"The horror film is no longer feasible in the same shape as in the silent days..." wrote G?ard Legrand in 1951. "We are far from the cruelty of films by Tod Browning like The Unknown," in which Lon Chaney, as The Armless Wonder, a circus attraction, has his arms really cut off to satisfy his mistress (Joan Crawford) who cannot bear to be touched by any man. The Browning/Chaney collaborations dealing with deformity and disability are an interesting counterpart to the Surrealist mode of representing the humanbody as extraordinarily disfigured. Curator Sidra Stich, in the catalog Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art, links this violation of the body to a physical reality in the aftermath of World War I; but, she writes, "it also reiterates the Surrealist assault on rationality and idealism...The idea of perfection has no place in this realm; conformity has been totally disenfranchised."