While the film has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process.

The screenplay concerns a vengeful stage magician named Phroso (Lon Chaney) who becomes paralyzed in a brawl with a rival (Lionel Barrymore).

The screenplay was written by Elliott J. Clawson, based on the 1926 play Kongo by Charles de Vonde and Kilbourn Gordon.

The Hays office, the official Hollywood censor, banned the stage play "Kongo" from the screen, so to bypass the ruling, MGM changed the title first to SOUTH OF THE EQUATOR, then finally to WEST OF ZANZIBAR.

[2] West of Zanzibar is intriguing to Lon Chaney fans because of the lost or excised sequences that Browning allegedly shot for the film that no longer exist; in particular, Phroso (Chaney) in costume as The Human Duck in a freak show act and scenes showing Phroso and his troupe when they first arrive in Africa.

The film also turns up frequently on the Turner Classics Movies cable TV channel and on PBS stations.

[4][5] Anna (Jacqueline Gadsden) cannot bring herself to tell her professional magician husband, The Great Phroso (Lon Chaney), that she is leaving him.

When she arrives, Phroso denies being Maisie's father (to her great relief), but refuses to tell her why she has been brought there and treats her with undisguised hatred.

The first night, she witnesses a gruesome tribal custom: when a man dies, his wife or daughter is burned alive on the same funeral pyre.

And yet they insist on putting it out....How any normal person could have thought this horrible syphilitic play could have made an entertaining picture, even with Lon Chaney, who appears in gruesome and repulsive stories, is beyond comprehension.

"[1] Despite this, the film proved to be a success, both domestically and internationally, although it had censorship problems in the British colony of Tanganyika for its portrayal of Africans.

The star is there, but the rush of getting his quota on the release schedule is taking its toll in the most important phase of production--preparation.

In this respect Chaney's latest impresses as having exhausted the property men and the casting director and allowing Tod Browning to follow religiously one of those cuff scripts...Musical score is regular.

---New York Times In a much more recent review, Dennis Schwartz described it as a "strangely curious relic", but praised the "virtuoso performance of Chaney".