Big Top’s dark musical tones a natural fit for the unsettling silent-movie vision of The Unknown
One of the weirdest Hollywood films ever made helped bring local bandleader Scott McLeod back to shadowy instrumental soundscapes
Joan Crawford and Lon Chaney in The Unknown.
The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts presents The Unknown Featuring Big Top on November 1 at 7:30 pm
IT’S NEARLY 100 years old, yet The Unknown is still one of the weirdest and most shocking films ever produced by Hollywood. Released in 1927, it’s the pinnacle in a career-long collaboration between director Tod Browning and the legendary silent actor Lon Chaney Sr., two tortured souls who provoked each other to ever greater extremes. With The Unknown, Browning gave Chaney his wildest and most grotesque plot. Chaney answered with a performance of near pathological masochism.
David J. Skal and Elias Savada’s Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning remains the sole biography about the mysterious Browning, who ditched his middle-class family life to join the circus. This would inform his greatest known work, 1932’s Freaks, a film that was banned in multiple countries and persists in upsetting audiences to this day. Consumed by alcoholism, the misanthropic Browning never granted a single interview about his time in Hollywood.
Chaney’s story is less hazy, but how do we explain the strange compulsions that drove the Man of a Thousand Faces to such dreadful acts of physical agony? With his arms strapped mercilessly behind his back, the actor reportedly suffered unspeakable pain in his role as the armless knife-thrower Alonzo. He casually contorts his body from one scene to the next and even lights a cigarette with his feet in one especially memorable interlude, and this is already the least crazy thing about The Unknown.
It would be criminal to reveal much more. Suffice to say, there’s also a deformed killer with two thumbs on one hand, an unrecognizably young Joan Crawford as Alonzo’s touch-averse assistant Nanon (he disrobes her with a few well-aimed knives), and a detour into surgical horror before surgical horror or even horror was a thing. In short, wherever you may think The Unknown will go, Browning’s spitefully melodramatic imagination takes you further. There’s nothing else like it.
“It was kind of an easy decision,” says Scott McLeod, whose band Big Top was invited by the Shadbolt Centre to produce a live score to the silent film of their choice. “It took about a day to realize, ‘Oh, let’s do The Unknown.’” The band’s evocative instrumentals are already soundtrack-ready, and McLeod, along with bassist Stephen Graf, discovered an uncanny fit between tracks like “Murderous Mary” and “Lipizzaner’s Dream”, where a galloping rhythm magically coincided with a scene involving a circus strongman suspended between two horses and a monstrous scheme to… Well, enough said.
Big Top.
To further whet your whistle, consider how serendipitously Big Top could repurpose the track “Doppelgänger” from its 2015 album Jo Jo the Dog Faced Boy. A fetching collision of electronica and Eastern European folk, it’s ideal for a scene that takes one of Browning’s most unexpected detours. “Because it’s like a Fritz Lang film all of a sudden,” laughs McLeod. “All the sets are silver and you’re in a laboratory and it’s all super science-fiction. Then it goes back to 1920s circus era!”
Oddly enough, McLeod confesses that he was in the mood to quit music when the Shadbolt first approached him. He was still struggling once the six-piece band was well into rehearsals, thinking, “Fuck, I’m over my head.” In The Unknown, Chaney plays a guitar with his feet. McLeod was wishing he could do that.
“I’d lost my mojo,” he sighs. “I couldn’t figure out where my amp sound was anymore. I had all these songs and I knew how to play ’em, but the tone was gone, the feel was gone. And to me, like in film, tone is one of the most important things. My fingers and my right hand weren’t doing what they should be doing. I was gonna blow it off. Then, all of a sudden, it arrived. Honestly, that was about a month ago. All of a sudden, my amp said, ‘Okay I’m here.’ My fingers went, ‘Oh, thank you.’ So I’m so glad I took this huge project on.”
Perhaps Browning and Chaney suffered so that Scott McLeod could play again. What a fitting denouement for a film so concerned with distressed and anomalous anatomy, murderous frustration, and a woman’s chronic fear of men’s hands.
“Right,” says a relieved McLeod. “Suddenly, I’m not all thumbs!” 
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