and physical difference in Gothic works, such as Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995) Recently, the collection Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (2010), edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik, fruitfully employs the framework of disability studies to study monstrosity in the Gothic. The collected essays focus on the ways in which Gothic texts respond to “˜human beings who are figured as inhuman because they do not align with the physical or mental standards of their society’.

Lon Chaney has inhabited so many memorable roles with the use of theatrically exaggerated Gothic embodiment or characters who are ‘other’ on screen. What quickly comes to mind of course is Erik in Phantom of the Opera 1925 or Quasimodo in 1925 as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and of course the cruel yet redemptive Phrozo in The Penalty 1920.

Chaney possessed the ability to express his innermost desires not only through intuitive emotional expressiveness, alongside his elaborate make-up, but also through the commanding physicality his roles put on his body.

Chaney was heavily inspired by clowns as a young man, fascinated by their personae’s duality. Alonzo is a particularly complex character as Chaney offers us, with most of his performances, a man who can be simultaneously loathed and yet often wears a strata of sympathetic layers as we see into his intricate psyche, a sympathetic yet hateful man. Alonzo is a violent misanthrope, yet he finds tenderness in his love for Nanon, ironically a woman who repels any love from men. The duality of the character exists in this… Chaney deftly balances his ill-spirited belligerence toward the world and his internal emotionalism for the object of his love, the elusive and troubled Nanon.

Chaney is drawn to these roles like moths to the flame of men who suffer their differences at the hands of societal norms, exacting a sort of rule of vengeance. While completely cruel, he still manages to convey a deep and abiding pathos.

In one of my other favorite performances, he brings to life the complex Blizzard in The Penalty 1920. Both legs had been amputated as a child by an inept surgeon. This sets his character’s trajectory off into a cruel space, one of abuse and a life of crime due to the hardship he endured by being an amputee.

He is referred to by his foes as ‘the cripple from hell’. Blizzard’s pursuit is to exact revenge on the man who left him a cripple, and the absolute objectification of evil. Blizzard’s body has been left imperfect, filling him with a taste for vengeance for those ‘mangled years’ of his childhood. Years of being forced to live with his ‘physical difference.’

It is this desire for retribution that drives the narrative so strongly. In this narrative of Gothic difference through the embodiment of amputation, Blizzard conceives of a grotesque way of punishing this doctor by having the doctor amputate the legs of the daughter’s fiancé, then attach them to his own body.

While Chaney’s performance as Blizzard, the criminal mastermind, does create a compelling set of nuances with his character as the criminally insane boy grown out of years of resentment and lust for revenge, it is his performance as Alonzo that truly hits the mark for me.

The Unknown creates a bizarre romantic notion that Alonzo the Armless can choose to have his arms removed for the object of his desire, Nanon, which elevates this Gothic Embodiment into the realm of what contemporary critics and filmmakers like David Cronenberg would call ‘body horror.’

Alonzo is also maliciously encouraged by his minion Cojo, who acts like a devil imp, egging Alonzo down a more dangerous path of self-destruction. Many classical horror films use the expressly contemptuous ‘little’ evil sidekick as nefarious as the monster itself.

The idea that Nanon suffers from a carnal phobia of having anyone touch her is a vastly more complex and grotesquely misshapen love story than that of The Penalty.

Ironically, he is rejected at the end of this queasy and grim story of unrequited love that turns on itself.

The Unknown can be considered an allegory of sexual repression and traumatized masculinity. Going all Freudian on the film, one could relate the act of Alonzo’s amputation to that which is Freud’s castration anxiety.

Professor & Author Rick Worland refers to The Unknown and the idea of Alonzo’s amputation, both faked and eventually actualized, as “a fantastic work of psycho-sexual grotesquerie’ its amputation plot presenting a ‘fever dream of phallic symbolism, castration anxiety, and sexual terror.” Alonzo has rendered himself virtually impotent in a sexual way in order to satisfy Nanon’s need to be untouched.

Essentially, the idea of Gothic Embodiment and the fetishistic use of amputation in a psycho-sexual context can not overlook the idea of the act of simple ‘touch.’ The idea of Gothic Embodiment or ‘difference’ is inextricably linked to the act of touching and therefore an indirect link to frustrated intimacy. The human hands best embody this dual nature of touching and the sense of ‘feeling’. Both explore the way we touch and act as tools to explore or express our emotions in kind with another human. What I’d like to call ‘body dialogue.’

The Unknown released by MGM in 1927 and directed by Tod Browning in the horror genre popularly known for (Dracula 1931, & Freaks 1932) takes place at Antonio Zanzi’s ‘gypsy circus’ in old Madrid. The story involves a bizarre love triangle between circus folk Alonzo the Armless, Nanon Zanzi, and Strongman Malabar the Mighty. Alonzo uses his feet to fire guns and throw knives at Nanon.

The circus act itself is a destructive spectacle of masochism as Nanon Zanzi assists Alonzo in his death-defying act. Nanon is the daughter of the circus owner, Antonio Zanzi. Alonzo secretly desires Nanon. As part of their dangerously erotic act that resembles contact, furthermore penetration, but only in its flare for tease and excitement, the moving target Nanon is strapped to a board that spins. With each shot of the gun, the bullets remove one more article of Nanon’s clothes. Next, with his feet, Alonzo throws the penetrating knives that outline Nanon’s bikini-clad body perfectly.

Alonzo is described by the circus owner as “˜the sensation of sensations!’, and as the “˜wonder of wonders!’

Chaney collaborated with real-life armless double Paul Dismute, whose dexterity in the remarkable scenes where he uses his feet to handle objects such as strumming guitars, pouring wine, throwing knives, or lighting cigarettes. Tod Browning and cinematographer Merritt Gerstad (who also worked on Freaks) would use Chaney’s upper body and face within the shot frame. It was a brilliant use of body choreography and timing to give the illusion that Chaney was manipulating these objects by himself, while Dismute remained off-camera, handling the objects.

Here are some selected critiques of the film cited in Dark Carnival the secret world of Tod Browning David J. Skal & Elias Savada Chapter- “Murderous Midgets, crippled thieves…”

“Reflecting the growing public alarm over the moral tone of films in the late twenties The Unknown was the first film to be frankly and aggressively attacked in the press for it’s melodramatic  morbidity.” The New York Sun assured readers that “the suspicion that the picture might have been written by Nero, directed by Lucretia Borgia, constructed by the shade of Edgar Allan Poe and lighted by a well-known vivisectionist was absolutely groundless…. The Sun admitted that The Unknown “may be just what the public wants. If it is- well, the good old days of the Roman Empire are upon us” The New York Daily Mirror suggested that “if you like to tear butterflies apart and see sausage made you may like the climax to The Unknown. … typical Chaney fare spiced with cannibalism and flavored with the Spanish Inquisition.”

The New York Evening Post observed that “Mr Chaney has been twisting joints and lacing himself into strait-jackets for a long time- so long, in fact that there is almost nothing left for him now but the Headless Horseman. The Evening Post called The Unknown ‘a remarkably unpleasant picture.{…} a visit to the dissecting room in a hospital would be quite as pleasant and at the same time more instructive.”

Richard Watts Jr of The New York Herald Tribune said of the film, “The case of Mr. Tod Browning is rapidly approaching the pathological. After a series of minor horrors that featured such comparatively respectable creations as murderous midgets, crippled thieves and poisonous reptiles, all sinister and deadly in a murky atmosphere of blackness and unholy doom… the director presents us now with a melodrama that might have been made from a scenario dashed off by the Messrs. Leopold and Loeb in a quiet moment”

Watts conceded that given cinema otherwise so completely devoted to red blooded values and ‘general aggressive cleanliness’ films of the sort Browning championed might provide a ‘valuable counteracting influence” Obviously he felt repulsed by The Unknown.

The conservative Harrison’s Reports wrote “One can imagine a moral pervert of the present day, or professional torturers of the times of the Spanish Inquisition that gloated over the miseries of their victims on the rack and over their roasting on hot iron bars enjoying screen details of the kind set forth in The Unknown. but it is difficult to fancy average men and women of a modern audience in this enlightened age being entertained by such a thoroughly fiendish mingling of bloodlust, cruelty and horrors. … Of Mr. Chaney’s acting it is enough to say it is excellent of it’s kind. Similar praise might well be given the work of a skilled surgeon in ripping open the abdomen of a patient. But who wants to see him do it?”

There does seem to be a sadomasochistic tone pervading Browning/Chaney collaborations that begs the question about their private machinations that collaboratively generated such cruel public spectacles.

Joan Crawford eighteen at the time recalled Chaney’s ordeal with wearing the leather harness as agonizing a self punishing behavior. Mr Browning would say to him, “Lon, don’t you want me to untie your arms?” ‘No, the pain I am enduring now will help with the scene. Let’s go!” That’s how he was able to “convey such realism” and emotional agony that made it shocking and fascinating.“Chaney projected the image of physical suffering as both the definition and price of his stardom; exactly why he chose to is not so clear and since he left no revealing journals or correspondence on the matter, may forever remain obscure” Crawford said about Chaney, “When he acted, it was if God were working, he had such profound concentration. It was then I became aware for the first time of the difference between standing in front of a camera, and acting.”

“˜Armless Wonders’ were among the most spectacular and well-paid performers in turn-of-the-century American freak shows who would perform tasks and feats (no pun intended) to entertain the onlookers.

While Freud had his pseudoscience fix for every mental ailment, Tod Browning favored themes of a visceral, sexually charged plot surrounding resentment and revenge. He screened overt manipulation of disturbing sexual symbolism in order to shock his audience into consciousness. The threat of castration is a particularly violent notion and a repressed emotional impulse. Freud’s Uncanny, the idea of disembodied limbs, severed heads, and hands cut off at the wrists, all have something particularly unsettling about them. Especially when they are shown as capable of independent movement, it all springs from the castration complex. Browning’s fascination with sexually motivated mutilation, like that of Cleopatra being turned into a chicken or ‘duck’ lady in Freaks, annihilating her beauty, that quality which she used to lure Hans.

In Freaks, Francis is an armless woman, and there are two armless girls- Martha Morris and Francis O’Connor. Richard Watts Jr, film critic for the New York Herald Tribune, said of Browning– “Browning is the combination of Edgar Allan Poe and Sax Rohmer of the cinema. Where every director, save Stroheim, breathes wholesomeness. Out-of-door freshness and the healthiness of the clean-limbed, Tod revels in murkiness… His cinematic mind is a creeping torture chamber, a place of darkness, deviousness, and death.”

After Freaks, “In Browning’s next project, the Freudian theory would be bizarrely literalized into a weird and spectacular circus attraction. Based on an original story by Browning. Alonzo the Armless was a vehicle for Lon Chaney that would prove to be one of the darkest carnivals of the entire Browning canon.”

Boxing Helena is a 1993 modern-day, grotesquely romantic melodrama that was directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch (daughter of David Lynch). The film utilizes the mechanism of amputation as what I’ll call ‘seductive symbology’. The film stars Julian Sands and Sherilyn Fenn as the object of his desire, a surgeon who will keep his love closest to him by any means.

David Lynch’s daughter did an incredible job of blindsiding my expectations of horror while utilizing an outre grotesque bit of violent eroticism with Surveillance (2008) coming a long way off from Boxing Helena, which initially I thought was a woman’s pugilist film, much to my surprise and stomach-turning angst. The scene in Surveillance where the little girl in pajamas is wandering the desert, I believe, is more than a coincidental great nod to the scene in THEM! (1954). Lynch’s work has some truly dynamic horror moments… I can’t say more about the film without giving away some of the ingenious plot twists and mechanisms. Another modern classic that is reminiscent in its use of eroticism conflated with amputation is Alejandro Jodorwosky’s masterpiece Santa Sangre 1989. The Gothic Embodiment again takes place in a traveling circus and showcases the sexualization of Concha’s violent amputation of both her arms by her volatile, sword-throwing, philandering Neanderthal husband, played by Guy Stockwell where the crossover imagining of mythos and psycho-sexual stimulation of violence and armless saints blend into a nightmarish wander-land for the son Fenix.

The Unknown is a profoundly bizarre love triangle with the sense and symbolism of touch tethering the players together in an immortal context of specific reliance on the importance of contact, using Nanon’s abject horror of being touched and her repulsion of the male physique. Hands and arms are the active normative use of the physical expression of intimacy at odds with the difference of Gothic Embodiment. To the extent that Alonzo is willing to ‘castrate’ himself in order to possess Nanon fully. This is how the opening title goes. We are placed down into an altered world of reality and the fantastical lifestyle of circus life.

The circus features an armless entertainer named Alonzo. He is a knife thrower who could split the hairs on two flies dancing in unison. His claim to fame is that he handles both bullets and blades with his bare feet. In the film’s opening scene, Alonzo performs, showing confidence in his perfect aim by flinging phallic knives at his beautiful assistant Nanon, who is at the receiving end of his knife throwing while seated on a rotating platform. With each delivery, he picks off one more article of Nanon’s clothing that dangles there, boasting of his sexual competence. Through this performance, Alonzo can sublimate his own feverish sexual urges for Nanon.

The secret lies in the fact that Alonzo actually does have two strong, capable arms, a fact that only his dwarf assistant Cojo (John George) is privy to. Each day, Cojo laces Alonzo into a punishing leather corset. Alonzo dons this apparatus to create the appearance of amputation. A disguise he perpetuates because he is on the run from the law, and it also brings him closer to the object of his fixation, the beautiful but sexually constrained Nanon. Nanon is consumed with a phobia surrounding the male anatomy, in particular their hands. She is repulsed by men’s upper extremities, “Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!”

What frightens her more is the ‘ideal’ of Malabar’s physique. To Nanon, the object of Gothic horror seems to be the normative body, and strangely enough, not the body that is emphasized as different. Malabar’s body encompasses an extremely forceful ideal of the masculine body. Nanon is traumatized by Malabar’s aggressive touch and grasping hands. She finds him abhorrent.

She finds comfort in Alonzo, who poses no threat to her as he has no arms or hands that can either challenge her desire or harm her.

Although Alonzo possesses arms, he exhibits a freakish anomaly, as he has a double thumb on one hand. In the original story, Browning and screenwriter Waldemar Young had envisioned a claw as his deformity. However, the phallic charge of the double thumb is more in keeping with the influence that Freud’s The Uncanny had made on cinema.  According to writer/historians Skal & Savada,  ‘doubling’ is viewed by Freud as an imaginative defense against the feared loss of the self, or a part of the self.

Alonzo suffers in silence over his immortal love for Nanon, keeping their relationship strictly platonic, but he still attracts negative attention from Nanon’s father, the circus owner. On a dark and rainy night, Alonzo strangles the man, as Nanon peers outside her window yet does not see the killer’s face. The one thing that she does notice is the unmistakable double thumbs as it grips her father’s throat.

While Alonzo quietly broods over his unrequited love, the strong man Malabar (Norman Kerry) pursues her with all the traditional male prowess of a proud peacock. Of course, this sends Alonzo into fits of irrational jealousy. He blackmails a surgeon into actually removing his arms so that Nanon would assuredly run to him, being the safe male.

Malabar’s sexual advances only push Nanon closer to Alonzo’s friendship. But Alonzo’s sidekick Cojo ( John George, whom Browning used several times throughout his career) warns his friend that he shouldn’t let Nanon get so close as to be able to feel that he truly does have arms that are strapped down.

But when he returns to the circus after the surgery he discovers that Nanon has miraculously overcome her fear of manly chests, bulging muscles, and arms with which to hold her in ecstatic embrace. And the two are also engaged.

There is a sad, ironic scene when Nanon asks Alonzo if he is thinner before she tells him of her love for Malabar. The moment is filled with a typical Tod Browning sense of timely perversity, misdirection, and emotional pain.

She declares to her old friend that she even LOVES Malabar’s hands: “Remember how I used to be afraid of his hands?  I am not anymore. I love them now.’

I’ll leave the climax to those who haven’t seen this violently intoxicating film yet.

The film is filled with cruelty, irony, and obsession. While the story is more like a wickedly grotesque fairytale, it observes a journey of its own, nightmarish reasoning, intricate as it is repulsive.

What is Nanon’s strange and horrible fixation on men’s hands? She is terrified by the thought of their hands on her!

She has “grown so that [she] shrink[s] with fear when any man touches [her]” with their “beastly hands.” Nanon’s fear becomes apparent when she is courted by the circus weight-lifter or strongman Malabar.

When Malabar boasts to Nanon of incredible strength, flexing his arm muscles and grabbing at her hands and her wrists while telling her of how his “hands that long to caress you,” Nanon struggles to get away, experiencing sheer terror.

The Unknown (1927)-The Armless Wonder.

By MORDAUNT HALL.
Published: June 13, 1927

“Although it has strength and undoubtedly sustains the interest, “The Unknown,” the latest screen contribution from Tod Browning and Lon Chaney, is anything but a pleasant story. It is gruesome and at times shocking, and the principal character deteriorates from a more or less sympathetic individual to an arch-fiend. The narrative is a sort of mixture of Balzac and Guy de Maupassant with a faint suggestion of O. Henry plus Mr. Browning’s colorful side-show background.{…}

“The rôle of Alonzo, who poses as the Armless Wonder with a Spanish circus, is one that ought to have satisfied Mr. Chaney’s penchant for freakish characterizations, for here he not only has to go about for hours with his arms strapped to his body…{…}

“This tale is prefaced as if it were a circus legend, and soon one realizes that Alonzo is not only expert in the use of his feet when serving himself, but he is also supposed to be a crack shot and an unerring knife thrower. The girl who risks her life daily before Alonzo’s bullets and knives is Estrellita, impersonated by Joan Crawford. She becomes interested in Alonzo because most men in the circus without provocation invariably want to caress her.”