kidboots Even though Tod Browning is closely associated with Lon Chaney, he was first assigned Priscilla Dean and began to weave a spell of success around her. She had come to Universal in 1917 because she was impatient with Biograph's failure to utilize her talent and by 1920 she was Universal's top female star. Often teamed with Lon Chaney, it was her performance in "The Virgin of Stamboul" that had the front office realizing they had a winning actress and from then on her stories were hand picked, mostly with Tod Browning as director.Earlier in the year Universal had scored a hit with "Drifting" so they reteamed the stars, Priscilla Dean, along with Wallace Beery and Matt Moore, as well as director Browning in "White Tiger" about a trio of international jewel thieves. Raymond Griffith was one of the crooks and all the stars as well as Browning boosted the film's prestige. Siblings Roy and Sylvia are innocent victims trapped in a brutal criminal family. When their father is killed little Roy is led to believe that his whole family is dead and he vows to have his revenge on vicious Bill Hawkes (Beery) but Sylvia has escaped and 15 years later.......The three come together at a London wax works. Hawkes, now working under the name Donelli, has a pick pocketing racket going with Sylvia, posing as his daughter, as the lure. Roy, known as "the Kid", is also on the shady side of the law as an unbeaten "Mechanical Chessman" but seeing Sylvia lift a watch he stops to admire as from one crook to another - never dreaming she is his sister!! With Browning a freak show or carnival is never far away and there are some pretty grisly wax exhibitions: someone remarks "why do you want to hang around these gruesome figures for"!!They pool their talents. Roy feels that "Donelli" looks vaguely familiar but is persuaded to team up as they try their con game in America. With Roy dazzling the idle rich with his mechanical chess man act, the others are given the run of the house where they can locate the safe etc. Hiding out in a mountain cabin Hawkes begins to sow seeds of distrust by questioning the loyalty of both Sylvia and Roy - all the while handling a box of Argentine Ant killer. Scary stuff!! Matt Moore has an ambiguous part, Roy says from the first "there's something suspicious about that guy! I don't trust him!" and he is a shadowy figure but if you have ever seen him in a movie you'll know the part he plays!!Wallace Beery looks pretty imposing with his bleached white hair but for me the stand out is Raymond Griffith. It is a pretty grim and at times far fetched story but Griffith's light touch lightens the mood. There is a scene (sort of reminiscent of "Paths to Paradise") when he is strolling around the mansion having already robbed the safe and hidden the jewels, trying to act nonchalant and put the pesky butler off the scent. Another scene has him donning glasses as becomes his role of Donelli's secretary and not being able to see a thing because of the thick lenses: it is not a slapstick routine, he is just very skillful, slightly stumbling over an obvious chair etc. Griffith pulls it all off with aplomb. Very easy to see he had been a professional dancer.Highly Recommended.

tomgillespie2002 The movie starts with the death of Mike Donovan (Alfred Allen), who is watching over his two children Roy and Sylvia, whilst unbeknownst to him, the present Hawkes (Wallace Beery) is plotting against him. Roy runs outside, believing his father and sister dead, while Hawkes flees with Sylvia, who believes the same of Roy. Fifteen years later, Roy (Raymond Griffith), going by the name of The Kid, is scamming people with his mechanical chess player. Hawkes returns to England with Sylvia (Priscilla Dean) and witnesses the automaton at a wax display, and hatches a plan with Roy to take the chess player to America, where they can pull a giant scam on the upper classes. After pulling of a robbery, the trio flee to a remote cabin, where paranoia and greed start to take hold of them.Though he is now best remembered for his work in horror, most notable Dracula (1931) - arguably the greatest adaptation of the story ever made - and the excellent Freaks (1932), a macabre and twisted horror that would see itself banned for decades and tarnish the director's reputation, Tod Browning enjoyed a hugely successful and busy silent period directing, amongst others, caper films, focusing on small-time crooks and their schemes. White Tiger is one of these such films, and one of many collaborations he had with star Priscilla Dean, who was a huge star in her day, now sadly all but forgotten. The title White Tiger refers to the animal that lies inside of criminals, eating a way at them with guilt, uncertainty and paranoia, and we see this unfold in the second half on the movie as the lead trio hide out. I suspect the movie thinks itself as a window into this fascinating world, but after an entertaining first half, becomes a tedious and rather ridiculous melodrama.The print I watched of this was so old and grainy that the film would often jump, making certain scenes difficult to follow and title cards often unreadable. But should the film ever be given a re-mastering, I doubt it would do anything to improve the dullness of the film. After spending forty or so minutes setting up an intriguing story, we spend the next forty minutes in one location, where unconvincing suspicions arise about the true identity of Hawkes, and they needlessly bicker amongst themselves. It is something Browning would go on to develop further in the commercially successful The Unholy Three (1925), but White Tiger was so incoherent that it was shelved for over a year before the studio released a new edit to an underwhelming box-office.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

wmorrow59 This silent drama marked the ninth and last collaboration between director Tod Browning, best remembered for such macabre classics as The Unknown and Freaks, and actress Priscilla Dean, who is hardly remembered at all. Miss Dean was quite the star in her day, and was even called the Queen of the Universal Lot in the early 1920s, but nowadays the only attention she receives is due largely to ongoing interest in some of her colleagues. Beginning in 1918 she and Browning collaborated on a series of crime melodramas, including Outside the Law (1920), a box office sensation that also featured Lon Chaney in a dual role and boosted his career considerably. Chaney would make some of his best known films with Browning in subsequent years, and although their work is generally assigned to the horror genre most of their movies belong to a niche category Browning essentially invented, and certainly favored throughout his career: "caper" flicks involving small-time criminals connected to the lower rungs of show business: circuses, carnivals, wax museums, etc.White Tiger is one of these sagas, and although Chaney is not present -- unfortunately! -- Priscilla Dean plays opposite two interesting co-stars: Wallace Beery, who all but cornered the market in unsympathetic character roles during the silent era, and Raymond Griffith, who at this time had not yet launched his own series of wry, witty light comedies. The story concerns a trio of crooks who manage to get themselves invited into the homes of wealthy suckers by offering an unusual gimmick: a mechanical chess player that can challenge any human player and win. The automaton is, of course, bogus, operated by Griffith concealed within. Meanwhile, Beery impersonates a count (most unconvincingly) and passes off Dean as his daughter. After a demonstration of the machine, Griffith slips out and steals valuables, which are then hidden inside the robot chess player. If the plot sounds a wee bit far-fetched, it is. Perhaps this would have worked better as a comedy, but the actors play it straight and little that happens is believable, even "Hollywood" believable.Eventually the crooks wind up in a remote cabin with their loot and struggle with a growing sense of paranoia regarding each other's intentions. (Browning would re-use this motif with his trio of crooks in The Unholy Three a couple of years later.) The true nature of the relationship between the three characters is ultimately revealed, and there is a modicum of violence before matters are resolved. The last section of the film suffers from "cabin fever" in the most literal sense of the phrase: we're supposed to be gripped by suspense as tensions rise between the three crooks, but instead things get draggy, and viewers could be forgiven for wishing they'd wrap up the story a little faster.The print of White Tiger I've seen is somewhat abridged, but even granting the filmmakers leeway where missing footage is concerned the movie is not entirely coherent and, in the end, not very satisfying. (To put it another way, even if a pristine camera negative of the original release print were to be miraculously discovered, I doubt it would improve matters much, though I'd be happy to be proved wrong about that.) The biggest problem is a scenario damaged by too many credibility stretches and unmotivated actions. As mentioned earlier, this was the ninth crime drama Browning made with Priscilla Dean, and it would be fair to suggest that the formula was wearing thin by this point. Additionally, according to the biography of Browning by David J. Skaal and Elias Savada, at the time this film was made the writer/director was overwhelmed by personal difficulties and drinking heavily, which may explain the movie's shortcomings: the enterprise bears an unmistakable air of fatigue. Apparently the version Browning turned in to his bosses was a mess, and Universal shelved the film for over a year after its completion. Finally, anonymous studios hands were assigned to salvage the project with a fresh edit and newly written title cards. At this late date it's impossible to tell whether the film's deficiencies were present from the beginning or are the result of nitrate decomposition in surviving prints over the years, but in any case the film received poor reviews, and was not a success upon its release in 1923. Subsequently, the major players went their separate ways. Raymond Griffith became a star of sophisticated comedies of the late silent era; Wallace Beery became a character star of the '30s and '40s; and Tod Browning managed to pull himself together and produce the macabre classics for which he is remembered.As for Priscilla Dean, her career went into a decline not long after White Tiger was released. By 1927 she was appearing in two-reel comedies under Hal Roach's "All-Star" banner, alongside such fellow fading names as Mabel Normand and Theda Bara. One of Dean's comedies, Slipping Wives, featured Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in one of their early appearances together, which serves to underscore the irony that the one-time Queen of the Universal Lot is today remembered primarily for the company she kept.

boblipton Welcome to the world of Tod Browning, a world of sideshows and thieves, vampires and murderers, where men cut off their arms for love and wear dresses for revenge, the world of Dracula and FREAKS. Browning was a true original. He had a long association with Lon Chaney that ended only with death. In Browning's world, people pretend to be other than they are, but they rarely know who they are until it is too late.There are considerable problems with the story as told, probably due to the fact that the movie was shelved for a couple of years and then had the titles rewritten anonymously. I strongly suspect that the relationships between the three leads was a lot more sexual in Browning's script than they are here.In short, this is a bizarre movie and the main actors in it -- Wallace Beery, Raymond Griffith and Priscilla Dean play bizarre characters manipulated by a bizarre fate. Perhaps you don't believe in fate. If not, you may find this movie a mess of wild coincidences. But if you accept Browning's vision, you will find yourself drawn along.There is a happy ending tacked on, for those of you who like happy endings. The rest of us will ignore it.