The Unholy Three (Tod Browning, 1925)

This surprisingly good silent film combines the carnival and criminal worlds. In the beginning, Echo the Ventriloquist (Lon Chaney) is working a sideshow, along with Hercules the Strong Man (Victor McLaglen) and baby-faced small man Tweedledee, aka Little Willie (Harry Earles), and Rosie O’Grady (Mae Busch) works the crowd as a pickpocket. Echo closes his act by saying “That’s all there is to life, friends…a little laughter….a little tear...” Eager to get out of this life, the three concoct a plan to burgle houses they scope out by selling parrots to the owners. Chaney is a convincing cross-dressed Granny O’Grady, and things go well until Rosie falls in love with the straight shop assistant Hector. Hercules and Little Willie go out to do a robbery without Echo and wind up killing the owner of the house they are robbing. They plant evidence on Hector and hide, but Rosie prevails on Echo to save him. Eventually he does, quite dramatically in the courtroom, and when Rosie arrives at the sideshow to make good her promise to stay with him if he saves Hector, Echo says he was just kidding and lets her go, his heart breaking but a smile on his face, and the movie ending with his motto repeated. Busch is remarkable for being able to play the moll with a sneer and mocking laughter and a demi-ingenue in love, and she’s lovely in both modes. McLaglen is big, and Earles is little. And Chaney’s repertoire of facial expressions is nothing short of amazing—his posture and gestures make his Granny convincing, though if you watch carefully you can see the other layer of character, Echo, just inside. It’s a tour-de-force performance, almost enough to make one forget about the absurdity of hingeing the plot of a silent movie on ventriloquism…

Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)

Noir, of the caper-gone-wrong variety. Even the double-crosses fail, people with less nerve than required die, and so do people with nerve. Dix (Sterling Hayden) is a gambler and hooligan, waiting for one big win that will allow him to go back to Kentucky to be with the horses. He has friends, the hunchback Gus (James Whitmore) and the dancer Doll (Jean Hagen) loves him. Doc Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), fresh from seven years “behind the walls,” has a good plan for a heist, and brings in bookie Cobby (Marc Lawrence), and then lawyer Lon Emmerich (Louis Calhern) as investors. Emmerich—who has a bedridden wife and a cute girlfriend (Marilyn Monroe)—tries and fails to cheat the crew. During the heist things go wrong, the safecracker, a family man, gets shot by a richochet bullet from a dropped pistol, the nitro sets off burglar alarms next door, and Dix gets shot a little later by Emmerich’s sidekick who’d attempted another cross. Cobby talks, Gus is arrested, Doc is arrested while taking a break in a cab ride to Cleveland as he watches a pretty teenaged girl dance, and Dix and Doll manage to get away and they drive to Kentucky—but he’s lost too much blood, and dies under the cloudy sky in a pasture, surrounded by horses. Most of the film is shot in classic noir style, largely at night, and it’s populated by grotesques and character studies. The writers inject a speech by the police commissioner to reporters, to the effect that without police on the job, even though some may be corrupt, the world would be nothing more than a jungle. Dix—played by Hayden mostly with a straight-up, calm power, a direct gaze, and one or two flickers of feeling—is really damaged, carrying the long hurt of losing his father, his home, and his world, and though he is tough and unafraid, he’s not mean, not brutal. He does what is needful and no more. But even that is too much.