For Lon Chaney's sound debut, MGM had him filming a remake of one of his silent classics, The Unholy Three. I wish that Victor McLaglen had not been replaced by Ivan Linow as the strong man and Lila Lee is a more hardboiled case than Mae Busch, but the chance to hear Lon Chaney and realize he could have had a great career in sound makes The Unholy Three worth viewing.
The title comes from a crack Chaney makes about him as the show ventriloquist, the strong man Linow, and the midget Harry Earles being an unusual gang. The three decide to pool their respective talents with Chaney being a master of disguise as a criminal gang. As a front they open Mrs. O'Grady's pet shop with Chaney in drag as little old Mrs. O'Grady.
The weakness of the plot is Lila Lee who knows very well what this crowd is up to. She's along for the ride and she falls for a true innocent in this film, Elliott Nugent. He clerks in the pet shop and when murder is committed during one of their heists, he's set up to take the fall for it.
However the film was done to display Chaney's talents in creating new makeup faces and to throw in the dimension of voice. Who would know that after this film was finished that voice was attacked by throat cancer and then stilled.
One thing I found interesting showing the problems of early sound. During Nugent's trial sequence a note is passed to his lawyer Crauford Kent and Nugent reads it and they discuss the contents. They should have been whispering and would have been later on in sound. But instead they talk in normal conversational tone that certainly would have disrupted the trial proceedings. The microphone obviously wasn't sensitive enough to pick up whispers and/or the actors weren't accustomed to sound to fake it.
Speaking of the trial, John Miljan who normally played villains in his career does good work as the District Attorney who unmasks literally, the whole criminal enterprise.
The Unholy Three was not the best film Chaney could have done to make a sound debut, still it's our only record of him on sound and he registers well in the new medium.
The title comes from a crack Chaney makes about him as the show ventriloquist, the strong man Linow, and the midget Harry Earles being an unusual gang. The three decide to pool their respective talents with Chaney being a master of disguise as a criminal gang. As a front they open Mrs. O'Grady's pet shop with Chaney in drag as little old Mrs. O'Grady.
The weakness of the plot is Lila Lee who knows very well what this crowd is up to. She's along for the ride and she falls for a true innocent in this film, Elliott Nugent. He clerks in the pet shop and when murder is committed during one of their heists, he's set up to take the fall for it.
However the film was done to display Chaney's talents in creating new makeup faces and to throw in the dimension of voice. Who would know that after this film was finished that voice was attacked by throat cancer and then stilled.
One thing I found interesting showing the problems of early sound. During Nugent's trial sequence a note is passed to his lawyer Crauford Kent and Nugent reads it and they discuss the contents. They should have been whispering and would have been later on in sound. But instead they talk in normal conversational tone that certainly would have disrupted the trial proceedings. The microphone obviously wasn't sensitive enough to pick up whispers and/or the actors weren't accustomed to sound to fake it.
Speaking of the trial, John Miljan who normally played villains in his career does good work as the District Attorney who unmasks literally, the whole criminal enterprise.
The Unholy Three was not the best film Chaney could have done to make a sound debut, still it's our only record of him on sound and he registers well in the new medium.