"Nick Newman had replied to a tweet a few weeks back asking me what movies I would recommend. I told him to try The Unknown with Lon Chaney and go from there."

Tweeted Bob Dylan today.

I love that Bob Dylan tweets and how great he is at. The best.

Here's the starting point, so get started, and let me know what comes next:

It takes place in a circus, and "The circus is in town" is a line from "Desolation Row," giving special meaning to this response to Dylan's tweet, which takes us to a video that uses "Desolation Row" to prove that Dylan is the funniest person alive:

"Though it’s the film’s quieter absurdities – like its glorious shot of Crawford, sheathed in platinum sequins, descending a curved staircase while she scowls at a plate of cold, congealed steak – that tickle me more than its chaotic, cacophonous climaxes."

From "Mommie Dearest at 40: the derided camp classic that deserves a closer look/Faye Dunaway’s all-guns-blazing performance as Joan Crawford is one of many reasons why the reviled biodrama is not the disaster many have labelled it" by Guy Lodge (The Guardian).

Yes, it has been 40 years, and I rewatched it for the first time this week. Not because I noticed it's the 40 year anniversary but because it's in a collection of Frank Perry movies on the Criterion Channel, and I'd just watched one of them — "Diary of a Mad Housewife" — for reasons discussed in a November 9th post. And I'd watched another — "The Swimmer" — back in 2018, discussed here. Frank Perry is a strange director. All 3 of these movies have a heightened surreality. They're all heavily focused on an awfully unpleasant central character who's jammed right up in your face for 2 hours. 

There are 2 more Frank Perry movies collected at Criterion — "David and Lisa" (which I saw sometime in the 1960s and have never rewatched) and "Man on a Swing" (a 1974 movie that I don't think I'd ever noticed before).

Have you got anything to say about Frank Perry? If you know him at all, which of these movies is your opinion based on? If it's "Mommie Dearest," do you agree — as I do! — that these are the best 6 1/2 minutes in the movie?

"Joan Crawford is a circus performer who can’t stand men’s hands, while Lon Chaney plays an armless knife thrower."

That's a description of the movie "The Unknown"....

 

... which my son John ranks as his 4th favorite movie of 1927, in his ongoing project "101 Years of Movies/My favorite movies of each year from 1920 to 2020." 

That movie was certainly unknown to me. I'd never heard of his 3rd-ranked movie either. And of the 4 movies, I've only seen the second one.