One of the creepiest films I have ever watched is Erich von Stroheim's The Great Gabbo. This is the old story of a ventriloquist's dummy taking on a life of its own - but it wasn't an old story back in 1930. This may have been the original "devil doll" movie. Unfortunately, as an early talkie, it was padded out with too many mediocre song-and-dance numbers which today look and sound very lame. Back then, when sound was new, audiences wanted (or at least, movie producers THOUGHT they wanted) anything at all that made a noise, and bad musicals ran rife for the first several years. Stroheim must have winced at this abomination, but it was the only way to get his masterpiece made. This movie borrows elements from the stark German expressionist cinema where Stroheim began making his disturbing feature films. Later he was typecast as "the man you love to hate" and even appeared as the sinister butler in Gloria Swanson's Sunset Boulevard. In The Great Gabbo, he is not just creepy but violent, punching his dummy so hard he knocks its eyes out. These are but brief scenes in a hair-raisingly macabre movie that rises above all the razz-ma-tazz padding and remains an early sound classic.
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