White Tiger (1923)

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Even though Tod Browning is closely associated with Lon Chaney, he was first assigned Priscilla Dean and began to weave a spell of success around her. She had come to Universal in 1917 because she was impatient with Biograph's failure to utilize her talent and by 1920 she was Universal's top female star. Often teamed with Lon Chaney, it was her performance in "The Virgin of Stamboul" that had the front office realizing they had a winning actress and from then on her stories were hand picked, mostly with Tod Browning as director.Earlier in the year Universal had scored a hit with "Drifting" so they reteamed the stars, Priscilla Dean, along with Wallace Beery and Matt Moore, as well as director Browning in "White Tiger" about a trio of international jewel thieves. Raymond Griffith was one of the crooks and all the stars as well as Browning boosted the film's prestige. Siblings Roy and Sylvia are innocent victims trapped in a brutal criminal family. When their father is killed little Roy is led to believe that his whole family is dead and he vows to have his revenge on vicious Bill Hawkes (Beery) but Sylvia has escaped and 15 years later.......The three come together at a London wax works. Hawkes, now working under the name Donelli, has a pick pocketing racket going with Sylvia, posing as his daughter, as the lure. Roy, known as "the Kid", is also on the shady side of the law as an unbeaten "Mechanical Chessman" but seeing Sylvia lift a watch he stops to admire as from one crook to another - never dreaming she is his sister!! With Browning a freak show or carnival is never far away and there are some pretty grisly wax exhibitions: someone remarks "why do you want to hang around these gruesome figures for"!!They pool their talents. Roy feels that "Donelli" looks vaguely familiar but is persuaded to team up as they try their con game in America. With Roy dazzling the idle rich with his mechanical chess man act, the others are given the run of the house where they can locate the safe etc. Hiding out in a mountain cabin Hawkes begins to sow seeds of distrust by questioning the loyalty of both Sylvia and Roy - all the while handling a box of Argentine Ant killer. Scary stuff!! Matt Moore has an ambiguous part, Roy says from the first "there's something suspicious about that guy! I don't trust him!" and he is a shadowy figure but if you have ever seen him in a movie you'll know the part he plays!!Wallace Beery looks pretty imposing with his bleached white hair but for me the stand out is Raymond Griffith. It is a pretty grim and at times far fetched story but Griffith's light touch lightens the mood. There is a scene (sort of reminiscent of "Paths to Paradise") when he is strolling around the mansion having already robbed the safe and hidden the jewels, trying to act nonchalant and put the pesky butler off the scent. Another scene has him donning glasses as becomes his role of Donelli's secretary and not being able to see a thing because of the thick lenses: it is not a slapstick routine, he is just very skillful, slightly stumbling over an obvious chair etc. Griffith pulls it all off with aplomb. Very easy to see he had been a professional dancer.Highly Recommended.

The movie starts with the death of Mike Donovan (Alfred Allen), who is watching over his two children Roy and Sylvia, whilst unbeknownst to him, the present Hawkes (Wallace Beery) is plotting against him. Roy runs outside, believing his father and sister dead, while Hawkes flees with Sylvia, who believes the same of Roy. Fifteen years later, Roy (Raymond Griffith), going by the name of The Kid, is scamming people with his mechanical chess player. Hawkes returns to England with Sylvia (Priscilla Dean) and witnesses the automaton at a wax display, and hatches a plan with Roy to take the chess player to America, where they can pull a giant scam on the upper classes. After pulling of a robbery, the trio flee to a remote cabin, where paranoia and greed start to take hold of them.Though he is now best remembered for his work in horror, most notable Dracula (1931) - arguably the greatest adaptation of the story ever made - and the excellent Freaks (1932), a macabre and twisted horror that would see itself banned for decades and tarnish the director's reputation, Tod Browning enjoyed a hugely successful and busy silent period directing, amongst others, caper films, focusing on small-time crooks and their schemes. White Tiger is one of these such films, and one of many collaborations he had with star Priscilla Dean, who was a huge star in her day, now sadly all but forgotten. The title White Tiger refers to the animal that lies inside of criminals, eating a way at them with guilt, uncertainty and paranoia, and we see this unfold in the second half on the movie as the lead trio hide out. I suspect the movie thinks itself as a window into this fascinating world, but after an entertaining first half, becomes a tedious and rather ridiculous melodrama.The print I watched of this was so old and grainy that the film would often jump, making certain scenes difficult to follow and title cards often unreadable. But should the film ever be given a re-mastering, I doubt it would do anything to improve the dullness of the film. After spending forty or so minutes setting up an intriguing story, we spend the next forty minutes in one location, where unconvincing suspicions arise about the true identity of Hawkes, and they needlessly bicker amongst themselves. It is something Browning would go on to develop further in the commercially successful The Unholy Three (1925), but White Tiger was so incoherent that it was shelved for over a year before the studio released a new edit to an underwhelming box-office.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Fortunately this 1923 Universal film by Tod Browning survives for us to view and evaluate. Made right after Browning's OUTSIDE THE LAW this film has all the feel of "Outside the Law" even to the point of looking like it re-uses some of the "Outsidethe Law" sets. Browning's stars in this film are perhaps his favorite muse, Priscilla Dean who appeared in "Outside the Law" and many other Browning films, Wallace Beery, Raymond Griffith and Matt Moore. Even the same cameraman William Fildew is on hand. If you're familiar with Tod Browning's films you'll recognize that he's treading on territory that he would later use at MGM in such films as THE UNHOLY THREE, THE MYSTIC and THE SHOW. In fact Raymond Griffith has a mustache and is dressed wearing a familiar striped shirt almost identical to John Gilbert's in 1927's "The Show". So one gets the feeling that Browning is never really finished saying what he wants to say where as many of his films, such as "White Tiger", keep returning to the same theme. Sources state that "White Tiger" was made in 1921 but not edited and released until 1923 which is probably why it bears such a striking resemblance to "Outside the Law". As in "Outside the Law" and the later "Unholy Three", the story in "White Tiger" has three to four criminals on the run after a jewel robbery, held up in a claustrophobic environment, each having to deal with the other's foibles. In "Outside the Law" it was an apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco and in "White Tiger" it's a log cabin in western New York. The sense of mistrust amongst the criminals is just as tense as it is in both the 1925 "The Unholy Three" and it's 1930 sound remake.

This film's title (a contrived reference to the criminal instinct) is so arbitrary, I suspect that someone in Universal's front office ordered Tod Browning to make a movie called 'White Tiger' but didn't care about its actual content.SPOILERS COMING. We get several of the usual Tod Browning elements here: a grotesque scam, urban criminals who hide out in the woods, stolen jewels concealed in an unprepossessing object, and the convenient regeneration of a lifelong criminal.The story opens in a London slum, resembling the one in 'The Blackbird', but with a prologue structurally similar to the one in 'West of Zanzibar'. Roy and Sylvia Donovan are the young children of a criminal who has just been shopped to Scotland Yard by his henchman Hawkes (Wallace Beery). As the peelers burst in, Hawkes flees with little Sylvia, leaving boy Roy to his own devices as the children's father is killed.Fade in fifteen years later at 'a famous wax musee (sic) in London' (I wonder which one). The grown-up Roy (played by Raymond Griffith) is now working inside a mechanical chess-playing device, clearly inspired by the (equally fraudulent) automaton which Johann Nepomuk Maelzel exhibited in Europe and America in the 1830s, and which was rumbled in an 1836 essay by Edgar Allan Poe (whom Raymond Griffith resembled facially). Working a scam in the same layout is Sylvia (Priscilla Dean), whom Hawkes has raised as a pickpocket. (In the film's main story following the prologue, Beery is made 15 years older with an impressive makeup job, but his character has not gained any weight.) Annoyingly and contrivedly, the Donovan siblings have each believed the other to be killed in the police raid. Now they meet -- the audience are aware of their relationship -- yet fail to recognise each other, although Roy feels a 'brotherly' affection for this woman.The whole gang -- Griffith, Dean, Beery, the mechanical chess-player, Uncle Tom Cobley and all -- hightail it to a very unconvincing New York City. Roy seems to recognise Hawkes as the man who shopped his father, but bides his time. After they pull their big heist, they scarper for a convenient cabin in the woods like the crooks in 'The Unholy Three'. The three lead characters in this movie -- all played by American actors -- are lower-class Londoners who pass themselves off in New York as Italian nobility. It's fortunate that this is a silent movie, so that we're spared what surely would have been ludicrous attempts at double-decker accents. (And anyway, Raymond Griffith had a throat ailment which would end his acting career in talking pictures.) It's deeply annoying that the characters played by Dean and Griffith spend so much time together, in such close quarters, before realising they're brother and sister.SPOILERS NOW. As this is a Tod Browning film, it's no surprise that a man and woman who are lifelong criminals -- Griffith and Dean, this time round -- experience a total and sincere reformation, and (very contrivedly, but also as usual for Browning) they receive a full pardon from the forces of the law. As in 'The Blackbird', this film strongly implies that a well-bred patrician (in this case, Matt Moore's top-hatted stranger) is innately superior to people of plebeian birth.I watched this Tod Browning film with a strong sense of deja vu, as so many of its elements strongly echo so many other Browning films. One point in this film's favour is that it has a bit more comedy relief than usual for Browning, including a couple of wisecracking inter-titles. I'll rate 'White Tiger' 7 out of 10, but I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's first introduction to Tod Browning's bizarre world.