White Tiger (1923 film)

White Tiger is a 1923 American silent crime film directed by Tod Browning starring Priscilla Dean and featuring Wallace Beery in a supporting role.

Plot
As the film opens, Mike Donovan, a London criminal, is betrayed to the police by his associate, Hawkes. Donovan is shot by police and Hawkes flees to Paris with Donovan's young daughter Sylvia, leaving Donovan's young son Roy behind. Each sibling grows up believing the other is dead.

After some years, Hawkes and Sylvia return to London. There they encounter Roy, now known as "the Kid," who operates a bogus chess-playing automaton. Hawkes and Sylvia invite Roy to join forces with them. The three take the automaton to New York, where Hawkes calls himself "Count Donelli" and rents a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Sylvia poses as the Count's daughter and Roy as his secretary. The three plan to use the automaton to gain access to the houses of the wealthy in order to carry out jewel robberies. Meanwhile Sylvia has fallen for an admirer, the well-bred Dick Longworth, who takes them to visit his hunting cabin in the Catskills.

The trio exhibits the automaton at the home of Longworth's sister. After the chess match, Roy slips out of the automaton and steals pieces of jewelry from a safe. The butler recognizes that he is not one of the guests and has him brought downstairs. When interrogated he pretends to be deaf and dumb, then gives his captors the slip on the way to the police station. Hawkes and Sylvia realize that Longworth has recognized Roy and that they must flee. The trio decide to lie low in Longworth's cabin. Guessing where they have gone, Longworth arrives at the cabin and is taken prisoner.

At the cabin the trio grow increasingly mistrustful of one another. As Hawkes sows division between Sylvia and Roy, Longworth looks on in amusement. Finally Hawkes and Roy fight and Roy is badly injured. Sylvia and Roy realize that they are brother and sister and that it was Hawkes who betrayed Donovan. Hawkes flees and has a fatal accident in the woods. The police break into the cabin, but Longworth assures them that the robbery was "just an experiment" and the jewelry will be returned. He tells Sylvia that all four of them have been cat's-paws of fate.

Theme
In White Tiger, Browning, a former magician, provides an exposé of the “mystifying mechanics” of the famous chess-playing automaton widely exhibited in late 18th and early 19th century Europe and America. The automaton fashioned to represent a Turkish chess master was an often convincing—though entirely fraudulent—representation of artificial intelligence: the device was actually operated by a human chess expert concealed within the cabinet below the chess board. Browning, a great admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, combined Poe’s famous 1836 essay on the hoax with the author’s fascination with tales of mystery and the macabre.

The protagonists in White Tiger use the “baffling” device to gain entrance to a wealthy estate and execute a jewel heist. In exposing the fraud, Browning violates a precept of the magician's code of ethics; to never reveal the mechanics of an illusion.