Lon Chaney's only talkie would be worth seeing just to hear him him speak, (His voice sounds remarkably like the old TV and wrestling announcer, Dick Lane), but this oddball film is a hoot overall. Chaney spends nearly half the film in drag, disguised as an old lady, and his weird burglary scam involves himself (He's a tremendously unfunny ventriloquist) a dopey strongman and a vicious midget, running a pet shop as a cover, and then robbing their patron's homes after delivering their pets. Chaney uses his ventriloquism skills to sell suckers parrots that don't speak, a particularly gratuitous scam since why not just get parrots that do talk? Oh, and Chaney keeps a gorilla (Well, Charles Gemora in a particularly ratty gorilla suit) as a pet. There's the standard Chaney love triangle: Chaney loves his moll/accomplice Rosie, played by the very pretty Lila Lee, who was the mother of James Kirkwood, author of "A Chorus Line", and she loves an overwhelmingly namby-pamby nice young man named Hector, who is about as far from the Trojan hero Hector as you can possibly get. What Rosie sees in this simpering wimp, who is less masculine than she is, I can not imagine. Chaney smacks her about a bit (Okay, more than a bit. She plays one scene with his hand print still visible on her cheek. But come on, he goes to prison just to please her.) but he's at least a man. Elliot Nugent, who plays Hector, went on to direct many second-level comedy films, and to write several successful plays. Judging by his performance here, his career change was well advised. Harry Earles' midget character is the most vicious character, laughing at the memory of a pitiful victim pleading for his life, and mocking Rosie's grief, and even loosing the gorilla. Many have pointed out that Chaney's voice in this film is as supple as his make ups were, but the real revelation is how seamlessly he abandons the overplaying of silent cinema for the more realistic and restrained acting of sound film.
Review of The Unholy Three
