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Rating: Let's start with something about the author.
Tod Browning was a director truly unlike any other: a boy who ran away from home at six years old, joined a circus, and began working as a clown... and someone might say, "well, it's normal for a child to love certain things," and they'd be right if not for the fact that this love stayed with him until his death. But it's not a love tied to the hilarity and revelry of this strange environment; rather, his fixation stems from the importance of the different, the marginalized, and their relationships with the so-called normal world.
From all this, Browning crafted some of the greatest masterpieces of silent cinema and beyond: "The Unholy Three," the two monumental "Freaks" and "The Unknown," and this "West of Zanzibar." In particular, the latter is a dark, grim, vicious, and significant film (its significance also stems from the dirty, swampy setting that pervades much of the work). As in many of the director's works, we find Lon Chaney, who eclipses many of his contemporary actors and even many of today, all without uttering a word. Here he plays a magician, Phroso, who is married to his assistant, but she falls in love with the shady Crane. A fight breaks out between the two men, leaving Phroso paralyzed from the waist down... The scene then shifts about twenty years later to the deep Africa where Chaney, thanks to his tricks, has become a pseudo-god to the inhabitants, who adore him and call him "dead-legs." When he learns that Crane is also in that part of the world for his business, he devises a plan for revenge...
I won't say more... I'll just say that from here on out, it's a succession of absurd sequences, mind games, human wickedness, superstition, and falsely magical rituals. In conclusion, a film to watch not so much for its beauty (it's not a masterpiece—"The Unknown - 1927" is), but to understand how in those years, among the other untouchable figures like Lang, Murnau, and company, this director should also be added as one of the most significant and innovative of the first part of the century.
Excellent settings, impeccable direction, superb performances, and a vastness of human and religious meanings.
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