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The title is the location of a seedy tropical outpost, just the humid purgatory for Tod Browning and Lon Chaney to flex their cruel wit. Phroso the conjurer has a recurring trick, the skeleton that turns into a babe in the rotating coffin, the ruthless ivory trader (Lionel Barrymore) steals his wife (Jacqueline Gadsden) and breaks his back in a brawl. The sight of his dead beloved with an abandoned baby triggers the cuckold's revenge, a scheme eighteen years in the making: "He and his brat will pay!" Lording over jungle outcasts from his wooden wheelchair, "Dead Legs" wows the natives with sideshow illusionism while thwarting his rival's business. All is prelude to a vengeful coup, the illegitimate tyke raised in a sleazy dive grown into a debased blonde (Mary Nolan) to be presented to her father. "He made me this thing that crawls... Now I'm ready to bite!" Supernatural spirits can be faked, down in the void only human desperation and perversion are real. Chaney's slithering pantomime anchors Browning's dense imagery, meaty muscles shifting on a shorn visage, pathetic, glowering, anguished, ecstatic. Twitching from addiction with only the dilapidated doctor (Warner Baxter) by her side, the heroine gazes at a funeral pyre and cackles with terror. "That's the law of the Congo." The truth collapses weeping into laughter and vice versa, a Pietà can only momentarily disperse the air of decay. A grand Gogolesque nightmare, with consequences for Wellman (Safe in Hell) and Sternberg (The Shanghai Gesture). The true magic is an attempt at familial connection in the face of encroaching death, the mordant punchline is that the tribal elder is a tough audience. "Gee, but you're a strange man!" With Tiny Ward, Kalla Pasha, Curtis Nero, and Noble Johnson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |