![]() Helen Chandler and Bela Lugosi in Dracula. West of Zanzibar, from 1928, stokes the same insecurities, featuring a magician (Chaney, yet again) cuckolded and paralyzed from the waist down in a fight with the other man. The Unknown, from 1927, immerses itself in castration anxiety by cheekily conflating one appendage with the other: an ersatz armless man (Chaney, natch) actually gets the double amputation he’s always faked so he can be with his extremity-phobic paramour, only for her to ditch him and shack up with a bigger, stronger male prospect. With virtue reduced to a phoney pose, erotic drive supplants it as the currency of purity, Browning’s mid-period films populated by hostages to their own carnal tastes. ![]() Honest sin has more purchase with Browning than false virtue in 1926’s The Blackbird, Chaney plays an irresistibly suave no-goodnik moonlighting as a “bishop” right out of a Flannery O’Connor story, his piety and bum leg both ruses to hoodwink suckers out of a few bucks. In this light, coming from a man who learned to survive on his own from a young age, ruthlessness can be read as a sign of respect. Maybe Browning reinforced the widespread distrust and fear of the physically different with this depiction, but it sure beats the gentle pity extended by eggshell-walking writers so fearful to offend that they equate disability with an edgeless agreeability. Earles dials up the nefariousness as a coldblooded crook – in footage excised before the release, he strangles a three-year-old child – and meets a fittingly grisly fate. Just as formative was Browning’s casting of Harry Earles, who played a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz, as a blackhearted manipulator fleecing a poor sap by posing as a baby. In 1925, his sordid, delectable The Unholy Three introduced many of what would become his trademarks: tangled psychosexual neuroses, a scam involving false identities, a double role for Chaney that hints at themes of inner duality. (With Drifting, Browning also considered another notion of outsiderism in an 18-year-old Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Asian movie star.)Įven as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera immortalized “the man of a thousand faces”, Chaney stuck with Browning when the hungry young film-maker moved to MGM. The relaxed rulebook of the pre-Hays Code period allowed Browning to give these sketchy, shady flimflam artists meaningful desires and motivations that would eventually be replaced by compulsory two-dimensional villainy. Priscilla Dean and Lon Chaney fill out their own rogues’ gallery in such early silents as The Wicked Darling, Outside the Law and Drifting, their specialty being criminals too quick-witted to be written off as two-bit hustlers. His filmography began in earnest with a pair of collaborations that partnered him with willing, able vessels for the turpitude he sought to exorcise by splaying it on-screen. He settled into the director’s chair and kicked his output into high gear with a couple dozen one- and two-reelers that gave him a feel for the emotive, illusory potential of the still-primitive movie camera. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamyĭeep in the grips of alcoholism by his 30s, Browning latched on to a renewed sense of purpose after a near-death experience driving his car into a moving train in the summer of 1915. Caught between his impulse to gawk at the exotic and his flowering compassion for human beings most movies preferred not exist, he located a tragic humanity in every stripe of outcast.Įdward G Robinson in Outside the Law. ![]() ![]() Unspeakable: The Films of Tod Browning collects 17 key titles from the maestro of the macabre, and illustrates that the full breadth of his filmography stretches far beyond the horror genre he’s now famed for jump-starting. It’s been a long while since the days when the circus presented a viable occupation for an unruly youth, enough time for Browning to appreciate from a deviant peddling filth to an esteemed auteur worthy of his own retrospective at a hall of the highbrow like New York’s Lincoln Center. Three years later, he’d take leave of the stage with sights set on the burgeoning silent film industry, but he’d carry the lurid spirit of the big top with him through the rest of an illustrious, disreputable career. He would spend 10 years cutting his teeth as a barker, song-and-dance man, clown and contortionist before rechristening himself Tod, the German word for “death”, conferring a ghastly gravitas. ![]() Just before the turn of the 20th century, at the ripe age of 16, a bricklayer’s son named Charles Albert Browning Jr decided that these were his people and abandoned his well-heeled family to join their grubby ranks. ![]()
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