The Unholy Three is Lon Chaney as a ventriloquist who leads a gang of thieves disguised as a kindly old woman, in a crime melodrama that was remade as his only talking film.
The Unholy Three (1925), directed by Tod Browning, stars Chaney as Professor Echo, a ventriloquist who, with a strongman and a dwarf, poses as a grandmother running a pet shop, using the shop as a front for robberies. Echo’s double life, as a criminal and as a protector of a young woman, drives the film.
Chaney’s Echo, in drag as the grandmother, is both comic and sinister, and his ventriloquism, with a dummy that seems to speak, gives the film its most uncanny moments. The gang’s crimes and Echo’s conscience make the melodrama more than a trick.
It is a signature role because it is Chaney and Browning at their most inventive, and because the 1930 remake, Chaney’s only sound film, closes his career with the same character.