The Wicked Darling

Tod Browning, Universal, February 1919: the first of the ten pictures he made with Lon Chaney. Priscilla Dean is Mary Stevens, pickpocket, the Gutter Rose. Chaney is Stoop Connors, her partner, who does not want her leaving the racket for Kent Mortimer, the man whose wallet she lifted. Harvey Gates from an Evelyn Campbell story. Six reels, shot December 1918 into January. Chaney is not yet in appliances; the menace is the walk and the face. A battered print is how it survives. Dean was Browning’s star before Chaney was.