by

Michael Ferguson

Unlike the so-called masters of film directing whose visual style

became so much leitmotif that ardent film enthusiasts claim they can spot a Griffith, a DeMille, a Hawks, a Ford or a Hitchcock just by looking at a single scene, Tod Browning was no great visual stylist. It can even be argued that he was no great director, period. A clue to his importance, however, is that in the self-constricting world of film academia one discovers just as many critics wishing to dismiss him as one does critics championing a career often overlooked and underappreciated.

Browning made 62 films as movie director, but it is his final string of bizarre tales--and in particular his DRACULA and FREAKS--that have assured him a place in the annals of horror movie greats; a place he doubtlessly would find bittersweet considering his dislike for the finished version of the vampire tale and the resounding manner in which the latter circus melodrama tolled the deathknell on his career.

Charles Albert "Tod" Browning, not unlike many of his films, was both strange and mysterious. Authors David Skal and Elias Savada, in their 1995 bio of the director entitled Dark Carnival, painstakingly unearthed, dusted off and examined with a fine-toothed comb every document available on the man and yet they still couldn't manage a volume over a scant 217 pages. Despite their excellent work, one never really gets a sense of who this man was, as there's far less personality than there is the piecing together of events and facts and figures.

The apparent dichotomy arises from his famed running away from his Louisville home as a teenager to join a traveling carnival, eventually becoming a blackface comedian (part of an act called "Lizard and Coon"), then a sideshow attraction known as "The Hypnotic Living Corpse" (a live, premature-burial act), and then a stage and film comedian who acted in 52 short films from 1913 - 1915; all this show business, all this caught up with being a showman, and yet he refused to show much of anything of himself that wasn't in front of a curtain or projected on a wall. No wonder, perhaps, given that his peers were illusionists, vaudevillians, escape artists, contortionists and magicians.

A popular gig playing Mutt in a live-action version of the comic-strip "Mutt and Jeff" in the burlesque show THE WHIRL OF MIRTH (1913) took him to Brooklyn where he met D.W. Griffith, who used him in a couple of comedy shorts before taking him along to Los Angeles. The young comic met actress Alice Houghton, whom he married (a first marriage lasted just four years), and then began to direct one and two reelers.

Besides loving show business, Browning had at least two other overpowering passions: baseball (his Uncle Pete Browning is the man for whom the Louisville Slugger was fashioned) and booze. Browning was the intoxicated driver of an automobile that smashed into a train flatbed in the Pacific Coast fog in 1915, killing comedian Elmer Booth, who was sitting in the passenger seat beside him.

After completing an assignment as one of seven assistant directors on "The Modern Story Sequence" of INTOLERANCE (1916), Browning continued to write and direct without distinction until he met Irving Thalberg, and, consequently, Lon Chaney at Universal in 1919. Both were to be instrumental to his rise and fall. Thalberg landed him his first substantial assignment, the direction of the quarter-million dollar spectacle THE VIRGIN OF STAMBOUL (1920), a pre-SHEIK sheik movie that did quite well at the box-office.

Browning's partnership with Lon Chaney was a match made in psychosexual silent movie heaven. Browning would direct Lon in 10 feature films, from 1919's THE WICKED DARLING to 1929's WHERE EAST IS EAST, doing five of those in a row. The director's penchant for tales of physical constraint and cruelty were right up Lon's alley and the actor brought to vivid life an increasingly twisted array of wronged, tortured and physically deformed men for Browning's cameras: criminal mastermind Professor Echo of THE UNHOLY THREE (1925), transformed by love to repent and use his voice-throwing skills to set free a man falsely accused; again a master criminal in THE BLACK BIRD (1926), disguising himself as a kindly cripple only to have fate see to his actual crippling before sending him to his maker; Singapore Joe, the hideous lecher in THE ROAD TO MANDALAY (1926), caught up in a murderous sexual frenzy for the daughter he doesn't realize is his own; Alonzo the Armless, in THE UNKNOWN (1927), deliberately fashioning himself a sideshow freak by harnessing his arms, then willing to have them removed to consummate his love for the beauty who shuns a man's touch; both Inspector Burke of Scotland Yard and the nightmarish vampire in LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT (1927), a lost film and also the biggest moneymaker of the Browning-Chaney collaborations; "Dead Legs" Flint, in WEST OF ZANZIBAR (1928), an insanely embittered paralytic who rules as icon in a tiny African village where he single-mindedly, yet unknowingly destroys his own family; and "Tiger" Haynes, in WHERE EAST IS EAST (1929), the scarred animal trapper also caught in the rending of his family through jealousies, seductions and the perfunctory homicidal ape on the loose.

Could Browning have been writing his autobiography here in these sordid and darkly violent tales colliding Greek mythology with Freud, firearms and the fantastic? He was, in fact, a prolific writer who not only brought these weird stories and strange books to the attention of the studios, but wrote, adapted or provided the treatment for at least 17 of the films he directed. Known to be a singularly cold man, who didn't even return to his hometown for his father's funeral, he once told of coming upon the sight of a woman slitting the throats of both her children over a bathtub in a midwestern hotel. Family could be a monstrous institution.

Decked out in jodhpurs, megaphone, and beret, Browning had a reputation as a temperamental whip-cracker on the set and it seems many of those who worked with him couldn't stand him in the least. A couple of substantial financial disasters (DRIFTING and WHITE TIGER, both in 1923) and increasing difficulty dealing with his alcoholism lost him the job of directing Chaney in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME.

By the time WEST OF ZANZIBAR was released in 1928, the critics had turned on him, sickened by the repetition and the insistence on depravity.

In 1929, his contract with MGM was over and a year later Chaney was dead, too.

DRACULA (1931), at Universal, was so big a hit that it rejuvenated his dangerously flailing career and was to become his eternal footnote in motion picture history, despite how quickly he lost interest in the project which officially represented his career box-office high. Back at MGM, and reunited with Thalberg, he embarked on FREAKS (1932), perhaps his most personal work and the catalyst for his most personal and professional undoing. The film lost $164,000 for the studio and Browning's very next film, a raunchy layman's comedy called FAST WORKERS (1933), became his biggest financial bomb ever.

Three more films would follow with Browning taking vastly reduced cuts in pay in order to get them made: MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935), THE DEVIL DOLL (1936), and MIRACLES FOR SALE (1939), the first two even managing to become mild successes at the box-office.

Tod Browning was taken off the MGM payroll in 1942, his wife Alice would die two years later, and he would spend the rest of his days a veritable recluse, though still wealthy enough to live quite comfortably in his Malibu home surrounded by ducks, dogs and kegs of beer. Two long decades later, following a stroke, he died at age 82; FREAKS had just been rediscovered on college campuses all over the country.

So while it may be true that one cannot necessarily tell a Tod Browning film by a signature sweep of the camera or a visual style that personifies his vision, one can most assuredly tell a Browning film by its story, its recurrent and incessant themes: of crooks, crime and vengeance, bodily deformity and dismemberment, sexual longing and punishment, family fractures and self-destruction, a painful and cruel world of illusion and delusion.

Many of Browning's films are not widely available as yet on video, thus appreciation and reassessment of his work will no doubt occur as the trickle from vault to videotape takes place. The following is a list of SEVEN TOD BROWNING FILMS that are available on tape (or cable) and would serve as a nice introduction to what he did best and what he did worst.

OUTSIDE THE LAW (1921): The second teaming of Browning and Chaney takes place in this exciting crime melodrama in which Chaney provides two of his thousand faces for the price of one. He is bad guy gangster "Black Mike" Sylva, who frames former thief "Silent" Madden and then sets up his lovely daughter "Silky Moll" Madden, and he's also Chinaman Ah Wing, key to the downfall of "Black Mike" in a split-screen encounter.

THE UNHOLY THREE (1925): After a four year separation, Browning and Chaney are reunited again under Thalberg at Metro for this hugely successful crime melodrama with a wicked twist. Browning combines at least two of his favorite settings, the crime world and the circus, in this tale of a trio of carny outcasts (a ventriloquist, a midget and a strongman) who commence a vicious crime spree using a pet store where the ventriloquist (Chaney) dresses as an old lady selling "talking" parrots as a front.

Naturally, the ventriloquist provides the voice for these bogus birds and Browning comes up with a humorous sight gag to indicate the parrot-speak in a silent film. The story is more than a bit silly, but it is played with conviction and Browning is obviously having a lot of fun. Perhaps he was having too much "fun," as one scene involving midget Harry Earles being mistaken as a gift from Santa Claus by a little girl whose house is being robbed had its disturbing climax clipped by Metro's head office: the little bastard was throttling her.

THE 13TH CHAIR (1929): Not officially available on video, this early MGM talkie does occasionally show up on Turner's TNT cable station, and, in spite of its static and stagy quality, is really quite entertaining. Based on a popular Broadway mystery play, the film tells the story of murder among British socialites and the dear old spiritualist summoned to conduct a seance to solve the crime. Barring the sweet, but colorful old woman's powers, the brash Inspector Delzante is sure to once and for all get to the bottom of the mystery. Much to the viewer's delight, Delzante is essayed by none other than Mr. Bela Lugosi (then in the midst of his enormously popular stage tour of DRACULA), whose pointed, aggressive and abrasive performance not only shows off his remarkable screen presence and charisma, but also demonstrates a far more substantial facility with handling English dialogue than both Lugosi detractors and apologists would have you believe. Some see Lugosi's feisty demeanor, complete with arched "vampire" eyebrows and cold, penetrating stares, as Browning's audition and dress-rehearsal for using the actor in DRACULA the following year, citing that there's nothing in the original script to suggest that the Inspector be played this way. But I think Lugosi's restrained, yet still delightfully melodramatic Delzante pumps life and energy into this very enjoyable antique.

DRACULA (1931): The film that officially ushered in the American horror genre and became one of the great financial successes of the early 1930s (it single-handedly put Universal in the black that year), is also a significantly flawed film saved primarily by the trademark performance of Bela Lugosi and the maniacal inspiration of Dwight Frye's Renfield. The famed first reel in Transylvania and at the Count's castle is so well photographed and appropriately slow and creepy that the rest of the film's insistence on a dialogue-stuffed photoplay of the popular stage version becomes more and more painful as it progresses. Given the opportunity to visually exploit the supernatural subject matter without the explanation of real-world deceit (as in the monster who turns out to be just a guy in a mask in most prior "scary" movies), Browning grinds the fantasy to a halt with unimaginative, static camerawork that basically serves to photograph a stage-play. His initial enthusiasm for the project apparently waned as Universal kept harping about the costs (it came in over-budget) and his own alcoholism complicated matters. A joke on the set was that Browning's direction of DRACULA consisted of telling cinematographer Karl Freund to nail the camera down in place and let it run. Some scenes in the finished film are presented in stagy tableau simply because Browning never got around to shooting his two-shots or close-ups. Ultimately, he had no contractual agreement for final cut on this, his 56th directing job, and years later he bitterly spoke about the appalling job of editing from the scrapheap done on his most famous outing; one of a handful of mediocre films still heralded as a "classic." A bit of trivia: During the odd subjective-camera glide on board the shipwrecked Vesta, it is Browning's own voice on the soundtrack declaring the discovery and "madness" of the sole survivor, a gleaming and gloating Renfield.

FREAKS (1932): Based on Tod Robbins' short story "Spurs," this is Browning's most famous and highly-touted cult picture, though THE UNKNOWN (1927) and the rarely seen expressionistic carnival tale he made called THE SHOW (1927) may someday also draw attention. Exhibiting an innate sense of both our attraction to and repulsion by physical deformity, Browning fashions a nasty tale of one beauty's corruption by greed in a world of misfits pledging to accept her as "one of us." Olga Baclonova's melodramatic, drunken rejection of the freaks and the sexual humiliation of the midget who loves her, in the famed Wedding Feast sequence, brings about her own physical mutilation (and the off-screen castration of her strongman lover). It is powerful, disturbing stuff. Preview audiences were appalled and the studio cut 20 minutes from the original print. When it finally opened, it did such poor business that one might have guessed it would just dry up and disappear. Not so, as moralizing critics, women's groups and religious orders took it to task and made it a cause celebre. MGM, to its credit, waged a counter-attack in the trades, but the general public's disinterest (or distaste) and the sermonizing call to arms took its toll.

FREAKS was a disaster. Great Britain wouldn't screen it until 1962. Vehemently discussed and debated in the sixties by film students, the jury is still out on whether Browning was exploiting his cast of pinheads, half-torsos, and other oddities or was in some way paying tribute to their world, their sense of family and loyalty (albeit in a horror setting).

MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935): The definitive creaky old talkie with far too much lip-flapping and far too few thrills. A virtual remake of LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, it strikes me as somewhat sad to see Browning so literally robbing from his own success of just 8 years prior because he so plainly needed a formula hit. An old mansion murder mystery with bogus supernatural overtones, this one employs a silent Bela Lugosi and a spooky Carroll Borland, as his daughter Luna, to scare a crafty killer into confession. The film's static dialogue scenes are occasionally given reprieve by the appearance of the vampire couple, with the best scene an impressively gorgeous (but all-too brief) glimpse at a winged Luna alighting inside the cavernous mansion's dining hall. Once again, Browning was victimized by the censors, this time cutting scenarist Guy Endore's explanation of the bloody wound at Lugosi's temple. The original story reveals that Lugosi's Count Mora had an incestuous relationship with daughter Luna. Guilt-ridden, he murders her and then shoots himself in the head, thereby damning them both to roam as members of the Undead. Lugosi was particularly embittered when a tagged-on finale, provided only after most shooting was completed, revealed he and Ms. Borland were only actors pretending to be vampires.