It’s a re-make of a Tod Browning/Lon Chaney Snr silent called West of Zanzibar, and it’s completely off the air, as is everything by those folks. In this film, Walter Huston plays Dead Legs, a role originally originated by Lon Chaney.
Flint is a disabled businessman who stays out west of Zanzibar, where he has the villagers completely taken in by his magic tricks and a limited number of servants – including Lupe Velez as his mistress – under his control. Anyone who gets in his path is intimidated, assaulted, shot, or otherwise terrorised.
His devious goal is to extract slow and convoluted retribution on another white person in the neighbourhood, Gregg (C. Henry Gordon), who is an even worse ratbag as a slave and ivory trader and who hurt Flint in a brawl years before when Flint found he was having an affair with his wife. After keeping Ann Whitehall (Virginia Bruce), whom he believes to be the illegitimate daughter of the adulterous couple, in a Capetown convent for eighteen years, Flint now transports her to his jungle hideaway, where he forces her into a life of prostitution serving the locals – by heavens, sir, is there no end to your depravity?!
Around the same time, a doctor called Kingsland (Conrad Nagel) emerges flat on his back, hopelessly addicted to a peyote-like root that he was sent to Africa to eradicate. Despite his drug addiction, Kingsland is an innately nice person, and when he meets Ann, who is virtually insane and paralysed from fever, he begins treating her; Velez also makes a play for the good Doc since he still has a working penis.
Meanwhile, in his new capacity as witch doctor of a neighbouring tribe, Flint engages in the most horrible of quaint local customs: if a man dies and has a problematic moral daughter, the girl is tossed on the funeral pyre beside the father’s body. Ann rushes through the jungle complex, avoiding Flint’s inebriated coworkers, rioting Africans, and even Kingsland, a grinning wretch who has just taken his daily dose; weirdness exudes from the walls.
Not all of the film is as well-directed as this piece – as an early talky, it lurches from stagy scene to stagy scene, despite the discourse being quite literate for the most part, with some notable mistakes, particularly in the love scenes.
Meanwhile, Flint cures Kingsland of his addiction so that he can operate to relieve Flint’s recurring pains with an ingenious method: Flint ties Kingsland up in the swamp and has him sucked sober by leeches; Kingsland must now choose between his medical duty to heal Flint and his desire to bring down Flint’s twisted ego empire. Of course, Flint devises the “fire ritual” as the brutal culmination of his revenge on Gregg and Ann, only to learn – gasp! – that Ann is and has always been his own daughter, whom he must now save from his own hideous creation! This film shows the end of the world.
This isn’t the first time Heart of Darkness has been given a high dose of acid. When you realise it’s all a psychological ploy to fulfil Flint’s sickest wishes, the heinous racism becomes tolerable. Walter Huston is no Lon Chaney in terms of physicality, but he embraces the character with crazy grace and propels the work ahead with sheer strength. Nagel is a wonderful Doctor, both friendly and harsh, punch-drunk and worthless.
