flashback tod browning

Article by James Jenkins

"I bid you . . . welcome."

With the indelible words of the renowned Count, we enter into a world of the bizarre, the dark, the sinister, often populated by outcasts, criminals, the physically deformed and grotesque—the world of Charles Albert "Tod browing".

browning and friends

A director of over forty films from 1917 to 1939, taking or sharing story and screenwriting credits for at least fourteen of those films, Browning is certainly best known for his seminal work Dracula (1931), which put Universal on the cinematic map and began a monster/horror franchise for the studio that would continue through the 30’s and include such definitive works as Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933). However, Browning’s work on Dracula and at Universal was sporadic, sandwiched between his ongoing and commercially successful collaborations with producer Irving Thalberg, writer Waldemar Young, and actor Lon Chaney, Sr. at MGM on such pictures as The Unholy Three (1925 and 1930, the latter version of which was Chaney’s only venture into sound film), London After Midnight (1927), and his magnum opus, Freaks (1932).
Browning did not invent the horror or gangster genres—they had been staples of the burgeoning American film industry for at least 10 years before Browning started making films. However, Browning’s films, combining a flair for the melodramatic with a shadowy, sometimes "morbid" style and stark characterizations, were not only commercially successful, but his style transcended the transition from silent to sound eras, making him a director of unique capability and experience.

browning portrait

Running away from his Louisville, Kentucky home at 16, Browning joined the circus, where he worked as everything from side-show barker to clown to contortionist. It was here that Browning developed an already intrinsic fascination for oddity and melodrama. The people and situations he experienced over the next 17 years became the stock for some of his most commercially successful films: The Unholy Three, The Show (1927), and The Unknown (1927).
Becoming an actor for Biograph in 1915, he eventually came to the attention of D.W. Griffith, who most certainly fed Browning’s flair for the melodramatic after hiring him as an assistant director on Griffith’s crème de le epic, Intolerance. Inspired by his mentor, Browning began to synthesize his experiences, writing stories and screenplays that tended to utilize a revenge formula in which an embittered and often deformed or scarred protagonist attempted to redress the wrongs committed against him. The protagonist eventually suffered some painful, typically grotesque end, usually in an ironic attempt to undo the effects of the revenge he had so carefully planned (or which she had planned, in the case of The Devil Doll [1939]). The irony of the protagonist’s end was often very cruel or grotesque itself, emphasizing a natural order of justice.
However, Browning was usually more concerned with the characters that populated his stories than the plots that framed them. He once said about writing for Lon Chaney: "When I’m working on a story for Chaney, I never think of the plot. That follows of itself after you have conceived a characterization. [I ask myself] ‘What are the most startling situations for such a deformity?’" Browning saw more entertainment in how interesting the situations were for characters with deformities—how they did or did not function as "normal"—than with the metaphoric aspects of the deformities themselves.

All of Browning’s characters, however grotesque and deserving of their ends they may be, are still utterly human in their desires and motives. It was easy for audiences to excuse the melodramatic excess of his protagonists precisely because of their physical abnormalities in films like The Jury of Fate (1917), The Blackbird (1926), The Road to Mandalay (1926), The Show, and West of Zanzibar (1928), but Browning had something more planned—a way to break down the stereotype and hyperbole of melodrama and focus on the humanity of his deformed characters. In 1932, he would assemble the ultimate cast of outcasts and the deformed, place them in another revenge-based narrative, and then lead us to sympathize with these characters in Freaks.

dracula

Ironically, after Browning’s success with Dracula, Universal quickly followed up with James Whale’s Frankenstein, which worked to secure Universal’s command of the horror genre. Back at MGM, Thalberg, who was Director of Production, reacted to this success by commissioning Browning to "out-horror" Frankenstein. In response, Browning pulled out all the stops, focusing on a short story by Tod Robbins concerning a circus dwarf who attempts to get revenge on some of the "larger" performers he works with because they try to cheat him out of an inheritance.
Browning brings all of his big top and directorial experience to bear on this story. In Freaks, he affects a transformation with his deformed characters by focusing on their identifiably human aspects. Always interested in strong and often deadly passions, Browning portrays his group of outcasts as righteously outraged when one of their own, a dwarf named Hans, is almost murdered by two able-bodied lovers—one of whom, the trapeze artist named Cleopatra, married Hans after discovering he was about to receive a valuable inheritance. Browning is careful to show us the more innocent, almost child-like passions of the circus "freaks" as they enjoy themselves at Hans and Cleopatra’s wedding feast. The betrayal of their innocence in the malicious plot to murder the dwarf creates an indignation in the audience that is appeased in the scene where the freaks exact their revenge. Shot almost entirely from the perspectives of the freaks, the revenge scene depicts the harsh requirements of a natural justice that is required to keep us all human—and does so with such disturbing images as an armless, legless Torso Man slithering underneath a circus wagon amid the mud and muck of a pounding thunderstorm to place himself in position for the attack.

In Freaks, Browning presents us with "real" horrors—injustice against humanity, whatever form that humanity may take. The fact that the freaks experience no consequences for their acts—a departure from his earlier formulas—is the final signal that Browning wants us to see ourselves in this struggle for justice and humanity. As humans, we have been outcasts essentially since our creation—exiled from the Garden for eating fruit we weren’t supposed to touch. This primitive indulgence and its resulting alienation are perhaps a condition we have been trying to reconcile ever since, and nowhere is this attempt at reconciliation more evident than in our art. Like the gangster, and sometimes like the monster, we find ourselves as embittered outcasts trying to regain some sense of ownership and control over our lives. Tod Browning is part of a cinematic tradition that allows us to do this and, thus, reintroduces us to our humanity.

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