Tod Browning - The Carnival Master of the Macabre
He is largely unknown to the general public but aficionados of the macabre consider Tod Browning a god in the world of horror cinema. His directorial career goes back to the early silent era and progressed to sound films.
He was born Charles Albert Browning, Jr., in 1880 to a well-to-do family. As a child, young Charles put on amateur plays in his backyard and when he grew into adolescence, he became enamored of circuses and carnival life, an obsession he would put to use in the future. At the age of sixteen, he abandoned his middle class family and comfortable life to run away and become a circus performer.
Charles soon changed his name to "Tod” and traveled extensively with sideshows, carnivals and circuses. He had myriad jobs and worked as a l barker for the Wild Man of Borneo, performing a live burial act in which he was billed as "The Living Corpse", and performing as a clown with the Ringling Brothers Circus. Years later, he would draw on this experience as inspiration for his most provocative work in film. He performed in vaudeville as an actor, contortionist, magician and dancer. While working as director of a variety theater in New York, young Tod was introduced to director . He left carnival life behind and began acting along with his comic partner on single-reel nickelodeon comedies for Griffith and the Biograph company.
When Griffith split from Biograph and moved to California in 1913. Browning followed him and continued to act in Griffith's films which were produced at the Reliance-Majestic Studios. Browning even worked as an extra in the epic Intolerance and acted in approximately fifty silent films. Perhaps his work with Griffith became the the catalyst for his behind the camera work because it was at this time that he began directing and helmed eleven short films for Reliance-Majestic.
Unfortunately, Browning’s career was sidelined for two years in an accident that was as bizarre and troubling a story as any found in any of his films. In June of 1915, he crashed his car at full speed into a moving train. His passengers were film actors Elmer Booth and George Siegmann. Booth was killed instantly, while Seigmann and Browning suffered serious injuries, including in Browning's case a shattered right leg and the loss of his front teeth. During his convalescence, Browning was able to write scripts but did not return to active film work for two years..
In 1917, after he had finally recovered from his injuries, Browning made his feature film directorial debut and moved back to New York that same year. While in New York he directed. two films for Metro Studios before it was transformed into the giant Metro, Goldwyn, Mayer. One of his films used the rudimentary special effect of double exposure which was considered groundbreaking for the time.
Browning returned to California in 1918 and produced two more films for Metro, but it was when he left Metro and joined Bluebird Productions, a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, that his legend began. At Bluebird he met a brilliant young producer named Irving Thalberg who paired Browning with actor Lon Chaney, Sr., the famed Man of the Thousand Faces. Browning and Chaney became one of the greatest partnership in movie history and would ultimately make ten films together over the next decade.
The death of his father sent Browning into a depression that led to alcoholism. He was laid off by Universal and his wife, Alice, left him. Thankfully, he recovered, reconciled with his wife, and got a one-picture contract with the newly formed Metro Goldwyn Mayer. His fiomwas a moderate success, putting his career back on track.
Thalberg reunited Browning with Lon Chaney for the classic The Unholy Three, the story of three circus performers who concoct a scheme to con and steal jewels from rich people using disguises. The Browning's circus experience shows in his sympathetic portrayal of the antiheroes, a ventriloquist who masquerades as an old lady, a circus strongman and an adult midget who disguises himself as a baby. The film was a resounding success, so much so that it was remade in 1930 as Lon Chaney's first and only talking motion picture.
Browning and Chaney embarked on a series of popular collaborations, including The Blackbird and The Road to Mandalay. The Unknown which is one of the most disturbing films ever made, a masterpiece of the macabre that featured Chaney as Alonzo the Aarmless, a sideshow entertainer who pretends to be armless and uses his feet to throw knives. Joan Crawford co-starred as the carnival girl Nanon who Alonzo is obsessed with. Nanon is a damaged beauty who can’t stand to be touched and Alonzo’s fascination with her causes him to do the unthinkable. The Unknown was originally titled Alonzo the Armless and could be considered a precursor to Freaks in that it concerns a love triangle involving a circus freak, a beauty and a strongman.
The Unknown is by far the most intense and demented of Browning’s films. Joan Crawford said that she learned more about acting from working with Chaney in this movie than from everything else in her long career put together and critics often cite Chaney's performance as one of the greatest ever captured on film. Burt Lancaster always maintained that Chaney's portrayal in The Unknown was the most emotionally compelling film performance he had ever seen an actor give.
In 1927 Browning had his first foray into vampire films, London After Midnight, one of those highly sought-after lost films who loss so annoys film historians. The last known print was destroyed in an MGM studio fire in 1965. In 2002, a photographic reconstruction of London After Midnight was produced by Rick Schmidlin for Turner Classic Movies and scenes are now on You Tube. Browning and Chaney's final collaboration was in 1929 with Where East is East, a semi-lost film of which only incomplete prints have survived. Browning's first talkie The Thirteenth Chair was released in 1929 and like many early talkies was also shown as a silent. The star of The Thirteenth Chair was a relatively unknown actor named Bela Lugosi.
After directing the boxing melodrama The Iron Man, he began work on a film that was based on the short story by Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins, the screenwriter of The Unholy Three. The name of the film was Freaks, an unholy love triangle between a wealthy dwarf, a gold-digging aerialist, and a strongman; a murder plot; and the vengeance dealt out by the dwarf and his fellow circus freaks. Freaks was so controversial that even after heavy editing to remove many disturbing scenes, it still was a commercial failure. Browning's career was derailed.
Critical reception to Freaks was mixed but not entirely adverse but the real damage was done both by the cinema managers and audiences themselves. The horrified reaction to Freaks ensured its financial ruin though it did have a good run in some cities but not enough to make any difference; Freaks was was banned for over thirty years in Great Britain. Audiences enmeshed in the grim realities of the Great Depression. Simply weren't willing to endure a close-up view of some of life’s more unpleasant aspects.
His next film was 1936’s The Devil-Doll with Lionel Barrymore in the lead. Barrymore portrayed a Paris banker who is framed by his three partners and sent to Devil’s Island for seventeen years. While in Devil’s Island, the banker encounters a scientist who has invented a process to shrink animals and humans. The tiny people resemble dolls when inanimate and have no will of their own and follow any command. The formula reduces people to 1/6th of their original size, with the idea of making the Earth's limited resources needed for survival, clean water, food, energy, etc., last longer for an ever-growing population. The banker and the scientist escape from prison and when the scientist die, Lavond joins forces with his widow and uses the shrinking technique to obtain revenge on business associates who framed him and vindication for himself. The banker returns to Paris where he opens a doll's shop, then proceeds to send his tiny creatures on missions to kill the men who framed him. To avoid detection by the police, he uses the same device as Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three and dons women’s clothing to disguise himself as a not-so-little old lady.
Browning's last film for MGM was in 1939, a light-hearted mystery about stage magicians called Miracles for Sale. Unfortunately for lovers of quality horror, he retired from the industry and spent the remainder of his life living on his ample savings and, according to Carlos Clarens in his book Horror Movies, "gently deprecating the films that had made him rich and celebrated."
Tod Browning died at the age of 82 while recovering from a cancer operation.
This article is taken from Wikipedia and John Brosnan’s biography of Tod Browning on the History Of Horror website and has been edited by Francesca Miller.
