Background
Tod Browning was born on 12 July 1882 in Louisville, Kentucky, United States.
Tod Browning was born on 12 July 1882 in Louisville, Kentucky, United States.
Browning ran away from school to join a circus, and in the next few years he roamed all over the world with traveling acts—this in the last years of the nineteenth century.
It is Boys’ Own romance and Browning emerged from it an actor. From 1913 he was with Biograph and he went on to work for D. W. Griffith on Intolerance. Thus inspired, he began directing, generally for Universal. In 1919, he made The Wicked Darling, in which Lon Chaney had a small part. They worked together again on Outside the Law, a Priscilla Dean vehicle in which Chaney filled two roles. For a few years, Browning made romantic melodramas: Dean again as Cigarette in Under Two Flags, and in Drifting and White Tiger; Eleanor Boardman and Tvrone Power Sr. in The Day of Faith; and two Evelyn Brent pictures—The Dangerous Flirt and Silk Stocking Sal. Then, in 1925, Chaney persuaded MGM to hire Browning. Reunited, they made The Unholy Three, The Blackbird. The Road to Mandalay. The Unknown. London After Midnight. West of Zanzibar.
The Big City, and Where East Is East, it was a fruitful collaboration. Browning wrote many of the original stories, stimulating Chaney’s extraordinary inventiveness at distorting makeup. The result often came close to that poignant conception of deformed creatures that makes Freaks so influential a film and that has constantly colored the best films in the horror genre. In The Unknown, for instance, Chaney plays a man who has had his arms amputated because Joan Crawford cannot hear to be touched. While in London After Midnight. Chaney was a hideous vampire so deformed that the makeup could he worn only for short periods. He also played the detective pursuing the vampire—an interesting reflection on the way horror films engage the two fantasy aspects of ourselves.
Briefly, Browning returned to Universal to make Outside the Law, an Edward G. Robinson thriller, and Dracula. Chaney was now dead and the title part was taken by Bela Lugosi. Although one of the original sound horror films, Dracula owes more to Lugosi than to Browning. James W’hale was able to exploit the basic nineteenth- century plots rather better than Browning, anti seemed to he more in tune with the two levels on which such films work. The contortions of Chaney had impressed Browning and he returned to MGM to make his masterpiece, Freaks, an allegory on the antagonism between the beautiful and the damned, and an inexplicably harrowing insight from the studio of so much glamour. A commercial flop, and widely banned. Freaks now seems less a horror picture than an indictment of the cult of attractiveness. Before his retirement, Browning made two more worthwhile pictures: Mark of the Vampire, a remake of London After Midnight, with Lionel Barrvmore and Lugosi splitting Chaney’s original roles; and The Devil Doll, scripted with Erich von Stroheim, with Barrvmore as an escaped convict selling dolls that are miniaturized humans. But neither of these is as interesting as the Whale films or as suggestive as the silent pictures made with Chaney.
Mark of the Vampire
1935The Devil Doll
1939Miracles for Sale
1939