West of Zanzibar (1928, Tod Browning)

 
West of Zanzibar
1928|Tod Browning

Lon Chaney slithers across the floor, his legs paralyzed from a fall, his heart blackened by betrayal. Eighteen years earlier, he was Phroso the Magician, a successful performer with a beautiful wife. But she left him for another man, only to die the following year after giving birth to a daughter. He has spent every day since then setting into motion a vicious revenge on the man and child who ruined his life, and now, gazing at the hence-grown girl, his hatred boils over.

Phroso, now known as Dead-Legs, has followed his wife’s lover, ivory hunter Crane (Lionel Barrymore), to the jungles of Africa. The magician leads a hateful existence there, gaining god-like power over the natives with his old illusions so that they might do his bidding. His cruelest treatment, however, is surely reserved for Maizie (Mary Nolan), the child his wife carried, whom he tucked away in the lowest brothel in Zanzibar for the greater part of her life. Having no idea where she came from, she has resigned herself to a life of booze, addiction, and wretched men. When the time is right, Phroso plans a deadly reunion between his rival and the abandoned girl.

The frequent teaming of Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning was a lucrative one throughout the 1920s. Browning’s affection for society’s misfits provided ideal vehicles for Chaney’s genius at creating fearful yet sympathetic characters. West of Zanzibar allows the actor to create a fully realized person out of what could have been a one-note villain. While Chaney is revered for his awesome makeup skills in films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, he relies primarily on his own physicality, his leering eyes, and the natural contours of his rugged face to create Phroso. He eerily takes on the appearance of a monstrous, armed snake as he drags his crippled body across the floor, but his performance is equal parts grotesqueness and pathos (Chaney was truly one of the great, underrated emotional actors of the silent era), reminding us that no matter how repulsive his actions, he is himself a tortured soul. Like Browning’s later masterpiece Freaks, this film explores how easily people can slip between civility and brutality when pushed over the edge.

The other really impressive performance is that of Mary Nolan, who ensures that Maizie is no mere damsel in distress. She charges her character with a surprising wildness, a disgust with her surroundings, and a wearied hopelessness that suggests a woman who, even at her young age, has seen too much. Take her reaction to a tribal funeral, which follows the native tradition of cremating a dead man’s surviving wife or daughter along with him. She becomes fixated on the event (and Browning’s camera fixates on her face), laughing crazily before finally breaking into tears. It’s not the reaction you would probably expect or perhaps even accept from such a character, but Nolan makes it poignant. Maizie, like Phroso, has been pushed so far that she can’t help but behave callously when presented with such a ghastly sight.

Browning was particularly adept at combining the lurid and the humane, and West of Zanzibar still has the ability to make your skin crawl. The story is one of single-minded revenge, and the African jungle setting, totally un-PC by today’s standards, provides enough depravity and voodoo fantasy for an evening’s guilty pleasure. But the complex central performances elevate the material, making it a story of damaged people lost in their own misery. The film’s grisly outcome is a nasty bit of business, especially after we have invested our sympathy in these characters, so while the pleasure may be guilty, the sting is no less potent.

— Felix Gonzalez, Jr.

CAST: Lon Chaney, Lionel Barrymore, Mary Nolan, Warner Baxter, Jacqueline Gadsden
COUNTRY: USA