Asides

Image of the day, 7/23/11

By July 23, 2011No Comments

3

A ver­sion of pas­tor­al in Jack Conway’s 1930 all-talking ver­sion of The Unholy Three. In the fore­ground, Lila Lee and Lon Chaney; in the back­ground, Ivan Linow and, in the gor­illa suit, Charles Gemora. 

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No Comments

  • Oliver_C says:
    July 23, 2011 at 11:20 am

    “The Unholy Three”? And a guy in a gor­illa suit?
    Aha, so *that’s* where Marvel Comics got the idea…
    http://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=768597&gsub=27878

  • David Ehrenstein says:
    July 23, 2011 at 1:50 pm

    I’ve seen it and it’s quite good.

  • Kiss Me, Son of God says:
    July 23, 2011 at 4:18 pm

    Hey, it’s Bryan Cranston!

  • Shawn Stone says:
    July 23, 2011 at 5:24 pm

    “I don’t trust that midge!”
    On the whole, the deep malice of the Browning ver­sion (1925) gets swapped out for some­thing more super­fi­cial, but there’s noth­ing super­fi­cial about Chaney’s commitment.

  • Glenn Kenny says:
    July 23, 2011 at 5:29 pm

    It’s true, this is dime-store stuff next to the ori­gin­al, but still, so much to love: Chaney, Lila, Harry Earles say­ing “Pretty beads, pretty beads,” and so on. My favor­ite thing about this shot in its non-still ver­sion is the cas­u­al, uncon­scious sur­real­ism it achieves; these two char­ac­ters fret­ting over their “rela­tion­ship” out­side their cab­in in the woods while a gor­illa jumps around behind them.

  • AeC says:
    July 23, 2011 at 11:45 pm

    I saw the ori­gin­al at Film Forum’s Tod Browning ret­ro­spect­ive a couple years ago, which sim­ul­tan­eously showed me just how more twis­ted Browning could get than Dracula and Freaks and made me a lifelong Chaney, Sr. fan. This one’s been sit­ting on my shelf for a while after I picked up a Chaney six-pack from Warner Archive a few months back. It just moved closer to the head of the “To Watch” list.

  • haice says:
    July 24, 2011 at 12:19 am

    Laurel & Hardy fled the cir­cus around that same time with the estim­able Charles Gemora as “Ethel” in THE CHIMP. Hilarious scene with the three of them in a motel room as L & H plot to ditch the monkey.