Tod Browning’s Ballyhoo Art

II. The Hypnotic Living Corpse

Tod Browning’s carny origins were always part of his mystique. As with many other film pioneers, even an exact birth date for the director born Charles Albert Browning is tricky to pin down. Browning himself filed a birth certificate in 1947 with the state of Kentucky, giving his birth year as 1880, but he was also known to cite 1882 or even 1874. And the “Tod” is likewise mysterious. It’s the German word for death, but we don’t know for sure if it came from his family or was a stage name he chose for its ghoulish panache. As for Browning’s tales about his years on the road with street fairs and carnivals—as Skal and Savada put it, they’re “largely unverifiable” and “often contradicted by surviving archival data.”

His childhood in Louisville seems to have been normal enough, but Browning didn’t stick around long. Early interviews and studio publicity claimed that sixteen-year-old Browning fell for a dancer in a traveling street fair—which brings up thoughts of the alluring carny ladies in all three movies presented here—and ran away to pursue her. His crush fizzled, but young Tod became an accomplished “ballyhoo artist,” the barker who stood outside a tent, rattling off all the reasons that the credulous locals should pay up to see what was inside. In this case, so the story goes, Browning’s tent held “the Wild Man of Borneo,” actually a costumed Black man from Mississippi. “Gaffed,” or faked, attractions were common in this world, and Browning himself may have played one, as he drifted from one carnival to another. Early Hollywood publicity even said he did a Nightmare Alley–style “geek act” as Bosco the Snake Eater. Geeks, the lowest of the low in the carny hierarchy, were usually late-stage alcoholics and other desperate souls whose act had them chase chickens around an enclosure and, in a grotesque flourish, bite off and swallow the bird’s head. If Browning really did work as Bosco, one hopes he faked the head-biting.

Equally alarming to anyone with even a touch of claustrophobia was Browning’s supposed work as the Hypnotic Living Corpse. A “hypnotist” would pretend to put Browning under, and he would then be lowered into a coffinlike box where the crowds could peer down a wooden shaft to observe him after the dirt had been shoveled in. That shaft of course also provided ventilation, plus it enabled coworkers to lower water and food that Browning could discreetly consume when the crowds thinned out. Browning breezily claimed that this nightmarish living grave, which often lasted as much as forty-eight hours, gave him plenty of time to think.

There exists a photo of Browning in blackface for a vaudeville act, and there are reviews of Browning’s comedic stylings in a burlesque show called The Whirl of Mirth. There are claims that he worked with magicians, including the legendary Leon Herrmann, which might explain how Browning became fascinated with exposing how illusions worked. Balancing the 
adventures, however, is Skal and Savada’s evidence that Browning also lived off and on at his family’s house in Louisville, as a boarder. They conclude that Browning, like many a modern young adult, went home to his parents between gigs.

After his stint in vaudeville, Browning, by then (probably) a little over thirty years old, tried his hand in the wild and woolly early film industry. In 1913, he began to work as a movie actor for D. W. Griffith in New York and followed the famed director to California. There, Browning acted in about fifty one-reel comic shorts and began directing one- and two-reelers. But the acting phase of his career was about to come to an abrupt and tragic end.

Browning was, at minimum, a problem drinker all his life, though at times he went on the wagon or switched from liquor to beer. Late on the night of June 16, 1915, a heavily inebriated Browning was flooring the gas pedal on the way home from a nightclub. Riding with him were George Siegmann and a rising young actor named Elmer Booth. It was a foggy night, and the results of alcohol, speeding, and lousy visibility were horrific: Browning’s vehicle slammed into a freight train carrying iron rails. Booth died instantly, Siegmann was badly hurt, and Browning’s own injuries kept him in the hospital for months. Skal and Savada believe that Browning’s teeth were knocked out, hence the mustache he wore for the rest of his life, which helped conceal dentures that never quite fit. Afterward, Browning shifted from acting into screenwriting, then directing—and focused on melodrama, not slapstick. Director Allan Dwan, who had been in a car close behind Browning’s and saw the accident’s bloody aftermath, said his once-athletic friend Tod gave up both exercise and sports.

It isn’t hard to imagine that the crash affected how Tod Browning perceived disability and disfigurement. He never discussed that night publicly, and his friends didn’t recall Browning ever mentioning it in private, either, not even to express regret. But as his career gained momentum, Browning’s work would increasingly deal with illness, injury, cruel fate—and bad choices.

III. “Always After Money”

Strictly speaking, the earliest film in this set, The Mystic, isn’t a carnival movie in the same sense as The Unknown and Freaks, which have plots that stay firmly planted in the world of stages, tents, and caravans. The Mystic begins in that world, with a bogus mentalist act performed by “Gypsies” (the common term for the Romani people in the 1920s) for a boisterous crowd in Hungary. Aileen Pringle is Zara, the fortune teller and star of the show, Mitchell Lewis is her father, and Robert Ober is Anton, the sidekick who’s in love with Zara. Along comes an American con artist (Conway Tearle), who introduces himself with “I’m Michael Nash—and I’m always after money.” He wants to bring the troupe to the big time—not Broadway but the drawing rooms of New York City. Nash’s plan is to polish Zara and co.’s act to a high gloss in order to separate Doris Merrick (Gladys Hulette) from the millions she inherited from her dead father. True to most such stories, at least a couple of the gang begin to grow a conscience.

The film fits the form of what film scholar Vivian Sobchack calls Browning’s “crook melodramas,” but it has a carny heart. That’s most obvious in the initial division between the knowing gang and their marks—the “us against the world” element of the sideshows that parted rubes from their dollars. That attitude may have justified a lot of criminality, but it has also endeared Browning’s work to countless misfits over the years. At the same time, Browning breaks part of the carny and magician code: he delights in showing the precise workings of the phony séances. A couple of key scenes involve someone hiding in an alarmingly small secret panel, in an echo of Browning’s time as the Hypnotic Living Corpse.

Aileen Pringle isn’t widely remembered even by connoisseurs of silent stars, but she had a good career and a long and lively retirement in which she became a more cultivated breed of socialite than the swells lampooned in The Mystic. Pringle came from a wealthy family, and in her heyday was usually cast as a high-society kind of dame, like the one she played in the film version of the Elinor Glyn romance Three Weeks (1924). As the crooked Zara, Pringle is clearly having a great time, both in the early scenes, where she plays hip-swinging tough with Conway Tearle, and later, when she swishes around nightclubs and stages in luxe outfits, then cleanly reverts to her real self and plots a jewel heist.

Those gowns and headdresses came courtesy of Romain de Tirtoff, the great stage and costume designer who was known as Erté and closely associated with art deco. Erté was more or less imposed on Browning by MGM head Louis B. Mayer, and Pringle said neither director nor designer had the mistiest notion of what the other did for a living. In fact, when one lavish costume ripped, Browning chased Erté off the soundstage, shouting an antigay slur. While they might not have pleased Browning, the costumes remain one of the movie’s best elements, emphasizing Zara’s flamboyance and the absurdity of the “spook show” that people are only too willing to fall for.

IV. “Anything but a Pleasant Story”

When Tod Browning first directed Lon Chaney, it was in a supporting role: that of a sinister crook in a Universal melodrama, The Wicked Darling (1919), which starred the charming and popular Priscilla Dean. There was, however, something electric already in Chaney and in the way Browning filmed him. Chaney’s stance, his stare, his movements seem to hypnotize the camera itself. He had star quality from the first, and Browning, like no other director, had the ability to highlight it. They followed up The Wicked Darling with a wildly contrasting double role for Chaney, as both a vicious gangster and Ah Wing, a Chinese philosopher, in the 1920 version of Outside the Law.

Now it seems an inevitable partnership—two men with long, colorful, and at times painful experience rising through the ranks of showbiz, who had both landed in “the flickers.” Chaney, born in 1883, was the son of deaf parents, and it is often said that he honed his superb pantomime skills to communicate with them. Chaney, like Browning, spent years touring the vaudeville circuit. And the actor’s early adulthood was marked by tragedy, when, in 1913, his wife, Cleva, a singer, drank corrosive poison and ruined her vocal cords. Afterward, just as Browning never mentioned his fatal drunken crash, Cleva’s name was one that Chaney never spoke—not even to their son, whom Chaney raised and who grew up to be the actor Lon Chaney Jr. The public scandal of Cleva’s suicide attempt caused Chaney to seek a fresh start, entering the movie business, where Browning was already earning a living. Both men eventually made their names in the genres of mystery and horror, in stories replete with murder, mutilation, and strange and ugly coincidences.

Yet after Outside the Law, amazingly, it was five years before this meant-to-be team reunited. By then, Browning was in one of his periodic career troughs, having recently fallen off the wagon and been dropped by Universal and (temporarily) his wife. Browning had mostly pulled himself together, but, as they say, he needed a hit. Chaney, on the other hand, had become a major star through not-Browning vehicles like Hunchback (1923) and He Who Gets Slapped (1924).

This was the situation when Browning and Chaney reunited, at MGM, for The Unholy Three, in which Chaney plays a ventriloquist who’s the leader of a ruthless gang. The source material was a novel by Tod Robbins, whose story “Spurs” would later inspire Browning’s Freaks. The Unholy Three remains a creepy and even shocking film, although the genius of Browning and Chaney’s partnership is that you could say that about nearly anything they made together. The Unholy Three was a smash, and led to other profitable films for the pair—MGM brass knowing a good thing when they saw it—including The Blackbird, The Road to Mandalay (both 1926), and the long-lost London After Midnight (1927).

The Unknown was Browning and Chaney’s sixth collaboration, and it all came together in this one—the carnival background, the sociopathic criminals, the body horror, the sublimated sex. Set in Madrid for an extra touch of the exotic, the movie (originally titled Alonzo the Armless) concerns an armless carnival performer (Chaney) who has a knife-throwing and sharpshooting act done entirely with his feet. But like most Browning protagonists, Alonzo has a dark secret: he is wanted by the police, and is hiding out in the carnival, careful to conceal the physical secrets that could give him away.

Alonzo is passionately in love with the assistant in his act, Nanon, played by Joan Crawford at her most seductive. Nanon is in turn loved by Malabar (Norman Kerry), the strongman, but Alonzo figures he has an advantage: Nanon has a deep loathing of men’s arms, declaring that she hates the very idea of being held by a man. As the law closes in, Alonzo makes an astonishingly terrible decision, one that, of course, goes very badly indeed.

Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times wrote, with lofty understatement, that The Unknown is “anything but a pleasant story.” It is, however—and Browning doesn’t always get enough credit for this—an incredible actors’ showcase. Browning gets a marvelous performance out of the relatively inexperienced Crawford. She always spoke highly of Chaney, crediting him as the first costar who made her understand the fundamentals of screen acting. And close observation of her work shows that what is usually described by male critics as Nanon’s “phobia” is clearly more than that. Crawford is playing what we now call trauma, quite likely stemming from violence. (The way Nanon recoils from her father is another broad hint.) It’s easy to understand why a young and beautiful woman in a rough-and-tumble carnival might be disgusted by men in general. Crawford herself had paid her dues on a chorus line, and she puts her all into Nanon’s fears: “Hands! Men’s hands! How I hate them! . . . God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!”

The George Eastman Museum recently restored The Unknown to something near its full length, adding back about ten minutes of footage—a fair bit of which consists of fades and close-ups—that distributors had trimmed because they thought that stuff just slowed the film down. They were doing a grave disservice to Lon Chaney and his director, since The Unknown contains some of the finest reaction shots of Chaney’s career. Alonzo’s thoughts are dark, demonic—and we can read them all when Chaney’s face is turned toward the camera.

Though the film’s editing cleverly suggests otherwise, and MGM publicity shamelessly lied about it, the required contortions were beyond even the legendary Chaney’s abilities. Scenes of Alonzo using his feet to light cigarettes, to eat his food, and even to play a guitar were all accomplished by a real-life carnival performer, Paul Desmuke, who was born without arms. It was yet another way in which The Unknown foreshadowed Freaks.

V. “I Asked for Something Horrifying”

From this distance, nearly a century after the film was made, it’s hard to comprehend the sheer hysteria of the 1932 reactions to Freaks. Many reviews have a whiff of class prejudice to go with the era’s eugenics, such as Elinor Hughes’s in the Boston Herald: “Any who enjoy watching the pitiful, grotesque mistakes of nature may behold them in Freaks.” Sideshows, in other words, are a low form of entertainment that have a degrading effect on the masses.

Before Freaks came out, as MGM played up the film in the fan magazines and trades, the choice of material may have made sense from a commercial perspective. After Browning’s smash hit Dracula (1931) for Universal, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg had signed him to a new contract, and the Boy Wonder offered the posh jewel-thief saga of Arsène Lupin as a welcome-home gift. Browning countered that he wanted to make a film from Robbins’s story “Spurs,” about a circus beauty who marries a little person for his money, only to suffer his dark and vicious revenge. Thalberg was intrigued. Universal—also Thalberg’s ex-employer—had been making a killing with monster movies, the story seemed at least vaguely monster-adjacent, and surely lavish MGM could outdo cheapskate Universal.

Like the story it’s based on, not much in Freaks is overtly gruesome, however, despite a script by Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon that is said to have caused Thalberg to put his head in his hands and moan, “I asked for something horrifying, and I got it.” The film has frightening moments, and a memorably shocking payoff, but that wasn’t what the reviews focused on. The problem was those people and what critics and viewers called their deformities. The distancing effects of makeup and trick photography were largely absent. Instead, Browning cast real carnival performers, with Schlitze (a man with microcephaly), Frances O’Connor (“the Living Venus de Milo”), Prince Randian (“the Living Torso”), and Johnny Eck (“Half Boy”) playing versions of themselves. In that regard, as critic Kristen Lopez has argued, Freaks remains a landmark for its portrayal of disability—these are real people, shown not as objects of unwanted pity but as “performers who enjoy performing,” as she puts it.

Along with Greed and The Magnificent Ambersons, Freaks is one of the most notorious victims of brutal Hollywood editing. After some in the preview audience ran from the theater, more than two entire reels were eliminated before Thalberg was satisfied. Some cuts involved Hercules’s and Cleopatra’s violent fates. Other cuts, like those affecting Edith “the Turtle Girl,” had a different purpose: don’t show too much disability. At the time, and for many years afterward, the mere presence of disabled people in Freaks was reason enough to call it “horror.” The ugliest story from the making of the film is that only established film pro Harry Earles (who had played the unholiest in Browning’s The Unholy Three in 1925) and his sister Daisy, as well as the famous conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, were permitted to eat inside the MGM commissary. The other carnival veterans were banished outside for lunch after certain VIPs, led by producer Harry Rapf, complained that the sight of the Freaks cast put everyone else off their food.

In the film, those VIPs have their spiritual equivalent in Cleopatra, the trapeze artist so fiendishly played by Olga Baclanova. Blond and beautiful, though no longer a youngster, and thus in need of a less strenuous career, Cleopatra is having an affair with strongman Hercules (Henry Victor). She is loved by fellow performer Hans (Earles), but he is a little person and in Cleo’s eyes fit for nothing but mockery—and marrying, then murdering, for his money.

“One of us, one of us, gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, we accept her, we accept her,” goes the immortal chant of the sideshow performers at Hans and Cleopatra’s wedding banquet. And whether or not critics missed the point in 1932, it is unmistakable now. When Cleopatra flees her own wedding in disgust, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the sideshow people. It means she isn’t one of them because she’s not worthy of them. “My people are decent circus folks,” says kindhearted Venus (Leila Hyams). “Not dirty rats what would kill a freak to get his money.” We cringe from her use of that word to describe Hans, but still, Venus is right. Decent circus folks accept one another. Tod Browning accepted them. He wanted moviegoers to do the same.

Freaks remains, even more than the legendary but rather static Dracula, the film most associated with the art and ambitions of Tod Browning. This film maudit represented the summit of his career, but the problem with a summit is always the same: there’s nowhere to go but down. Even after the brutal reviews rolled in, and MGM took a financial bath on the production, Browning’s career didn’t halt. He made good films after Freaks—Mark of the Vampire in 1935, The Devil Doll in 1936—but they feel less personal. He never again made anything with a carnival theme.

Browning directed his last movie in 1939, and retired. He had made good money from sound investments and claimed not to miss the business. “When I quit a thing,” he said, “I quit.” But any real artist—and Tod Browning was that—hopes the work will live on, will continue to connect. He acknowledged this, however tersely, in a letter responding to a critic’s enthusiastic overview of his career in 1953: “Your article in Films in Review was very—very—good. Thanks.” It is a shame that Browning spent so many years steadfastly refusing to answer questions from fans, reporters, historians, or anyone else who might have recorded more information than the small amount we’re left with. But that was Tod Browning. He drew us in. We laughed, we shuddered, we felt kinship with even his most twisted characters. And as far as he was concerned, we left the tent with nothing to complain about.