From · Tod Browning's Underworld

1929 · Directed by Tod Browning

Tod Browning, MGM, May 1929: the tenth and last film he made with Lon Chaney. Chaney is Tiger Haynes, an animal trapper in French Indochina, marked by the work. Lupe Velez is his daughter Toyo; Lloyd Hughes is Bobby Bailey, the circus owner's son she wants. Estelle Taylor is Madame de Sylva, the mother who left them and now sets herself at the boy. Silent picture with a synchronized score, seventy minutes in the AFI listing. Chaney's penultimate silent role. The studio jungle and the yellowface casting are the film's idea of the East.

From · Spotlight: Mabel Normand

1914 · Directed by Mack Sennett

Chaplin, Mabel Normand, and Mack Sennett with a mallet, 1914: three men, one girl, a park, and a weapon that keeps changing hands. Keystone. Chaplin is already playing dirty; Sennett is the boss who put himself in the shot. It is a one-reeler about force as courtship, and the mallet is the only honest character.

From · American Spectacle

1927 · Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack, Merian C. Cooper

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Paramount, 1927, shot in northern Siam with a Lao family, Kru and his household, and the animals that raid them. A tiger, an elephant drive, a house on stilts. They staged hunts the way Flaherty had staged an igloo: enough truth to photograph, enough arrangement to survive. Nominated at the first Academy Awards in the Unique and Artistic Picture category that Sunrise won. The title is the word for elephant. King Kong is the fiction they made from this method six years later.