Tod Browning

Tod Browning (born July 12, 1880, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.—died October 6, 1962, Malibu, California) American director who specialized in films of the grotesque and macabre. A cult director because of his association with fabled silent star Lon Chaney and his proclivity for outré fantasy and horror pictures, Browning made a handful of sound pictures as well as almost 40 silent movies. But the impact of those films—especially Dracula (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, and Freaks (1932)—still lingers.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early life and work

Browning ran away from home at age 16 and found steady employment in circuses and carnivals as a clown, contortionist, magician’s assistant, and barker. After working in vaudeville as a blackface comedian, he was hired for the long-running burlesque revue The Whirl of Mirth, in which he appeared in sketches based on popular comic-strip characters of the period. In 1913 he was signed by the Biograph Company, where under the supervision of D.W. Griffith he was featured in a series of knockabout comedies. He went on to costar in the Bill the Office Boy comedy series in 1914 for the Mutual Film Corporation. In 1915 he made his directorial debut with the one-reel silent The Lucky Transfer.

In June of that year, while driving drunk, he collided at high speed with a moving train. Browning and actor George A. Siegmann were seriously injured; actor Elmer Booth was killed. During Browning’s long convalescence, he turned to screenwriting. After his recovery, he had a small role in Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) while also functioning as an assistant director on it. He then moved to the Fine Arts Film Company in 1917, where he codirected (with Wilfred Lucas) his first full-length feature, Jim Bludso (1917).

Browning spent a year at Metro Pictures before signing with the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1918. There he made nine films with leading actress Priscilla Dean, including the hit The Virgin of Stamboul (1920). The Wicked Darling (1919) marked Browning’s first work with Lon Chaney and starred Dean and Chaney as a pair of pickpockets. Browning, Dean, and Chaney reunited for Outside the Law (1920), a crime story set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in which Dean played a criminal trying to go straight; Chaney played two roles, a villainous gangster and a Chinese servant.

The MGM and Universal years

In 1925 Browning moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), where he wrote and directed a series of bizarre, almost surrealistic melodramas starring Chaney, who showed his versatility and facility with makeup by playing often physically disfigured characters in those films. Their first project was the shocking (for the time) circus tale The Unholy Three (1925), with Chaney as a transvestite ventriloquist who teams with a dwarf (Harry Earles), a strongman (Victor McLaglen), and a pickpocket (Mae Busch) to go on a crime spree that culminates in murder. In The Road to Mandalay (1926) a shady sea captain (Chaney) tries to stop his daughter from marrying his partner in crime. In The Blackbird (1926) Chaney played the title character, a London thief who disguises himself as his “brother,” the Bishop, a crippled minister who runs a rescue mission for the poor. The Unknown (1927), another circus tale, starred Chaney as an “armless” knife thrower who plots grisly revenge against a romantic rival. In London After Midnight (1927; now lost) Chaney had a dual role as a Scotland Yard inspector and a sinister vampire. Chaney played “Dead-Legs” Phroso, a paralyzed former magician who raises the daughter of his hated rival in a brothel but does not know she is actually his own, in West of Zanzibar (1928). The Big City (1928; now lost) was something of a departure for Browning and Chaney since it was a simple, straightforward gangster story. In the macabre Where East Is East (1929), Chaney played an animal trapper in French Indochina who kills his wife and then himself by letting loose a wild gorilla.

Browning’s first talkie was The Thirteenth Chair (1929). Chaney was not yet open to the notion of making a sound picture, so Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi was recruited to play the police inspector investigating a murder at a seance. Chaney finally made one sound film, a remake of The Unholy Three, before his sudden death from bronchial cancer in 1930, but Jack Conway directed it instead of Browning, who had jumped to Universal and could not take the property with him. Instead, he remade another of his Chaney silents, Outside the Law (1930), with Edward G. Robinson taking the part left vacant by Chaney’s death.

Chaney’s sudden death also forced Browning to find a substitute for the lead role in the film version of Dracula (1931), and again he turned to Lugosi, who filled the void with the unctuous line readings that made him inseparable from the character of the elegant vampire. Lugosi had already played the part onstage for three years, and that version was the primary basis for the film. Dracula was an enormous success and was the first of the classic Universal horror films of the 1930s and ’40s. The success of Dracula enabled Browning to flourish throughout the early 1930s. Iron Man (1931) was based on a W.R. Burnett novel and starred Lew Ayres as a prizefighter and Jean Harlow as his disloyal wife.

Back at MGM, Browning delivered a surprise with Freaks (1932), a truly shocking morality play that boldly cast a number of actual sideshow performers. Olga Baclanova, as the trapeze artist who marries a midget circus owner (Earles) only to try killing him for his money, is the film’s nominal protagonist, but it is really the “freaks” themselves who make this film so haunting. Browning’s obvious affection for those performers—such as Prince Randian the “Living Torso” and the Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton—was undoubtedly inspired by his own younger days with the circus. However, studio head Louis B. Mayer was reportedly appalled when he saw it, and he curtailed its distribution. Though it would later be hailed as the director’s masterpiece, Freaks was greeted with almost universal revulsion upon its original release; critics used such negatives as “ghastly” and “repellent,” while British censors banned the picture in Great Britain for more than three decades. Freaks all but finished Browning’s Hollywood career; he would direct only four more films.

Final films

Fast Workers (1933) was a drama about the men who erect skyscrapers, with John Gilbert. Mark of the Vampire (1935) was a lively remake of London After Midnight; Lugosi starred as a vampire who might be responsible for murder, and Lionel Barrymore played a professor of demonology. The Devil Doll (1936) had Barrymore scuttling about in women’s garb, Lon Chaney style, as a madman who shrinks people and bends them to his will, exacting revenge on the judge and jury who sent him to Devil’s Island. After that came only Miracles for Sale (1939), a B-film mystery with Henry Hull as an escapologist and Robert Young as a stage magician trying to expose a fake spiritualist.

The heavy-drinking Browning then retired, for reasons that have never been fully explained. Exiling himself to his home in Malibu, he went into virtual seclusion after the death of his second wife, actress Alice Wilson, in 1944. After MGM production head Irving Thalberg’s death in 1936, he had no one there to champion his peculiar interests. But he left a void in the cinema where once eeriness had spread like graveyard mist.