Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
The Unholy Three
A sideshow ventriloquist, a strongman and a midget leave the carnival to run a pet shop, and to rob the customers who buy its talking parrots.
A silent picture about a ventriloquist is Tod Browning’s first joke, before the film has told any of its own. Lon Chaney plays Echo, who leaves the sideshow with Hercules the strongman and Tweedledee the midget to keep a pet shop, where Chaney in a grandmother’s shawl sells parrots that only talk while he is in the room. Harry Earles, who came back for Browning’s Freaks, is the cigar-chewing baby in the pram. The burglaries come to murder, the wrong man goes on trial, and Echo has to decide whose voice to throw. Watch for the gorilla in the back of the shop, which is not part of the act.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Tod Browning
- With
- Harry Earles · Mae Busch · Matt Moore · Lon Chaney · Victor McLaglen · Percy Williams
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Tod Browning four years apart, both times staging a performance for an audience that does not know it is being fooled: Echo throwing his voice into a parrot, Madame La Grange calling the dead into a dark room. The first time the trick is the crime; the second time it is how the crime is solved.
The same novel, the same star, five years apart. In the silent Echo throws his voice and the titles have to tell you; in the talkie you hear the grandmother, the dummy and the parrot, all of them Chaney. The story hardly changes. What it is about does: a man whose trick is a voice, in the year pictures got one.