Dean’s mean… Outside the Law (1920), with Stephen Horne, BFI

 “Priscilla Dean… was a feminist icon before such a label ever existed.” Eddie Muller

As the BFI’s Bryony Dixon said in her introduction, the birth of the Hollywood gangster movie is normally placed in the late twenties with the likes of Underworld or The Racket, following on from the prohibition-induced black market, but here is an early contender from Tod Browning which has many of the classic ingredients; a Moll, a vicious hoodlum and betrayal for love. Outside the Law is a dynamic movie and the print we saw screened was largely superb, with so much detail on the big screen in NFT1.

It was Tod Browning’s second collaboration with Lon Chaney and, as if to make up time, Lon has two roles, one as Black Mike Sylva, a gangster with his face twisted by malice, and the other as Ah Wing, loyal servant to Chang Lo (E. Alyn Warren) who seemingly had a larger role in the original cut with what we have now being based on a 1926 re-release.

The look...

The undoubted star though is Priscilla Dean as Molly Madden (Silky Moll), who plays the Moll (ha!) to perfection and, as she proved in Browning’s The Virgin of Stamboul (1920), was an actor of presence, range and natural warmth. She is top-billed for a reason and you can see why she was such a star and how she earned the epithet, The Queen of Crookdom, in her run of nine flicks with Browning. She’s snappy and sassy and dominant in a way we don’t normally see – Bryony was right in that, we’d want to watch more having seen this film.

Eddie Muller’s notes from the San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2017 we reproduced here and he sums up this appeal: “the public loved the power she wielded on screen; especially the sceptical sneer that became the actresses’ trademark, alerting audiences that there would soon be hell to pay and Miss Dean would be cashing the cheques.”

Lon One and Lon Two...

Dean plays Molly – aka Moll - the daughter of “businessman” Silent Madden (Ralph Lewis) who is determined to step away from his life of crime – ironically, Lewis was in an even earlier crime film called Going Straight with Norma Talmadge. They take advice from the sagacious Chang Lo and plan their exit.

Unfortunately, Black Mike has other ideas and, planning revenge on people he really, really hates, he hatches a plan with Dapper Bill Ballard (the always-charming Wheeler Oakman who was also married to Dean at the time) to frame Silent for the shooting of a cop and force Molly into working with them. Silent is duly sent down for a couple of years, not found guilty exactly, just “in the general location” when the killing went down (la, la, la in Ameri-ca…) and leaving his daughter without a “protector”.

Cilla and Ralph Lewis

Molly, pained at her father’s injustice, happily goes along with a plan to rob jewels from a society party, little suspecting that it’s another of Black Mike’s traps and that he will leave her in the lurch for the cops to grab as he makes off with the loot. But, crime, as the title card says, can’t hold sway over the human heart and Dapper Bill confesses all to Molly with whom, naturally, he has fallen in love…

 The two collude as the deal goes down and they avoid even a triple cross before hiding out and going stir crazy waiting for the noise to die down. Is there still time to get back on the straight and narrow, will Bill penetrate Moll’s tough exterior with his puppy-dog eyes and the repeated intrusions of the cute kid from across the hall (Stanley Goethals) and will Black Mike discover them?

I’m not spoiling anything by revealing that there’s a huge bloody punch up at the end, much the same as in The Virgin of Stamboul and one heck of a gun fight in which Miss Dean plays a full part.

Also worthy of note is a small, uncredited cameo from a fifteen-year old Anna May Wong.

Wheeler Oakman before and after...

Stephen Horne had fun with this one using piano, zither (?), bowls and flute – a one-man gamelan rolling out a stream mood-matching themes that blended seamlessly with the narrative in ways few can sustain. Sometimes his music is so good you don’t notice it – in the best possible ways – whilst sometimes you do look over to check that there really are only two hands involved. Nothing is ever sacrificed to the integrity of his duet with the performers on screen and, if you’d seen Priscilla Dean, you’d know what I mean.

 Another excellent dip into the archives at the BFI, next up is Maurice Elvey’s Palais de Danse

(1929) which will be introduced by Elvey-expert Dr Lucie Dutton.

Anna May Wong on the left.