 |
| Freaks one of Browning's oddball masterpieces |
The city of Louisville is responsible for a lot of American whackos. While the city’s most famous offspring is the overhyped showboat and draft dodger Muhammad Ali, it also lays claim to gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Birth of a Nation director D.W. Griffith, and early baseball hero Pete Browning. There must be something in the water!
According to authors David J. Skal and Elias Savada in their 1995 book Dark Carnival, Browning, a center and left fielder who spent the majority of his short career in his native Louisville, has never been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame because he was such a legendary drunk. In an era when it was not uncommon for baseball players to sip from bottles of whisky in between innings, Browning managed to make a drunken spectacle out of himself. One tall tale has it that Pete’s teammates put a keg of beer near third base to encourage the usually lazy outfielder to hustle. During one game against the rival team from Cincinnati, Browning fell into an alcohol-induced slumber a few feet from second base.
This man was the uncle to another Louisville eccentric and the subject of this essay, Charles Albert “Tod” Browning, Jr.
Like his relative, Tod would grow up to be a legendary drunk whose will dictated that a friend finish off a case of Coors at his funeral. Browning, to put it mildly, was an American original and arguably the man responsible for introducing the masses to an all-American brand of horror. Browning, an enthusiast of baseball, prizefights, and young, beautiful women, was light years away from the “post-American” crowd that now dominates the cinema world. However, Browning also shared some familiar vices. Often described as a sadist and a noted fan of marathon dance/torture sessions that sprouted like weeds in Depression-era California, Browning also carried on a not-so-secret affair with an underage actress. The actress just so happened to be Anna May Wong, thus upping the ante for the 1920s by connecting Browning to an interracial and pedophilic romance. (David Butler, who knew Browning back in the 1920s, characterized the relationship as part of Browning’s desire for “ ‘something different’”).
Dark Carnival makes it clear that sex parties and drug use were the norm in silent-era Hollywood. But sexual debauchery aside Browning should be studied as the first man who exposed the Jungian shadow to American audiences. For his pains, and for constantly putting the ugly and the liminal on screen, Browning was usually dismissed as a hack by stateside critics. However, like Poe, Hawthorne, and Lovecraft, European, especially French critics, took to Browning’s outré worldview and characterized him as an important auteur.
So what makes Browning’s films so different and why is his name still revered among horror film enthusiasts? For starters, Browning is the man who made 1931’s Dracula the first major Hollywood horror film of the talkie era. Bela Lugosi’s turn as the vampire from Transylvania is still the archetype of the cinematic bloodsucker. Dracula is Browning’s best known work, but it is neither his masterpiece nor his most important film. Indeed, Dracula is a cinematographic dream thanks in part to German expat Karl Freund, who, along with Browning himself, did much to introduce American audiences to the dark majesty of German Expressionism. However, Dracula sports a clunky narrative and is marred by several strange editing decisions.
To truly understand the genius of Browning and his vision of American society, one must start with his silent collaborations with the great actor Lon Chaney. The pair first collaborated on a crime film called Outside the Law.
Outside the Law concerns Molly “Silky Moll” Madden (played by Priscilla Dean), a typical Irish American “gun moll” who ultimately succeeds in reforming her ways. The person who tries to keep Molly from going legit is San Francisco tough “Black Mike” Sylva (played by Chaney). Outside the Law contains the hallmarks that would later define Browning: a focus on the ugly, exoticism and eroticism (much of the film is set in Chinatown, the major symbol of sensuality and horror in 1920s pulp), and an interplay between sexual perversion and chastity. The film also gleefully wallowed in criminality at a time when, because of Prohibition, millions of thirsty Americans suddenly found themselves outside of the law.
Other Chaney-Browning crime films include The Blackbird (1926), The Unholy Three (1925), The Road to Mandalay (1926), London After Midnight (1927), The Unknown (1927), and West of Zanzibar (1928). Of these films, The Unholy Three, The Road to Mandalay, West of Zanzibar, and The Unknown deserve closer scrutiny.
The Road to Mandalay, now a lost film, and West of Zanzibar both deal with more or less the same topic. Both are exotic melodramas, with the former set in Burma and the other in the Congo. Back in the 1920s, these two nations were still under white rule, with Burma a part of British India and the Congo under the watchful eyes of the Belgians.
In The Road to Mandalay, the seamier side of European rule is contained within the character of “Singapore” Joe (Chaney), a one-eyed whoremaster. Joe tries to break up the romance between a convent-raised white girl (played by Lois Moran) and one of Joe’s former business partners (played by Owen Moore). Joe tries to ruin the couple’s marriage as a way to get back at his former partner, but he winds up being knifed to death by an Asian after that man’s unsuccessful rape attempt of the female lead. The true shocker in The Road to Mandalay is the fact that the woman of the movie is Joe’s daughter, thus slathering Freudian themes all over Joe’s predatory nature towards the relationship.
West of Zanzibar makes the father-daughter taboo even more explicit. The film concerns a paralyzed former magician named Phroso (played by Chaney) who concocts a scheme to get back at the ivory trader (played by Lionel Barrymore) who stole Phroso’s love away from him. Prior to relocating to the Congo and becoming a god to the superstitious natives, Phroso finds the love of his life dead inside of a cathedral alongside her living female toddler. Angry about his maiming (which renders his lower half unusable), Phroso decides to get revenge by raising the daughter of the ivory trader as a simple prostitute in Zanzibar.
Eighteen years later, Phroso attempts to show the trader, a man named Crane, how his once beautiful blonde daughter has become a slut and an alcoholic. Believing that Crane will kill himself because of this knowledge, thus triggering the native custom of sati, Phroso finally reveals his plot over glasses of whisky. A smiling, somewhat drunk Crane reveals to Phroso that the girl is his daughter, not Crane’s. In essence, Phroso raised his own daughter as a harlot. Kongo, the original stage play that inspired West of Zanzibar, made things even more explicit: rather than becoming a drunk, Phroso’s daughter contracted syphilis in the Zanzibar whorehouse.
This knowledge drives Phroso to suicidal sadness, and he connives to have the natives burn him alive instead of his daughter. Such fatalism was common to characters played by Chaney, as was the themes of amputation and sexual frustration. Chaney, you see, never got the girl. This was mostly because he either played cripples who couldn't use their lower portions, criminals, or hideous Parisian phantoms. Browning, who ran away to the circus at a young age and for a time played a “living corpse,” was naturally attracted to such characters.
In The Unknown, Chaney plays "Alonzo the Armless," a circus performer who actually has arms. In order to keep up appearances, Alonzo wears a corset that pins his arms behind his back. Besides economic security, Alonzo also pretends to be armless because he is a wanted criminal who can be easily identified via the double thumbs on one of his hands.
As the film progresses, Alonzo falls in love with his assistant, played by a very comely Joan Crawford. Crawford’s character, Nanon, has a pathological hatred of male arms. So, one night while the circus is in town, Alonzo blackmails a doctor into actually amputating his arms. When Alonzo goes to show Nanon his new physique, she reveals that she has gotten over her phobia and is in love with the strong arms of circus performer Malabar the Mighty (played by Norman Kerry). Incensed, Alonzo tries to have Malabar’s arms ripped during a weird act involving Malabar controlling two horses on treadmills, but Alonzo ultimately gives into his sadness and kills himself for Nanon’s happiness.
The Unknown is arguably Browning’s best film. It contains all his trademarks: carnivals, the underside of life, sexual repression, and mutilation. While perversity would later be excised from Browning’s films (for instance, the vampires in the 1935 Browning film Mark of the Vampire were supposedly an incestuous couple according to the original and heavily edited script by Communist writer Guy Endore), The Unknown contains all of the story’s intended warts.
Editing for moral reasons also struck on The Unholy Three, Browning’s first box office smash. Based on a novel by Tod Robbins, The Unholy Three concerns a convoluted jewel heist featuring three sideshow performers. The ringleader is the ventriloquist Prof. Echo (Chaney), who spends most of the film in drag as a kindly old grandmother. Prof. Echo’s associates include the dumb strongman Hercules (Victor McLaglen) and the midget Tweedledee (played by real German midget Harry Earles). Robbins’ original novel has Tweedledee as the mastermind motivated by a hatred of all normal-sized people. The film version does away with this angle, but it keeps Tweedledee as the film’s most psychotic member.
In one deleted scene, Tweedledee attempts to strangle a little girl who comes close to discovering the trio’s secret. Oddly enough, the censors disliked the scene of an adult Earles attacking and wounding a child actress, but they agreed to a replacement scene where a newspaper headline makes it clear that the young girl was murdered.
All of Browning’s morbidity finally coalesced into the 1932 film, Freaks.
Freaks is the film that forever soured Browning’s name in Hollywood, and by the time that the reclusive director died in 1962, he hadn’t directed a motion picture since 1939. Freaks is once again set among the world of carnies, and, for the time, it made the very radical decision to cast actual “freaks.” Real-life human torsos, bearded women, transvestites, and Siamese twins are the supporting characters of Freaks, while the midget Hans (played by Earles) is the unfortunate protagonist who is rejected by his normal-sized wife, Cleopatra (played by Olga Baclanova).
In the film’s most quoted scene, a drunken Cleopatra, who is conspiring with the circus’s strongman to kill Hans for his fortune, rejects the circus freaks and proclaims that she will never become one of them. This outburst at the strange wedding feast seals Cleopatra’s fate, for, on the night when she plans to murder Hans, the freaks gang up on her, mutilate her, and castrate her lover. Cleopatra ends the film as an attraction—a half-duck hybrid that quacks rather than talks.
Freaks is these days lauded as a misunderstood masterpiece. Back in 1932, most people thought that Browning was making fun of and exploiting his cast. Modern critics see Freaks as a celebration of the ultimate underdogs in the face of social ostracism. The latter is probably closer to the truth, for Browning’s oeuvre is the dark face of the traditional American support for the underdog.
America traditionally is a nation that champions the self-made, the good-looking, and the youthful. But America is also the land of tabloid freaks, sideshow attractions, and lovable losers. While European horror filmmakers were busy dealing with the nightmarish and irrational, Browning created the American horror film genre by focusing on the disfigured, vengeful losers in the never-ending war between the sexes. The current culture of sexual frustration, incels, and cynical #MeToo heroes-victims-cum-groomers, is all but screaming out for a new era of Browning-esque movies. The closest we’ve come is the 2014 film It Follows, which is about an unknown and sexually-transmitted curse that sees victims stalked by naked and malevolent revenants.
Watching Browning’s films today reminds viewers just how much current cinema prizes good looks. Browning’s films contain plenty of physically unattractive people; no film today hires the homely unless the purpose is to use them for cheap laughs. In many ways, although Browning’s horror films presented a gothic imagining of the carefree 1920s, his films are more realistic portrayals of the underside—the underworld where crime and lust commingle.
Browning’s films not only created a uniquely American vision of horror, but they also shocked audiences with their unbridled enthusiasm for presenting all the grotesque gargoyles of life, especially life after the great mass maiming called the First World War.
Films like West of Zanzibar and Freaks show that cinema has always been obsessed with the perverted, and, conversely, cinemagoers have always flocked to the movies in order to enjoy their sexual perversions. Browning’s brand of perversion merely made anti-heroes out of tragically ugly losers and maimed psychopaths. These heroes are only beautified after they renounce their previously amoral ways. Chaney’s villains almost always find redemption through self-sacrifice. In contrast, contemporary films and indeed contemporary American society, makes heroes out of the unabashedly unnatural, depraved, and decadent. The only thing that matters is that they look good while sinning.
According to authors David J. Skal and Elias Savada in their 1995 book Dark Carnival, Browning, a center and left fielder who spent the majority of his short career in his native Louisville, has never been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame because he was such a legendary drunk. In an era when it was not uncommon for baseball players to sip from bottles of whisky in between innings, Browning managed to make a drunken spectacle out of himself. One tall tale has it that Pete’s teammates put a keg of beer near third base to encourage the usually lazy outfielder to hustle. During one game against the rival team from Cincinnati, Browning fell into an alcohol-induced slumber a few feet from second base.
This man was the uncle to another Louisville eccentric and the subject of this essay, Charles Albert “Tod” Browning, Jr.
Like his relative, Tod would grow up to be a legendary drunk whose will dictated that a friend finish off a case of Coors at his funeral. Browning, to put it mildly, was an American original and arguably the man responsible for introducing the masses to an all-American brand of horror. Browning, an enthusiast of baseball, prizefights, and young, beautiful women, was light years away from the “post-American” crowd that now dominates the cinema world. However, Browning also shared some familiar vices. Often described as a sadist and a noted fan of marathon dance/torture sessions that sprouted like weeds in Depression-era California, Browning also carried on a not-so-secret affair with an underage actress. The actress just so happened to be Anna May Wong, thus upping the ante for the 1920s by connecting Browning to an interracial and pedophilic romance. (David Butler, who knew Browning back in the 1920s, characterized the relationship as part of Browning’s desire for “ ‘something different’”).
 |
| If it feels so Wong... |
So what makes Browning’s films so different and why is his name still revered among horror film enthusiasts? For starters, Browning is the man who made 1931’s Dracula the first major Hollywood horror film of the talkie era. Bela Lugosi’s turn as the vampire from Transylvania is still the archetype of the cinematic bloodsucker. Dracula is Browning’s best known work, but it is neither his masterpiece nor his most important film. Indeed, Dracula is a cinematographic dream thanks in part to German expat Karl Freund, who, along with Browning himself, did much to introduce American audiences to the dark majesty of German Expressionism. However, Dracula sports a clunky narrative and is marred by several strange editing decisions.
To truly understand the genius of Browning and his vision of American society, one must start with his silent collaborations with the great actor Lon Chaney. The pair first collaborated on a crime film called Outside the Law.
Outside the Law concerns Molly “Silky Moll” Madden (played by Priscilla Dean), a typical Irish American “gun moll” who ultimately succeeds in reforming her ways. The person who tries to keep Molly from going legit is San Francisco tough “Black Mike” Sylva (played by Chaney). Outside the Law contains the hallmarks that would later define Browning: a focus on the ugly, exoticism and eroticism (much of the film is set in Chinatown, the major symbol of sensuality and horror in 1920s pulp), and an interplay between sexual perversion and chastity. The film also gleefully wallowed in criminality at a time when, because of Prohibition, millions of thirsty Americans suddenly found themselves outside of the law.
Other Chaney-Browning crime films include The Blackbird (1926), The Unholy Three (1925), The Road to Mandalay (1926), London After Midnight (1927), The Unknown (1927), and West of Zanzibar (1928). Of these films, The Unholy Three, The Road to Mandalay, West of Zanzibar, and The Unknown deserve closer scrutiny.
In The Road to Mandalay, the seamier side of European rule is contained within the character of “Singapore” Joe (Chaney), a one-eyed whoremaster. Joe tries to break up the romance between a convent-raised white girl (played by Lois Moran) and one of Joe’s former business partners (played by Owen Moore). Joe tries to ruin the couple’s marriage as a way to get back at his former partner, but he winds up being knifed to death by an Asian after that man’s unsuccessful rape attempt of the female lead. The true shocker in The Road to Mandalay is the fact that the woman of the movie is Joe’s daughter, thus slathering Freudian themes all over Joe’s predatory nature towards the relationship.
West of Zanzibar makes the father-daughter taboo even more explicit. The film concerns a paralyzed former magician named Phroso (played by Chaney) who concocts a scheme to get back at the ivory trader (played by Lionel Barrymore) who stole Phroso’s love away from him. Prior to relocating to the Congo and becoming a god to the superstitious natives, Phroso finds the love of his life dead inside of a cathedral alongside her living female toddler. Angry about his maiming (which renders his lower half unusable), Phroso decides to get revenge by raising the daughter of the ivory trader as a simple prostitute in Zanzibar.
Eighteen years later, Phroso attempts to show the trader, a man named Crane, how his once beautiful blonde daughter has become a slut and an alcoholic. Believing that Crane will kill himself because of this knowledge, thus triggering the native custom of sati, Phroso finally reveals his plot over glasses of whisky. A smiling, somewhat drunk Crane reveals to Phroso that the girl is his daughter, not Crane’s. In essence, Phroso raised his own daughter as a harlot. Kongo, the original stage play that inspired West of Zanzibar, made things even more explicit: rather than becoming a drunk, Phroso’s daughter contracted syphilis in the Zanzibar whorehouse.
This knowledge drives Phroso to suicidal sadness, and he connives to have the natives burn him alive instead of his daughter. Such fatalism was common to characters played by Chaney, as was the themes of amputation and sexual frustration. Chaney, you see, never got the girl. This was mostly because he either played cripples who couldn't use their lower portions, criminals, or hideous Parisian phantoms. Browning, who ran away to the circus at a young age and for a time played a “living corpse,” was naturally attracted to such characters.
In The Unknown, Chaney plays "Alonzo the Armless," a circus performer who actually has arms. In order to keep up appearances, Alonzo wears a corset that pins his arms behind his back. Besides economic security, Alonzo also pretends to be armless because he is a wanted criminal who can be easily identified via the double thumbs on one of his hands.
 |
| No fapping allowed: Joan Crawford and Lon Chaney as Alonso the Armless. |
The Unknown is arguably Browning’s best film. It contains all his trademarks: carnivals, the underside of life, sexual repression, and mutilation. While perversity would later be excised from Browning’s films (for instance, the vampires in the 1935 Browning film Mark of the Vampire were supposedly an incestuous couple according to the original and heavily edited script by Communist writer Guy Endore), The Unknown contains all of the story’s intended warts.
Editing for moral reasons also struck on The Unholy Three, Browning’s first box office smash. Based on a novel by Tod Robbins, The Unholy Three concerns a convoluted jewel heist featuring three sideshow performers. The ringleader is the ventriloquist Prof. Echo (Chaney), who spends most of the film in drag as a kindly old grandmother. Prof. Echo’s associates include the dumb strongman Hercules (Victor McLaglen) and the midget Tweedledee (played by real German midget Harry Earles). Robbins’ original novel has Tweedledee as the mastermind motivated by a hatred of all normal-sized people. The film version does away with this angle, but it keeps Tweedledee as the film’s most psychotic member.
In one deleted scene, Tweedledee attempts to strangle a little girl who comes close to discovering the trio’s secret. Oddly enough, the censors disliked the scene of an adult Earles attacking and wounding a child actress, but they agreed to a replacement scene where a newspaper headline makes it clear that the young girl was murdered.
All of Browning’s morbidity finally coalesced into the 1932 film, Freaks.
In the film’s most quoted scene, a drunken Cleopatra, who is conspiring with the circus’s strongman to kill Hans for his fortune, rejects the circus freaks and proclaims that she will never become one of them. This outburst at the strange wedding feast seals Cleopatra’s fate, for, on the night when she plans to murder Hans, the freaks gang up on her, mutilate her, and castrate her lover. Cleopatra ends the film as an attraction—a half-duck hybrid that quacks rather than talks.
Freaks is these days lauded as a misunderstood masterpiece. Back in 1932, most people thought that Browning was making fun of and exploiting his cast. Modern critics see Freaks as a celebration of the ultimate underdogs in the face of social ostracism. The latter is probably closer to the truth, for Browning’s oeuvre is the dark face of the traditional American support for the underdog.
 |
| Visionary filmmaker Tod Browning |
Watching Browning’s films today reminds viewers just how much current cinema prizes good looks. Browning’s films contain plenty of physically unattractive people; no film today hires the homely unless the purpose is to use them for cheap laughs. In many ways, although Browning’s horror films presented a gothic imagining of the carefree 1920s, his films are more realistic portrayals of the underside—the underworld where crime and lust commingle.
Browning’s films not only created a uniquely American vision of horror, but they also shocked audiences with their unbridled enthusiasm for presenting all the grotesque gargoyles of life, especially life after the great mass maiming called the First World War.
Films like West of Zanzibar and Freaks show that cinema has always been obsessed with the perverted, and, conversely, cinemagoers have always flocked to the movies in order to enjoy their sexual perversions. Browning’s brand of perversion merely made anti-heroes out of tragically ugly losers and maimed psychopaths. These heroes are only beautified after they renounce their previously amoral ways. Chaney’s villains almost always find redemption through self-sacrifice. In contrast, contemporary films and indeed contemporary American society, makes heroes out of the unabashedly unnatural, depraved, and decadent. The only thing that matters is that they look good while sinning.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your comment will appear after it has been checked for spam, trolling, and hate speech.