The Unholy Three

Browning was paid $10,000 to direct The Unholy Three. The film rights to Robbins's book had previously been purchased by Clarence Brown in 1919, when he was working as an editor. But Brown's mentor, director Maurice Tourneur, persuaded him to seek a more marketable property instead. Chaney based his performance as Echo upon an actual criminal. "August Vollmer, police chief and criminologist, told me of a hotel thief he had arrested who was also a physician," Chaney said. "Incidentally, I understand his man reformed, and, after serving his term and taking his medicine, has rehabilitated himself in society." As a gag, and a means of testing their disguises, Chaney and Earles visited the MGM Wardrobe Department as Mrs. O'Grady and baby Willie, and requested a diaper change. When the costumer was unpinning Earles's pants, he cried, "You will like hell, madam! Not this baby!" One day, McLaglen filled one of Tweedledee's baby bottles with Scotch. "You should have seen Lon in a wig and false front and big false keister sucking on that nipple!" Earles said, "You would've died laughing." In the novel, Echo is effeminate, and disguises himself as a young woman. This "beautiful girlish face" was one face that Chaney was unable to conjure from his makeup box, so it was decided that he would become "Granny" O'Grady instead. The giant ape that unleashed his fury in the film's climax was actually a normal-sized chimpanzee that was filmed on miniature sets. In one scene, a child is substituted for Chaney, to enhance the optical illusion. The pressbook claimed it was a 1,400-pound gorilla. Browning played along and exaggerated the ferocity of the beast, "Every shot that was taken of this animal was taken at great personal risk and exacted an amount of patience that is hard to describe. We were in momentary dread that he would break from his cage and kill everybody connected with the taking of the scenes." The total budget of The Unholy Three was $114,000. Its total worldwide gross was $704,000. MGM's profit was registered as $328,000. Research compiled by Bret Wood Sources: The MGM Story Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury by Joe Franklin The Horror People by John Brosnan Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning by David J. Skal & Elias Savada

According to studio publicity, the performers at the dime museum are actual carnival performers, recruited from a freak show on North Main Street in Los Angeles. This is most likely an exaggeration, since the Siamese twins and tattooed lady are obvious fakes. Born in Dresden, Harry Earles came to America at age 11 and was 23 when he appeared in The Unholy Three. The Unholy Three was given a preview run at the Loew's Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, opening Saturday, May 30, 1925. A.W. Bowles, general manager of the West Coast Theaters wired MGM's home office, "Very happy to advise you that the world premiere of The Unholy Three [broke] all existing Saturday opening records in the history of the theatre." Browning would recycle several elements from The Unholy Three in his 1936 film The Devil-Doll: the cross-dressing granny, stolen pearls hidden in a child's toy, and a Christmas murder. Browning's film was remade (almost shot-for-shot) in 1930 by director Jack Conway. Lon Chaney reprised his role as Echo. It was his last film, and the only talkie he ever made. In 1932, Browning adapted another story by Tod Robbins: "Spurs," which would reach the screen as Freaks (1932). The Unholy Three was not the only film in which Browning used a wild animal as a deus ex machina. A deadly reptile is unleashed at the end of The Show (1927), and a wild tiger is uncaged in Where East Is East (1929). "Extra police protection" was required to maintain order when a Hartford, Connecticut theater was swarmed with ticket-buyers. The manager wired to MGM, "Never to my knowledge have I seen theatre goers so deliberate in gaining admission to see this masterpiece." A county judge in Syracuse launched an attack on the film at a convention of the State Association of Child Welfare Boards, claiming it "was nothing less than an appeal to a child to become a thief, a play without moral or educational purpose, a debasing spectacle, purely and simply." DELETED SCENES When Hercules and Tweedledee rob the Arlington mansion on Christmas Eve, they awaken a three-year-old child, who tiptoes out to catch Santa in the act. "Oh Santa Claus," she exclaims, "You brought me a little bruvver!" She throws her arms around Tweedledee and begins kissing him. Mr. Arlington comes downstairs just in time to see his child being strangled by the diminutive burglar. Hercules tears a curtain from the doorway, wraps it around Arlington's head and suffocates him. Research compiled by Bret Wood Sources: The MGM Story Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury by Joe Franklin The Horror People by John Brosnan Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning by David J. Skal & Elias Savada

"Not often does one see so powerful a photodrama as The Unholy Three... After viewing this production the figures that have passed upon the screen still cling to one's mind and one feels like talking about the strange and unusual tale... This pictorial effort is a startling original achievement which takes its place with the very best productions that have ever been made." The New York Times "This is the greatest picture I have seen to date." Film Daily "There is nothing in the world of the photoplay so rare as intelligent, original and authentically thrilling melodrama. This makes The Unholy Three all the more important, for it is, by all odds, the most exciting and terrifying of all screen thrillers." New York Herald Tribune "We don't believe we have ever witnessed a more gripping, better produced or better acted picture." Moving Picture World "It was President Wilson who used to read detective stories to ease his mind. He would have liked The Unholy Three." Time "It is one of the finest pictures ever made, due to the able and clever direction of Tod Browning... Lon Chaney gives a perfect performance as the ventriloquist." Photoplay "A classic of screen literature." San Francisco Daily News "To Mr. Browning, all honor." The New Yorker "Crowded with action, suspense and thrills, this latest Chaney film of the underworld stands among the foremost melodramas screened for some time." Exhibitors Trade Review "..it is curiously muted compared to the macabre fancies dreamed up later in the series. But there is many a pleasing frisson to be had from the weird family circle formed by three carnival refugees...Slightly tongue-in-cheek...it also displays considerable subtlety in depicting the perverse passions that tear the trio apart." Tom Milne, TimeOut Film Guide "A marvelous piece of fantasy and one of the most bizarre films in the history of the cinema, tinged with moments of black humor." Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films Compiled by Bret Wood

Perhaps the greatest talent of director Tod Browning was his ability to make even the most preposterous story somehow plausible. Throughout his early career he specialized in crime melodramas that were tinged with the unusual but The Unholy Three (1925), his first of sixteen films for MGM, allowed him to plunge headlong into the perverse. In a plot that would have been played for slapstick by any other director, a trio of dime museum oddities - Hercules the strongman (Victor McLaglen), Tweedledee the midget (Harry Earles) and Echo the ventriloquist (Lon Chaney) - join forces to perpetrate a series of nocturnal burglaries. Shedding their carnival personages, they reinvent themselves in a warped reflection of the traditional family. Donning granny wig and black dress, Echo becomes the elderly Mother O'Grady, while Tweedledee climbs into a cradle to become her toddling grandchild and Hercules stands by as her muscle-bound son. Rounding out Echo's larcenous troupe are a beautiful pickpocket (Mae Busch) and a monstrous ape, which is inevitably unleashed in the film's suitably outrageous final reel. In publicity stories, Browning exaggerated the ferocity of the primate. "Every shot that was taken of this animal was taken at great personal risk," said Browning in the original press book, "We were in momentary dread that he would break from his cage and kill everybody connected with the taking of the scenes." In reality, the ape was nothing more than a large yet docile chimpanzee, which was made to appear bigger than life through the use of miniature sets and optical effects. To accomplish the illusion in one scene, a child was costumed as Echo so that the ape would loom large in comparison. Though The Unholy Three has moments of visual brilliance - the shadow of the dark triumvirate hatching their plans, the oft-parodied image of the infantile Tweedledee wearing a criminal scowl and smoking a fat cigar - Browning's primary accomplishment was shaping the macabre story and coaxing the proper degree of melodramatic abandon from his cast. Chaney's performances have, at times, been criticized as excessive, but his fire-and-brimstone acting style was ideally suited to the aggrandized plots that Browning and his screenwriters fashioned around him. The Unholy Three's peculiar subject matter inspired a great deal of behind-the-scenes tomfoolery. To test the effectiveness of their disguises, Chaney (as Mrs. O'Grady) took Earles (as Little Willie) to the studio's wardrobe department for a diaper change. Just before the undergarments were unpinned, Earles shouted, much to the wardrobe lady's surprise, "You will like hell, madam!" On another day, McLaglen filled Earles's baby bottle with Scotch, which was quickly swiped by the costumed Chaney. "You should have seen Lon in a wig and a false front and big false keister sucking on that nipple," recalled Earles, "You'd have died laughing!" So popular was Browning's twisted tale that MGM made The Unholy Three, conceived as nothing more than a low-budget melodrama, one of their high-profile releases of the season, alongside such monumental films as King Vidor's The Big Parade, Ben-Hur and Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow. It scored a multi-picture contract for Browning and enabled him to direct seven more films with Chaney, surprisingly unique thrillers populated by twisted bodies and criminal minds. In 1930, The Unholy Three was remade by director Jack Conway (Browning had left MGM for Universal, where he would direct Dracula in 1931). The talkie version, a scene-for-scene duplicate of Browning's original, would be Chaney's first and only sound film before his untimely death on August 26, 1930.Earles would reunite with Browning in 1932 for the director's most notorious production, Freaks, while McLaglen (former heavyweight boxing champion of the British Army and Navy) would become known as a character actor in the films of John Ford, including The Informer (1935) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Producer/Director: Tod Browning Screenplay: Waldemar Young, Based on the novel by Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins Cinematography: David Kesson Production Design: Cedric Gibbons and Joseph C. Wright Editing: Daniel J. Gray Cast: Lon Chaney (Echo), Harry Earles (Tweedledee), Victor McLaglen (Hercules), Mae Busch (Rosie O'Grady), Matt Moore (Hector), Matthew Betz (Regan), Edward Connelly (The Judge). BW-87m. by Bret Wood

"Hercules! The mighty...marvelous...mastodonic model of muscular masculinity!" "Nemo, how would you like to walk over to my house and have a drink?" "Why walk? Let's run!" "See her do the dance that broke the Sultan's thermometer!" "The Demi-Tasse Dandy!" "You see, my plan is so ridiculous...so simple...that it scares you." "It's spooky! It sounds... unholy!" "We'll be the Unholy Three!" "If I loved a man, he wouldn't have to have a dime!" "That's all there is to life, friends -- a little laughter...a little tear..." Compiled by Bret Wood