Background

Tod Browning was born on July 12, 1880 Charles A. Browning in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Charles Avery Browning, a prosperous cabinetmaker, and Lydia J. Browning.

Education

Browning attended Louisville Male High School; but at sixteen, moved by desire for adventure, he joined a traveling circus, the Manhattan Fair and Carnival Company.

Career

Tod Browning served as boy-of-all-work and was introduced to sideshow grotesquerie and deception, which figured prominently in his films. At eighteen Browning became a jockey, but within three years he was a singer and dancer with river shows on the Ohio and Missouri. In 1905 Browning teamed with Roy C. Jones to form "Lizard and Coon, " a popular comedy-contortion act, and he played in other acts and in musical comedy.

In 1910 he joined a vaudeville-burlesque troop, "World of Mirth, " for three seasons as principal comic. While touring in Los Angeles in 1913, Browning visited the vaudevillian Charlie Murray, then working at the Mack Sennett studio. Murray persuaded him to try motion pictures, and in October 1913 Browning appeared in his first film, Scenting a Terrible Crime.

This one-reel Biograph comedy foreshadowed his later work: in the film neighbors mistake the smell of sauerkraut for the odor of a corpse, but they are set right by a German coroner.

In the same month Browning moved with the D. W. Griffith organization from Biograph to Mutual, where he appeared in a series of one-reel comedies released by Komic (1914 - 1915); most were directed by Eddie Dillon and costarred Fay Tincher. Browning also directed some twenty-five two-reel comedies (released by Reliance-Majestic) and obtained his first credit as scenarist of a Dorothy Gish film, Atta Boy's Last Race (1916), for Fine Arts/Triangle. He appeared as a crook and a race driver (and possibly other roles) in Griffith's Intolerance (1916). He was also one of Griffith's numerous assistants.

In 1917 Browning made his first feature, Jim Bludso (Fine Arts/Triangle), with Wilfrid Lucas. He made two more features with Lucas before moving to Metro Pictures to direct five suspense melodramas (1917 - 1918). After the war, Browning joined Universal Pictures for ten features with Priscilla Dean (1918 - 1923). These films marked his emergence as a major director, and the stories reflected his taste for underworld settings and low-life characters.

Outside the Law (1921), featuring Lon Chaney, and The White Tiger (1923) were adapted by Browning from his own stories. In these years he also made two features starring Edith Roberts and three with Mary MacLaren, all of them at Universal. Browning was among that studio's most successful directors, enjoying the support of production chief Irving Thalberg.

But from 1923 to 1925, he suffered severe alcoholism. He left Universal and made The Day of Faith (1923) for Goldwyn Picture Corporation and two minor Evelyn Brent romances for Film Booking Offices (1924). Recovering in 1925, Browning went to Thalberg, who was then at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Browning was to direct films for Chaney, whose popularity had increased with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Some believe Chaney personally requested Browning.

MGM was seeking a vehicle to equal Chaney's earlier successes, and Browning suggested a bizarre crime story, The Unholy Three. Filmed in 1925, it gained great popularity and became the first of eight grotesque fantasies by Chaney and Browning at MGM: The Black Bird (1926), The Road to Mandalay (1926), London After Midnight (1927), The Unknown (1927), The Big City (1928), West of Zanzibar (1928), and Where East Is East (1929). The films portrayed fake vampirism, transvestite disguise, and other aberrations. All but two had stories by Browning.

In this period he also directed MGM features starring John Gilbert, Conrad Nagel, Aileen Pringle, and Edward G. Robinson. With the coming of sound, Browning directed three pictures for Universal, of which Dracula (1931) became his most popular film. Cold and atmospheric, its romantic treatment of the vampire is not typical of the seediness Browning usually found in depravity.

Dracula began a vogue of horror films. Back at MGM Browning directed Freaks (1932), widely considered his finest work and one that best exemplifies his use of the grotesque. It presents real circus freaks as selfless members of a loyal community; the "normal" characters are greedy and dehumanized. The film's financial failure (and the enmity it aroused between Browning and Louis B. Mayer) undermined Browning's independence at MGM. In his last seven years before retirement, complaining of front office interference, he made only four films.

In 1939 Browning retired to his Malibu cottage. He traveled, tended his ranch, added to his occult and mystery library, and wrote stories.

One of these, Inside Job, was filmed by Universal in 1946. Studios sometimes called on him to rework problem scripts. After the death of his wife in 1944, Browning lived in seclusion.

He died in Santa Monica. Browning's reputation remains controversial.

Achievements

• Tod Browning was a pioneering director who helped create the horror film genre, Tod Browning made his mark on cinema via his 10-film collaboration with actor Lon Chaney, the first sound version of "Dracula" (1931), starring Bela Lugosi, and most particularly his master work, "Freaks" (1932). His work with Chaney during the silent era stood the test of time, which started with "The Wicked Darling" (1919) and ended with "Where East is East" (1929). In between, he had Chaney portray a transvestite in "The Unholy Three" (1925), a cripple in "The Black Bird" (1926) and a vampire in "London After Midnight" (1927). Meanwhile, after "Freaks, " he helmed "Mark of the Vampire" (1935), a remake of "London After Midnight, " "The Devil Doll" (1936) and "Miracles for Sale" (1939), before calling it a career. Raoul Walsh places him "around the first ten" American directors who began in the silent era; others dismiss him as a conscientious craftsman or even as a hack. He is generally more appreciated in Europe than in America.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Victory / The Wicked Darling : A Lon Chaney Double Feature

    (Long before he became known as the "Man of a Thousand Fac...)

  • Freaks (1932)

    ()

  • Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers (Modern American Literature)

    (Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the em...)

  • White Tiger (Silent)

    (Tod Browning, the renowned director best known for the cl...)

  • Lon Chaney Collection

    (Celebrating the virtuosity of the man of a thousand faces...)

  • The Blackbird

    (There's no honor among thieves in director Tod Browning's...)

  • The Show

    (From director Tod Browning comes this delirious tale of j...)

  • Fearmakers - Volume 1 Documentary

    (The greatest horror directors of all time are profiled in...)

  • Dracula (1931)
  • Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning
  • Shadows
  • The Black Bird (1926)
  • Les Revoltes (Outside the Law) (1920) + Documentary: "Tod Browning & Lon Chaney" (Non Us Format) (Region 2) (Import)
  • The Show (1927)
  • The Mystery of the Leaping Fish

Views

His forty-eight films, preoccupied with grotesque motifs drawn from the circus and underworld, encourage viewers almost cynically to distrust complacent, corrupt appearances; they also show a rare sympathy for characters ostracized by society and victimized by their own obsessions.

Personality

The death of his father sent Browning into a depression that led to alcoholism. He was laid off by Universal and his wife left him. However, he recovered, reconciled with his wife, and got a one-picture contract with Goldwyn Pictures.

Connections

He performed in the company was Alice L. Houghton Wilson, whom he married in 1916. They had no children. After the death of his wife in 1944, Browning lived in seclusion.

wife :

Alice Rae Browning

1887–1944

colleague:

Lon Chaney

actor

mother :

Lydia J. Fitzgerald Browning

1850–1928

Father :

Charles L. Browning

1850–1922

References

• Masculinity, Femininity and other Curiosities in Tod Browning's 'Freaks' and 'Dracula'
• The role of monstrous bodies in Tod Browning's FREAKS
• The Cinema of Tod Browning: Essays of the Macabre and Grotesque
• Tod Browning (Spanish Edition)