Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival: The Unholy Three (1925)

Chaney stars as ventriloquist Professor Echo, the leader of a trio of swindlers and former sideshow castmates who, along with Echo’s pickpocket girlfriend, Rosie (Mae Busch), collectively impersonate a respectable family of shopkeepers, the better to scam and steal from their wealthy customers. When a badly botched burglary results in murder and the panicked criminals opt to frame an innocent man, Echo and Rosie face a moral reckoning whose bittersweet resolution cements the film’s status as a justly celebrated pinnacle of Browning’s signature brand of outré melodrama, depicting the ethical calculus of lives lived on the margins and in the shadows. In addition to the usual stellar turn by Chaney in yet another outrageous guise, Earles is particularly unsettling in the role of an adult posing as a baby in a carriage.

Accompanying the film is Tyler Stoner, a pianist-composer from Ligonier, PA, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BFA in Music Composition and a minor in Drama. There he studied music composition under Nancy Galbraith, and wrote and premiered works for a variety of chamber groups, including performances by contemporary music group NAT 28 and the CMU Philharmonic. Additionally he composed music for two animated short films Dragonfly and Cave Dream by Shopia Qin and Hannah Kim respectively. He performs in Pittsburgh with the band Little Gunpowder and recorded two albums with them.

With live piano accompaniment by Tyler Stoner!

Directed by Tod Browning

1925 | USA | Silent with English language intertitles | DCP