Even by the standards of star Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning, West of Zanzibar is an unrelentingly grim and gruesome melodrama. Chaney delivers an unforgettable performance as Flint, the crippled "king" of a faraway jungle island. Swearing vengeance against Crane (Lionel Barrymore), the man who stole his wife and left him a paraplegic, Flint concentrates his hatred on Crane's daughter Anna (Jane Daly). Bankrolling the girl's convent education, Flint brings Anna to his island domain, where he pumps her full of narcotics and forces her into a life of prostitution and all-around depravity. As a final humiliation, he intends to allow Anna to be sacrificed in a native ritual. But when he finds out that Anna is actually his own daughter, Flint does an abrupt about-face and does all he can to rescue the girl and her dissolute sweetheart Doc (Warner Baxter) from the rampaging natives. West of Zanzibar was remade (and, it has been, argued, vastly improved upon) as Kongo (1932), with Walter Huston in the Chaney role.