Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
The Unholy Three
A ventriloquist in a grandmother’s shawl, a strongman and a midget in baby clothes run a pet shop as cover for robbing its customers.
Lon Chaney’s only talking picture, and he made it a remake of his own silent so that he could show what his voice could do. Echo the ventriloquist speaks as himself, as old Mrs. O’Grady behind the counter, as the parrot that will not talk until he is in the room, and, Chaney insisted, he did every voice himself. Harry Earles is back as Tweedledee, the gang’s brains in a pram, and he is meaner with a voice than he was without one. Jack Conway shoots it flat and quick, a crime picture rather than a carnival one. Watch the witness box: the trial is where the grandmother has to talk her way out. Chaney died seven weeks after it opened.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Jack Conway
- With
- Harry Earles · Lon Chaney · Lila Lee · John Miljan · Elliott Nugent · Charles Gemora
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
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.