“Gruesome and at times shocking” as well as “anything but a pleasant story,” according to the 1927 New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall, “The Unknown” stars Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, a ...

Before his pivot to movies, Tod Browning, who was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1880, worked as a performer in carnivals and vaudeville. The experience made him uniquely suited to direct pictures set in ...