Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Verity Robins Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

John T. Ryan WHEN ONE WANTED to take an already frightening story and turn it into an even more disturbing shocker, there are two steps that would insure success. First, cast Lon Chaney in the Lead. Secondly, have Todd Browning direct. Fortunately for MGM, in 1925, WEST OF ZANZIBAR had both going for them.AS MANY OF the dramas of the period did, this film had a Show Business setting. In this case, we have Stage Magician, Professor Phroso (Lon Chaney), suffers the loss of his spouse, Anna (Jacqueline Gadsden)to her lover, Crane (Lionel Barrymore). The two men quarrel and fight, where Phroso suffers a severe fall; leaving his legs paralyzed and "dead." YEARS LATER, BOTH men are in Darkest Africa, where Phroso operates a trading outpost; where he uses his skills at prestidigitation to cheat Natives out of ivory. Eventually, Mazie (Mary Nolan) daughter of the now deceased Anna, comes under Phroso/"dead Legs" control and is left to wallow in the worst den of debauchery in Zanzibar.AFTER DIRECTLY CONFRONTING Crane, "Dead Legs"/Proso discovers that Mazie is after all his daughter. A sudden uprising by the African Natives, who have been cheated for so many years in the "Dead Legs" trading post, threatens to kill the Daughter and Proso sacrifices his own life; allowing Mazie to escape with young 'Doc' (Warner Baxter).OUR SYNOPSIS CAN do no justice to the film. With this outstanding "Duo of the Macabre", being Mr. Chaney and Mr. Browning, every scene is saturated with disturbing and frightful implications. DISDAINING THE BLOOD & gore that has come to be synonymous with "Horror", the production team instead creates all of their horror in the mind of the viewer.Please, please take the time to screen this film if you haven't yet done so. If you have, see it again

Weezy-LUiGi I feel Lon Chaney was the first extremely great actor to come out of the American film industry. He embodied characters like nobody's business. The fact that he was in this alone got me interested. Overall, the film was worth a watch to see Chaney portray the jaded stage magician turned African warlord. He was just so stone cold throughout the whole thing only to keep the audience guessing what he was actually going to do next. Lionel Barrymore was also a neat addition as the truly heartless villain who hadn't a care in the world, even when his life was at stake. Not as inspired as The Unknown or Phantom of the Opera, but still a worthy addition to the Lon Chaney catalog.

TSMChicago The opening sequences of Lon Chaney as the magician foreshadow the dark atmospheres that director Tod Browning would later create for Freaks and Mark of the Vampire. Excellent photography and an astonishing physical performance that was the hallmark of Chaney's work. I remember this film being shown on Chicago's PBS outlet WTTW-TV during the 1970s. It was tinted in certain scenes and featured a new score that was fresh, yet not too modern. A master from this television showing has to exist somewhere.Why this fantastic film is not more readily available is a mystery. It deserves to be seen on DVD or Turner Classic Movies.

funkyfry It's hard to know where to begin discussing this odd little film, a medium budget MGM production with a streamlined jungle aesthetic that's reminiscent of both the more visually audacious film "White Shadows in the South Seas" produced by Thalberg at MGM the same year as well as the cleaner and more claustrophobic jungle setting of Thalberg's 1932 production "Red Dust." In the latter film, Clark Gable played a character who was sort of a combination of Phroso "Dead Legs" as played in this film by Lon Chaney and "Doc" as played in this film by Warner Baxter.Phroso is a man who was paralyzed from the waist down in a fight with the philandering Mr. Crane (Lionel Barrymore). After he finds his wife dead in a church, he swears vengeance on Crane and his descendants including the baby daughter Crane had with his wife. Phroso's elaborate plan includes stealing Mr. Crane's ivory in Africa and unveiling the ruined daughter (Mary Nolan), whom he has placed in a whorehouse to get a proper "education." While keeping the daughter prisoner at his jungle hideout, Phroso forces the daughter to become an alcohol addict while trying to convince the local natives that he is a wizard. Everything builds up to a fiery climax in which Lon Chaney dons a witch-doctor costume and does a bizarre dance to prevent the cannibal natives from burning the daughter alive. There is also a major (and fairly predictable) revelation about her true identity which triggers the by-1928 typical Chaney sacrifice theme.As some critics at the time noted, the theme of self-sacrifice and masochism as portrayed by Chaney and Browning was getting a little bit stale by the time this film was made. It feels like a directionless film, as if the film itself basically exists as an excuse for Chaney and Barrymore to engage in an acting competition as larger than life characters. Another criticism which could very fairly be leveled at the film is that it's depiction of the native people is incredibly patronizing -- the natives for example are fooled easily by a man dressed in a silly monster costume (former pro-wrestler Kalla Pasha) into dropping their ivory so that Phroso's compadres can steal it. Only their ancient leader sees through Phroso's tricks. Tod Browning's direction is aimless and unimaginative, but he does create the seedy atmosphere that he was most famous for. And the main reason to watch the movie anyway is to see Chaney's performance -- he doesn't disappoint but he also doesn't do anything particularly new for him. In my opinion he's working here just a little bit too much in his comfort zone. He's convincingly psychotic and vengeful and then eventually he manages to turn the audience's emotions to pity and understanding, but by the time this movie came out that was starting to be a cliché in his films. In order for it to continue to work there needed to be an interesting variation and this film didn't really provide one. One thing that was interesting however was the fact that even after Phroso changed his attitude about the daughter (after the big revelation), he still continued to mistreat Doc and the others. So you could read the ending less as a "conversion" than as merely the re-direction of his psychosis. Tod Browning was famous for his bitter and sometimes ironic endings and it feels to me like this is how he intended us to read it.I want to make sure not to leave the other performers out -- Mary Nolan had a striking face and a decent talent for acting. She's got a pretty juicy role because she gets to look so awful for most of the movie and she gets to play kind of a desperate woman which you don't see very often in post-code films. Warner Baxter is a good solid actor and his work here showed promise that he later fulfilled. Lionel Barrymore gave one of his more restrained performances here, choosing to underplay to Chaney in their big confrontation scene. I like how completely unredeemed his character is -- he manages to make the character somewhat interesting even though ultimately we care little when he's killed off-screen.Unfortunately this film doesn't rise to the levels of the better Chaney/Browning films like "The Unholy Three" and "The Unknown" but it does manage to create a grittier jungle look than most "exotic" adventure films, it features memorably twisted and sadistic characters particularly from Chaney, and it explores some themes and topics that would have been verboten in the 1930s jungle films so it is kind of a curiosity.