Outside the Law (1920): dated depictions can’t overshadow Tod Browning’s genius (Review)

Readers, what emotion comes over you when I ask you to imagine Lon Chaney playing a character called “Ah Wing”? A shudder of unease, I’d imagine, one of a very different kind to the shudders he produced in his more famous horror roles. And yet it’s worth indulging Outside the Law, a silent film by Tod Browning released on a pristine new Blu-Ray by Eureka Masters of Cinema. The sight of the Man of a Thousand Faces with slanted eyes and buck teeth (why do they always give them buck teeth?) might be enough to make you wish he’d stalled out at 999 faces, but Chaney has a lot more to offer in this film than an outdated racist caricature. So, for that matter, does Browning – and his career-long empathy for the outcast is what makes Outside the Law fresher and more relevant than you’d expect.

Outside the Law was produced as part of Universal’s “Jewel” range, reserved for the fledgeling studio’s biggest budgets and biggest stars. You can tell – even the delicately-lettered captions are a work of art. Browning would not always enjoy this level of support from a studio: notoriously, MGM removed their logo from reissues of his 1932 film Freaks, unofficially disowning the much-banned film. From a modern viewpoint, though, we can see that the saving grace of Freaks is the saving grace of Outside the Law as well. Freaks is not about the horror of disability, it is about the horror of people’s horror of disability. Similarly, Outside the Law has an opening caption referring to a “yellow tide” washing over San Francisco, but it quickly moves outside the Fu Manchu stereotype to depict real villainy coming from white America.

As the film opens, Chaney’s Ah Wing and E.A. Warren’s Chang Lo have established a miniature Age of Enlightenment in San Francisco’s Chinatown, swaying the once-feared mobster Silent Madden and his equally formidable daughter Molly from their life of crime. This is anathema to some of Silent’s old cohorts, who would rather not learn a respectable trade. One of them, Black Mike Sylva, with the name of a pirate and the face of Old Man Steptoe, hatches a plot to get Molly back into the arms of the underworld – though not, significantly, his arms. One of the many fascinations of Outside the Law is that Molly is never a damsel, never the subject of romantic rivalry, indeed not really the subject of a romantic plotline. She has a lover, the aptly-named Dapper Bill, but he impacts the plot inasmuch as he can help her in her struggle against Black Mike. As Kim Newman points out in his typically astute interview elsewhere on the disc, Black Mike doesn’t want her back in the crime game because he loves her, or even lusts after her. He wants her back on his side of the law because she’s a fearsome enough gangster to tip the balance of power in Chinatown, and Priscilla Dean’s performance makes this easy to believe.

This lack of sexualisation ironically makes Molly incredibly sexy, and Dean’s cunning little smirks as she works out some new plot stand alongside Evelyn Brent’s wild cackling in The Last Command as one of silent cinema’s great images of female power. It was Dean, not Chaney, who was promoted as the film’s headline name, and if she is now less celebrated than her protean co-star Outside the Law offers a crash course in her appeal. Even by Pre-Code standards, Molly is a fantastically independent female character, resourceful in a crisis, hard-headed, tolerant to those who deserve it, and capable of bringing down vengeance on those who don’t.

Yet Chaney cannot be ignored, not least because as well as Ah Wing he also plays Molly’s nemesis Black Mike. Chaney’s transformative skill is still astonishing over a century later, although the presumed subtext of this dual role – the contrast between the virtuous Ah Wing and the bestial Black Mike – comes across less clearly in the surviving print. The only version of Outside the Law we have today is reconstructed from a 1926 reissue which reduced Wing’s role significantly, suggesting that even in the 1920s Chaney’s yellowface performance wasn’t a hit. It’s not my place to tell viewers how to approach this aspect of the film, and it feels glib to chalk it up to different times. There were Chinese actors back then – Anna May Wong, the groundbreaking star of Piccadilly, has an early uncredited role in this very film – and Universal could have cast them instead of Chaney and Warren. And yet these dated depictions can’t overshadow Browning’s characteristic sympathy for outsider communities, who are here presented as something close to the saviours of a West that has yet to stop being Wild.

The excised footage of Ah Wing is currently lost, but miraculously an alternate ending for the film has survived. It’s presented here along with Newman’s appreciation, which situates the film in the contexts of Browning’s career and Chaney’s influence on the crime genre, the latter often overshadowed by his horror work. Eureka’s Blu-Ray offers a rare chance to see one of Chaney’s crime films polished to perfection, with the print pristine enough to bear comparison to their recent, excellent reissues of John Ford’s silent movies. The surviving print has just two brief moments of unfixable damage in a late-action scene; for the most part, the image is clear enough to allow you to drink in the detail of the elaborate sets and appreciate the deep proto-noir shadows of William Fildew’s cinematography.

Graham on Outside the Law (1920)