Sobchack remarked that "The Big City concerns a nightclub robbery, again, the rivalry between two thieves. This time Chaney plays only one of them—without a twisted limb or any facial disguise.'" Critic Stuart Rosenthal commented on The Big City: "...Chaney, without makeup, in a characteristic gangster role." The Big City garnered M-G-M $387,000 in profits. West of Zanzibar (1928) In 1928, Browning and Lon Chaney embarked upon their penultimate collaboration, West of Zanzibar, based on Chester M. De Vonde play Kongo (1926). scenario by Elliott J. Clawson and Waldemar Young, provided Chaney with dual characterizations: the magician Pharos, and the later paraplegic Pharos who is nicknamed "Dead Legs." A variation of the "unknown parentage motif" Browning dramatizes a complex tale of "obsessive revenge" and "psychological horror." Biographer Stuart Rosenthal made these observations on Chaney's portrayals: The story opens in Paris, where Pharos, a magician, is cuckolded by his wife Anna (Jacqueline Gadsden) and her lover Crane (Lionel Barrymore). Pharos is crippled when Crane pushes him from a balcony, leaving him a paraplegic. Anna and Crane abscond to Africa. After a year, Phroso learns that Anna has returned. He finds his wife dead in a church, with an infant daughter beside her. He swears to avenge himself both on Crane and the child he assumes was sired by Crane. Unbeknownst to Phroso, the child is actually his. Rosenthal singles out this scene for special mention: Eighteen years hence, the crippled Pharos, now dubbed Dead Legs, operates an African trading outpost. He secretly preys upon Crane's ivory operations employing local tribes and using sideshow tricks and illusions to seize the goods. After years of anticipation, Dead Legs prepares to hatch his "macabre revenge": a sinister double murder. He summons Anna's daughter Maizie (Mary Nolan) from the sordid brothel and gin mill where he has left her to be raised. He also invites Crane to visit his outpost so as to expose the identity of the culprit stealing his ivory. Dead Legs has arranged to have Crane murdered, but not before informing him that he will invoke the local Death Code, which stipulates that "a man's demise be followed by the death of his wife or child." Crane mockingly disabuses Dead Legs of his gross misapprehension: Maizie is Dead Legs' daughter, not his, a child that Pharos conceived with Anna in Paris. Crane is killed before Dead Legs can absorb the significance of