Preceded by: The Perils of Pauline: "We descended on the cinemas and understood that everything had changed. Pearl White's smile appeared on the screen; this almost ferocious smile announced the upheavals of the new world" (Philippe Soupault, Cinema USA). Tonight's episode: "The Reptile Under the Flowers." Stay tuned: more on the Surrealists and Pearl White (with chapters from The Perils of Pauline and Exploits of Elaine) in November! Directed by Louis Gasnier, Donald MacKenzie. With Pearl White, Crane Wilbur, Paul Panzer. (1914, 20 mins, Silent, B&W, 16mm, Print from WKE) "Tod Browning has sometimes been called 'the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema,' and, in any case, is a 'dark angel' whose phantasmagoric creations were much admired around 1925 by the Surrealists" (Georges Sadoul). "Present-day Westerns and exotic films exhibit numerous traces of usury and a touch of rationalization...We are far from the cruelty of Tod Browning," wrote the Surrealist Gérard Legrand in 1951. West of Zanzibar exhibits the cycle of raw cruelty and guilt that made the Browning-Lon Chaney films masterpieces of psychological horror. An exotic locale is used in quite the opposite manner from White Shadows of the South Seas or Moana; here the "darkness" of the African jungle is used as a literary slate on which to exercise the most perverse nature of the European visitors. (The horror!). The plot, similar to that of The Penalty, has a tyrant "witch doctor," who lives to avenge himself on the man (Lionel Barrymore) who caused him to be disabled, exacting his revenge via the man's daughter. He sees the girl (Mary Nolan) despoiled in a local brothel and then schemes to have her executed by the natives under his voodoo "spell." The patently unbelievable plots of the Browning/Chaney films only added to their bizarre effect, reminding us of Ado Kyrou's dictum, "At the moment of dreaming the fantastic does not exist, it is real."