The Unknown

Tod Browning's most disturbing masterpiece — and the film that pushed the Browning-Chaney partnership to its most extreme and emotionally devastating place. Lon Chaney plays Alonzo, a criminal on the run who hides in a circus disguised as an armless knife-thrower, binding his arms painfully against his body for every performance. He falls obsessively in love with the circus owner's daughter (a very young Joan Crawford), who has a pathological fear of being touched by men's arms. Alonzo's solution to this problem is so radical and so horrifying that it crosses the line from devotion into madness — and then the twist comes. Chaney's performance, conveying a universe of desire and agony through facial expression alone, is one of the most remarkable in silent cinema. A film about the monstrous things we do for love, and one that lingers in the mind like a bad dream.