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The opening erotic dance is remarkably loaded: Alonzo the Armless (Lon Chaney) and Nanon (Joan Crawford) on a rotating platform under the big top, the female form outlined by hurled daggers, a live sex show, just about. Circus Zanzi is the place for such subterranean spectacle, Malabar the Mighty (Norman Kerry) bends iron bars and flexes his biceps for the gypsy beauty, but she's repelled by masculine thrust. Lacking "beastly hands," Alonzo is the one man she can come near; away from her eyes, he removes his girdle to reveal the fugitive strangler's murderous limbs, tightened by unrequited love. Surgery to the rescue! "If God intended us not to masturbate," posits George Carlin, "He'd have made our arms shorter." Tod Browning runs his rousing, cruel joke on the mutilated artiste and the frigid muse along the lines of Freud's description of Oedipus in The Uncanny, "the self-blinding of the mythical criminal." (Another gag: From Alonzo platonically hugged by Nanon, a cut to Cojo the dwarf chortling while puffing on a cigar.) Experimenting with filmic form as much as with body shapes, Browning places gauzy filters on the lenses to heighten the artificiality of "normal" romance, and uses a matron's adjustment of her opera binoculars to stage a rare tracking shot. The angularity of the caravan is contrasted with the sterility of the operating room, where, in the most chilling moment, Chaney slowly runs his palm along his shoulder to pantomime the surgeon's saw. (Later, the heroine hugs him again and is startled by his thinner frame. He smiles: "Not sick... but I have lost some flesh.") The endless contortions of human desire, a goldmine of images for Buñuel and Bataille and Jodorowsky. With Nick De Ruiz, John George, and Frank Lanning. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |