The Unholy Three

Tod Browning, MGM, 1925. Lon Chaney is Echo, a ventriloquist who disguises himself as Mrs. O’Grady, a bird-shop granny, with strongman Hercule (Victor McLaglen) and Tweedledee (Harry Earles) as the infant in the pram. They case houses; Mae Busch is the pickpocket who works with them. It was Browning and Chaney’s biggest commercial pairing and the template for the later sideshow crime pictures. Chaney remade it with sound in 1930, his only talkie, swearing five of the voices were his. The baby carriage is not a joke to the people inside the shop.