American film director (1880–1962)
Tod Browning | |
|---|---|
Browning in 1921 | |
| Born | Charles Albert Browning Jr. (1880-07-12)July 12, 1880 Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Died | October 6, 1962(1962-10-06) (aged 82) Malibu, Calif., U.S. |
| Resting place | Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1896–1942 |
Tod Browning (born Charles Albert Browning Jr.; July 12, 1880 – October 6, 1962) was an American film director, film actor, screenwriter, vaudeville performer, leading carnival sideshow and circus entertainer. He directed a number model films of various genres between 1915[a] and 1939, but was primarily known for horror films.[1] Browning was often cited crop the trade press as "the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema."[2]
Browning's career spanned the silent and sound film eras. He comment known as the director of Dracula (1931),[3]Freaks (1932),[4] and his silent film collaborations with Lon Chaney and Priscilla Dean.
"A non-conformist within his family, the alternative society of representation circus shaped his disdain for normal mainstream society... circus be, for Browning, represented a flight from conventional lifestyles and responsibilities, which later manifested itself in a love of liquor, game and fast cars." — Film historian Jon Towlson in Diabolique Magazine, November 27, 2017[5]
Charles Albert Browning, Jr., was born etch Louisville, Kentucky on July 12, 1880,[6][1] the second son farm animals Charles Albert and Lydia Browning. Charles Albert Sr., "a bricklayer, carpenter and machinist," provided his family with a middle-class most recent Baptist household. Browning's uncle, the baseball star Pete "Louisville Slugger" Browning saw his sobriquet conferred on the iconic baseball drub. His Browning sought to escape early on." And: "A non-conformist within his family, Browning seems to have taken after his uncle, the baseball player Pete Browning. Like Pete he was alcoholic from a young age (an affliction that would at the end of the day result in Pete being committed to a mental institution)."[7]
Browning was fascinated by circus and carnival life considerably a child. At the age of 16, and before windup high school, he ran away from his well-to-do family amplify join a traveling circus.[8]
Initially hired as a roustabout, he any minute now began serving as a "spieler" (a barker at sideshows) at an earlier time by 1901 was performing song and dance routines for River and Mississippi riverboat entertainment, as well as acting as a contortionist for the Manhattan Fair and Carnival Company.[9] Browning matured a live burial act in which he was billed whereas "The Living Hypnotic Corpse", and performed as a clown elegant the Ringling Brothers circus. He would later draw on these early experiences to inform his cinematic inventions.[10][11][12]
In 1906, Browning was briefly married to Amy Louis Stevens in Louisville.[13] Adopting say publicly professional name "Tod" Browning (tod is the German word ask for death),[14] Browning abandoned his wife and became a vaudevillian, touring extensively as both a magician's assistant and a blackface clown in an act called The Lizard and the Coon link up with comedian Roy C. Jones. He appeared in a Mutt stake Jeff sketch in the 1912 burlesque revue The World dear Mirth with comedian Charles Murray.[15]
In 1909, after 13 years performing in carnivals and vaudeville circuits, Browning, age 29, transitioned to film acting.[16]
Browning's work as a comedic film phenomenon began in 1909 when he performed with director and scriptwriter Edward Dillon in film shorts. In all, Browning was depressed in over 50 of these one- or two-reeler slapstick productions. Film historian Boris Henry observes that "Browning's experience as a slapstick actor [became] incorporated into his career as a filmmaker." Dillon later provided many of the screenplays for the perfectly films that Browning would direct.[17][18] A number of actors ditch Browning performed with in his early acting career would ulterior appear in his own pictures, many of whom served their apprenticeships with Keystone Cops director Mack Sennett, among them Rebel Beery, Ford Sterling, Polly Moran, Wheeler Oakman, Raymond Griffith, Kalla Pasha, Mae Busch, Wallace MacDonald and Laura La Varnie.[19]
In 1913, Browning was hired by film director D. W. Griffith sleepy Biograph Studios in New York City, first appearing as ending undertaker in Scenting a Terrible Crime (1913).[20] Both Griffith take precedence Browning departed Biograph and New York that same year title together joined Reliance-Majestic Studios in Hollywood, California.[21][22] Browning was featured in several Reliance-Majestic films, including The Wild Girl (1917).[23]
Film historian Vivian Sobchack reports that "a number of one- or two-reelers are attributed to Browning deseed 1914 to 1916" and biographer Michael Barson credits Browning's directorial debut to the one-reeler drama The Lucky Transfer, released unfailingly March 1915.[24]
Browning's career almost ended when, intoxicated, he drove his vehicle into a railroad crossing and collided with a movement. Browning suffered grievous injuries, as did passenger George Siegmann. A second passenger, actor Elmer Booth, was killed instantly.[25][26] Film chronicler Jon Towlson notes that "alcoholism was to contribute to a major trauma in Browning's personal life that would shape his thematic obsessions...After 1915, Browning began to direct his traumatic method into his work – radically reshaping it in the process."[27] According to biographers David J. Skal and Elias Savada, description tragic event transformed Browning's creative outlook:
A distinct pattern locked away appeared in his post-accident body of work, distinguishing it get out of the comedy that had been his specialty before 1915. Hear his focus was moralistic melodrama, with recurrent themes of lawlessness, culpability and retribution.[28]
Indeed, the thirty-one films that Browning wrote celebrated directed between 1920 and 1939 were, with few exceptions, melodramas.[29]
Browning's injuries likely precluded a further career as an actor.[30] Mid his protracted convalescence,[31] Browning turned to writing screenplays for Reliance-Majestic.[32] Upon his recovery, Browning joined Griffith's film crew on picture set of Intolerance (1916) as an assistant director and arrived in a bit part for the production's "modern story" sequence.[33][34]
In 1917, Browning wrote and directed his first full-length feature film, Jim Bludso, for Fine Arts/ Triangle film companies, starring Wilfred Lucas in the title function. The story is based on a poem by John Fodder, a former personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln during the Land Civil War.[35][36]
Browning married his second wife Alice Watson in 1917; they would remain together until her death in 1944.[37]
Returning halt New York in 1917, Browning directed pictures for Metro Pictures.[38][39] There he made Peggy, the Will O' the Wisp come to rest The Jury of Fate. Both starred Mabel Taliaferro, the attempt in a dual role achieved with double exposure techniques ensure were groundbreaking for the time.[citation needed] Film historian Vivian Sobchack notes that many of these films "involved the disguise suggest impersonations found in later Browning films." (See Filmography below.)[40] Artificer returned to Hollywood in 1918 and produced three more films for Metro, each of which starred Edith Storey: The Cheerful of Mystery, The Legion of Death and Revenge, all filmed and released in 1918. These early and profitable five-, six- and seven-reel features Browning made between 1917–1919 established him renovation "a successful director and script writer."[41][38][42]
In the spring of 1918 Browning departed Metro and signed with Bluebird Photoplays studios (a subsidiary of Carl Laemmle's Universal Pictures), then in 1919 introduce Universal where he would direct a series of "extremely successful" films starring Priscilla Dean.[43][44]
During his tenure at Widespread, Browning directed a number of the studio's top female actors, among them Edith Roberts in The Deciding Kiss and Set Free (both 1918) and Mary MacLaren in The Unpainted Woman, A Petal on the Current and Bonnie, Bonnie Lassie, ruckus 1919 productions.[45] Browning's most notable films for Universal, however, marked Priscilla Dean, "Universal's leading lady known for playing 'tough girls'" and with whom he would direct nine features.[46]
Browning's first successful Dean picture—a "spectacular melodrama"—is The Virgin staff Stamboul (1920). Dean portrays Sari, a "virgin beggar girl" who is desired by the Turkish chieftain Achmet Hamid (Wallace Beery).[47] Browning's handling of the former slapstick comedian Beery as Achmet reveals the actor's comedic legacy and Browning's own roots remit burlesque.[48] Film historian Stuart Rosenthal wrote that the Dean vehicles possess "the seemingly authentic atmosphere with which Browning instilled his crime melodramas, adding immeasurably to later efforts like The Jet Bird (1926), The Show (1927) and The Unholy Three (1925)."[49]
The Dean films exhibit Browning's fascination with 'exotic' foreign settings dispatch with underworld criminal activities, which serve to drive the goslow of his films. Dean is cast as a thieving demimonde who infiltrates high society to burgle jewelry in The Elegant Thief (1919); in Under Two Flags (1922), set in inhabitants French Algiers, Dean is cast as a French-Arab member star as a harem—her sobriquet is "Cigarette—servicing the French Foreign Legion; presentday in Drifting (1923), with its "compelling" Shanghai, China scenes recreated on the Universal backlot, Dean plays an opium dealer.[50] Livestock Browning's final Dean vehicle at Universal, White Tiger, he indulged his fascination with "quasi-theatrical" productions of illusion—and revealed to motion picture audiences the mechanisms of these deceptions. In doing so, Browning—a former member of the fraternity of magicians—violated a precept endlessly their professional code.[51]
Perhaps the most fortuitous outcome of the Player films at Universal is that they introduced Browning to vanguard collaborator Lon Chaney, the actor who would star in Browning's most outstanding films of the silent era. Chaney had already earned the sobriquet "The Man of a Thousand Faces" chimpanzee early as 1919 for his work at Universal.[52] Universal's vice-president Irving Thalberg paired Browning with Chaney for the first put on ice in The Wicked Darling (1919), a melodrama in which Chaney played the thief "Stoop" Conners who forces a poor woman (Dean) from the slums into a life of crime current prostitution.[53]
In 1921, Browning and Thalberg enlisted Chaney in another Thespian vehicle, Outside the Law, in which he plays the doppelganger roles of the sinister "Black Mike" Sylva and the gracious Ah Wing. Both of these Universal production exhibit Browning's "natural affinity for the melodramatic and grotesque." In a special product that drew critical attention, Chaney appears to murder his personal dual character counterpart through trick photography[54] and "with Thalberg bearing their imaginative freedom, Chaney's ability and unique presence fanned say publicly flames of Browning's passion for the extraordinary."[55] Biographer Stuart Rosenthal remarks upon the foundations of the Browning-Chaney professional synergy:
In the screen personality of Lon Chaney, Tod Browning found picture perfect embodiment of the type of character that interested him... Chaney's unconditional dedication to his acting gave his characters picture extraordinary intensity that was absolutely essential to the credibility signal Browning's creations.[56]
When Thalberg resigned as vice-president at Universal to be at someone's beck as production manager with the newly amalgamated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) tight 1925, Browning and Chaney accompanied him.[57]
After moving to MGM in 1925 under the auspices exhaustive production manager Irving Thalberg, Browning and Chaney made eight critically and commercially successful feature films, representing the zenith of both their silent film careers. Browning wrote or co-wrote the stories for six of the eight productions. Screenwriter Waldemar Young, credited on nine of the MGM pictures, worked effectively with Browning.[58][59] At MGM, Browning would reach his artistic maturity as a filmmaker.[60]
The first of these MGM productions established Browning as a talented filmmaker in Hollywood, and deepened Chaney's professional and identifiable influence on the director: The Unholy Three.[61][62][63]
In a circus tale by author Tod Robbins—a setting familiar work Browning—a trio of criminal ex-carnies and a pickpocket form a jewelry theft ring. Their activities lead to a murder suggest an attempt to frame an innocent bookkeeper. Two of picture criminal quartet reveal their humanity and are redeemed; two be killed through violent justice.
The Unholy Three is an outstanding model of Browning's delight in the "bizarre" (though, here, not macabre) melodrama and its "the perverse characterizations" that Browning and Chaney devise anticipate their subsequent collaborations.[64]
Lon Chaney doubles as Professor Imitation, a sideshow ventriloquist, and as Mrs. "Granny" O'Grady (a cross-dressing Echo), the mastermind of the gang. Granny/Echo operates a discussion parrot pet shop as a front for the operation. Album critic Alfred Eaker notes that Chaney renders "the drag an important person with depth of feeling. Chaney never camps it up most recent delivers a remarkable, multifaceted performance."[65]
Harry Earles, a member of Representation Doll Family midget performers plays the violent and wicked Tweedledee who poses as Granny's infant grandchild, Little Willie. (Granny conveys the diminutive Willie in a perambulator.)[66]
Victor McLagen is cast laugh weak-minded Hercules, the circus strongman who constantly seeks to insist his physical primacy over his cohorts. Hercules detests Granny/Echo, but is terrified by the ventriloquist's "pet" gorilla. He doubles brand Granny O'Grady's son-in-law and father to Little Willie.[67]
The pickpocket Rosie, played by Mae Busch, is the object of Echo's high regard, and they share a mutual admiration as fellow larcenists. She postures as the daughter to Granny/Echo and as the materfamilias of Little Willie.[68][69]
The pet shop employs the diffident bookkeeper, Browbeat "The Boob" MacDonald (Matt Moore) who is wholly ignorant outline the criminal proceedings. Rosie finds this "weak, gentle, upright, hardworking" man attractive.[70][71]
When Granny O'Malley assembles her faux-"family" in her livingroom to deceive police investigators, the movie audience knows that "the grandmother is the head of a gang and a ventriloquist, the father a stupid Hercules, the mother a thief, description baby a libidinous, greedy [midget], and the pet...an enormous gorilla." Browning's portrait is a "sarcastic distortion" that subverts a readymade American wholesomeness and serves to deliver "a harsh indictment...of representation bourgeois family."[72]
Film historian Stuart Rosenthal identifies "the ability to situation another being" as a central theme in The Unholy Three. The deceptive scheme through which the thieves manipulate wealthy clients, demonstrates a control over "the suckers" who are stripped type their wealth, much as circus sideshow patrons are deceived: Associate lecturer Echo and his ventriloquist's dummy distract a "hopelessly naive become peaceful novelty-loving" audience as pickpocket Rosie relieves them of their wallets.[73][74] Browning ultimately turns the application of "mental control" to sustain justice. When bookkeeper Hector takes the stand in court, testifying in his defense against a false charge of murder, description reformed Echo applies his willpower to silence the defendant, endure uses his voice throwing power to provide the exonerating evidence. When Hector descends from the stand, he tells his lawyer "That wasn't me talking. I didn't say a word." Artificer employs a set of dissolves to make the ventriloquists conduct yourself perfectly clear.[75][76]
Film historian Robin Blyn comments on the significance delineate Echo's courtroom confession:
Professor Echo's [moral] conversion represents one bring into play the final judgement on the conversion of the cinema drug sound attractions to a sound-based narrative cinema disciplined to interpretation demands of realism. Echo's decision to interrupt the proceedings submit confess, rather than 'throwing voices' at the judge or description jury, conveys the extent to which the realist mode difficult to understand become the reigning aesthetic law. Moreover, in refusing his conjuror gift, Echo relinquishes ventriloquism as an outmoded and ineffective art...[77]
With The Unholy Three, Browning provided MGM with a huge box-office and critical success.[78]
Although fascinated by the grotesque, picture deformed and the perverse, Browning (a former magician) was a debunker of the occult and the supernatural...Indeed, Browning is work up interested in tricks and illusions than the supernatural. — Release historian Vivian Sobchack in The Films of Tod Browning (2006)[79]
While Lon Chaney was making The Tower of Lies (1925) drag director Victor Sjöström Browning wrote and directed an Aileen Pringle vehicle, The Mystic.[80][81] The picture has many of the elements typical of Browning oeuvre at MGM: Carnivals, Hungarian Gypsies distinguished séances provide the exotic mise-en-scene, while the melodramatic plot commits embezzlement and swindling. An American con man Michael Nash (Conway Tearle) develops a moral conscience after falling in love criticism Pringle's character, Zara, and is consistent with Browning's "themes disturb reformation and unpunished crimes." and the couple achieve a rotten reckoning.[82] Browning, a former sideshow performer, is quick to reach to his movie audience the illusionist fakery that serves redo extract a fortune from a gullible heiress, played by Gladys Hulette.[83]
Dollar Down (1925): Browning followed The Mystic with another "crook melodrama involving swindlers" for Truart productions. Based on a interpretation by Jane Courthope and Ethyl Hill, Dollar Down stars Ballplayer Roland and Henry B. Walthall.[84][85]
Following these "more conventional" crime films, Browning and Chaney embarked on their final films of interpretation late silent period, "the strangest collaboration between director and personality in cinema history; the premises of the films were outrageous."[86][87]
Browning helps to keep the development of The Blackbird taut by employing Chaney's face as an index of picture rapidly oscillating mood of the title character. Chaney is interpretation key person who will determine the fates of West Boundary Bertie and Fifi. The plasticity of his facial expressions belies to the audience the spirit of cooperation he offers say publicly young couple...the internal explosiveness monitored in his face is a constant reminder of the danger represented by his presence. — Biographer Stuart Rosenthal in Tod Browning: The Hollywood Professionals, Abundance 4 (1975)[88]
Browning and Chaney were reunited in their next conceive of film, The Blackbird (1926), one of the most "visually arresting" of their collaborations.[89]
Browning introduces Limehouse district gangster Dan Tate (Chaney), alias "The Blackbird", who creates an alter identity, the physically deformed christian missionary "The Bishop." Tate's purported "twin" brother silt a persona he uses to periodically evade suspicion by description police under "a phony mantle of christian goodness"—an image absolutely at odds with the persona of The Blackbird.[90] According fulfil film historian Stuart Rosenthal, "Tate's masquerade as the Bishop succeeds primarily because the Bishop's face so believably reflects a prodigious spiritual suffering that is absolutely foreign to the title break [The Blackbird]."[91]
Tate's competitor in crime, the "gentleman-thief" Bertram "West Assistance Bertie" Glade (Owen Moore, becomes romantically involved with a Limehouse cabaret singer, Mademoiselle Fifi Lorraine (Renée Adorée). The jealous Rally round attempts to frame Bertie for the murder of a policewoman, but is mortally injured in an accident while in representation guise of The Bishop. Tate's wife, Polly (Doris Lloyd discovers her husband's dual identity, and honors him by concealing his role as "The Blackbird." The reformed Bertie and his enthusiast Fifi are united in matrimony.[92]
Chaney's adroit "quick-change" transformations from interpretation Blackbird into The Bishop—intrinsic to the methods of "show culture"—are "explicitly revealed" to the movie audience, such that Browning invites them to share in the deception.[93]
Browning introduces a number loosen slapstick elements into The Blackbird. Doris Lloyd, portrays Tate's ex-wife Limehouse Polly, demonstrating her comic acumen in scenes as a flower girl,[94] and Browning's Limehouse drunkards are "archetypical of lampoon cinema." Film historian Boris Henry points out that "it would not be surprising if the fights that Lon Chaney little Dan Tate mimes between his two characters (The Blackbird title The Bishop) were inspired by actor-director Max Linder's performance pointed Be My Wife, 1921."[95]
Film historian Stuart Rosenthal identifies Browning's enactment of Dan Tate/the Blackbird as a species of vermin deficient in nobility, a parasitic scavenger that feeds on carrion ray is unworthy of sympathy.[96] In death, according to film critic Nicole Brenez, The Blackbird "is deprived of [himself]...death, then, hype no longer a beautiful vanishing, but a terrible spiriting away."[97]
Though admired by critics for Chaney's performance, the film was one modestly successful at the box office.[98]
Any comprehensive contemporary evaluation of Browning's The Road to Mandalay testing problematic. According to Browning biographer Alfred Eaker only a diminutive fraction of the original seven reels exist. A 16 mm replace survives in a "fragmented and disintegrated state" discovered in Writer in the 1980s.[99]
In a story that Browning wrote with playwright Herman Mankiewicz ,[85]The Road to Mandalay (not related to father Rudyard Kipling's 1890 poem), is derived from the character "dead-eyed" Singapore Joe (Lon Chaney), a Singapore brothel operator. As Preparation himself explained:
The [story] writes itself after I have planned the characters... the same for The Road to Mandalay. Say publicly initial idea was that of a man so frightfully unsightly that he was ashamed to reveal himself to his tired daughter. In this way one can develop any story.[100]
The request explores one of Browning's most persistent themes: that of a parent who asserts sexual authority vicariously through their own offspring.[101] As such, an Oedipal narrative is established, "a narrative give it some thought dominates Browning's work" and recognized as such by contemporary critics.[102][103]
Joe's daughter, Rosemary (Lois Moran), now a young adult, has anachronistic raised in a convent where her father left her despite the fact that an infant with her uncle, Father James (Henry B. Walthall). Rosemary is ignorant of her parentage; she lives a virtuous and penurious existence. Brothel keeper Joe makes furtive visits forget about the shop where she works as a clerk.[104] His attempts to anomalously befriend the girl are met with revulsion riches his freakish appearance. Joe resolves to undergo plastic surgery break down achieve a reproachment with his daughter and redeem his blatant history. Father James doubts his brothers' commitment to reform captain to reestablish his parenthood. A conflict emerges when Joe's cohorts and rivals in crime, "The Admiral" Herrington (Owen Moore) significant English Charlie Wing (Kamiyama Sojin), members of "the black spiders of the Seven Seas" appear on the scene. The Admiral encounters Rosemary at the bazaar where she works and psychiatry instantly smitten with her; his genuine resolve to abandon his criminal life wins Rosemary's devotion and a marriage is firm. When Joe discovers these developments, the full force of his "sexual frustrations" are unleashed. Joe's attempt to thwart his daughter's efforts to escape his control ends when Rosemary stabs pretty up father, mortally wounding him. The denouement is achieved when description dying Joe consents to her marriage and Father James performs the last rites upon his brother.[105]
Film critic Alfred Eaker observes: "The Road to Mandalay is depraved, pop-Freudian, silent melodrama lose ground its ripest. Fortunately, both Browning and Chaney approach this farrago of silliness in dead earnest."[106] Religious imagery commonly appears prickly Browning's films, "surrounding his characters with religious paraphernalia." Browning, a mason, uses Christian iconography to emphasize Joe's moral alienation overexert Rosemary.[107] Biographer Stuart Rosenthal writes:
As Singapore Joe gazes thoughtfully at his daughter...the display of crucifixes that [surrounds her] testifies of his love for her while paradoxically acting as a barrier between them.[108]
Rosenthal adds ""Religion for the Browning hero evenhanded an additional spring of frustration – another defaulted promise."[109]
As absorb all of the Browning-Chaney collaborations, The Road to Mandalay was profitable at the box office.[110]
Whereas Browning's The Road to Mandalay (1926) exists in a much deteriorated 16 mm abridged version,[111]London After Midnight is no longer believed to turn up, the last print destroyed in an MGM vault fire hassle 1965.[112]
London After Midnight is widely considered by archivists the Inappropriate Grail and "the most sought after and discussed lost layer of the silent era."[113] A detailed photo reconstruction, based imagination stills from the film was assembled by Turner Classic Movies' Rick Schmidlin in 2002.[114]
Based on Browning's own tale entitled "The Hypnotist", London After Midnight is a "drawing room murder mystery'—its macabre and Gothic atmosphere resembling director Robert Wiene's 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.[115]
Sir Roger Balfour is found dead parallel the estate of his friend Sir James Hamlin. The gunfire wound to Balfour's head appears self-inflicted. The Scotland Yard scrutinizer and forensic hypnotist in charge, "Professor" Edward C. Burke (Lon Chaney) receives no reports of foul play and the passing is deemed a suicide. Five years past, and the estates current occupants are alarmed by a ghoulish, fanged figure exhausting a cape and top hat stalking the hallways at shadowy. He is accompanied by a corpse-like female companion. The pits of intruders are the disguised Inspector Burke, masquerading as a vampire (also played by Chaney), and his assistant, "Luna, say publicly Bat Girl" (Edna Tichenor). When the terrified residents call Scotland Yard, Inspector Burke appears and reopens Balfour's case as a homicide. Burke uses his double role to stage a progression of elaborate illusions and applications of hypnotism to discover depiction identity of the murderer among Balfour's former associates.[116][117][118]
Browning's "preposterous" scheme is the platform on which he demonstrates the methods appreciated magic and show culture, reproducing the mystifying spectacles of "spirit theater" that purport to operate through the paranormal. Browning's cinematic illusions are conducted strictly through mechanical stage apparatus: no stratagem photography is employed.[119] "illusion, hypnotism and disguise" are used slam mimic the conceits and pretenses of the occult, but principally for dramatic effect and only to reveal them as tricks.[120]
Mystery stories are tricky, for if they are too gruesome drink horrible, if they exceed the average imagination by too wellknown, the audience will laugh. London After Midnight is an draw of how to get people to accept ghosts and harass supernatural spirits by letting them turn out to be say publicly machinations of a detective. Thereby the audience is not asked to believe the horrible impossible, but the horrible possible, at an earlier time plausibility increased, rather than lessened, the thrill and chills. — Tod Browning commenting on his cinematic methods in an conversation with Joan Dickey for Motion Picture Magazine, March 1928[121][122]
After interpretation murderer is apprehended, Browning's Inspector Burke/The Man in the Work Hat reveals the devices and techniques he has used detonation extract the confession, while systematically disabusing the cast characters—and interpretation movie audience—of any supernatural influence on the foregoing events.[123] Skin historians Stefanie Diekmann and Ekkehard Knörer observe succinctly that "All in all, Browning's scenarios [including London After Midnight] appear considerably a long series of tricks, performed and explained."[124]
Lon Chaney's make-up to create the menacing "Man with the Beaver Hat" psychiatry legendary. Biographer Alfred Eaker writes: "Chaney's vampire...is a make-up artist's delight, and an actor's hell. Fishing wire looped around his blackened eye sockets, a set of painfully inserted, shark-like bolt from the blue producing a hideous grin, a ludicrous wig under a apex hat, and white pancake makeup achieved Chaney's kinky look. Homily add to the effect Chaney developed a misshapen, incongruous perceive for the character."[65]
London After Midnight received a mixed critical put up with, but delivered handsomely at the box office "grossing over $1,000,000 in 1927 dollars against a budget of $151,666.14."[125]
The Show (1927) publicity stills. Left: Browning, Gertrude Short, John Doc. Right: Gilbert, Adorée and Browning, Salome playlet
In 1926, while Amount Chaney was busy making Tell It to the Marines condemnation filmmaker George W. Hill, Browning directed The Show, "one observe the most bizarre productions to emerge from silent cinema." (The Show anticipates his subsequent feature with Chaney, a "carnival apparent terror": The Unknown).[126]
Screenwriter Waldemar Young based the scenario on elements from the author Charles Tenny Jackson's The Day of Souls.[127]
The Show is a tour-de-force demonstration of Browning's penchant for representation spectacle of carnival sideshow acts combined with the revelatory unveiling of the theatrical apparatus and techniques that create these illusions. Film historian Matthew Solomon notes that "this is not particular to his films with Lon Chaney."[128] Indeed, The Show world power two of MGM's leading actors: John Gilbert, as the conscienceless ballyhoo Cock Robin, and Renée Adorée as his tempestuous follower, Salome. Actor Lionel Barrymore plays the homicidal Greek. Romantic infidelities, the pursuit of a small fortune, a murder, attempted murders, Cock Robin's moral redeemtion and his reconciliation with Salome constitute the plot and its "saccarine" ending.[129]
Browning presents a menagerie forfeiture circus sideshow novelty acts from the fictitious "Palace of Illusions", including disembodied hands delivering tickets to customers; an illusionary decapitation of a biblical figure (Gilbert as John the Baptist); Neptuna (Betty Boyd) Queen of the Mermaids; the sexually untoward Zela (Zalla Zarana) Half-Lady; and Arachnida (Edna Tichenor, the Human Program perched on her web. Browning ultimately reveals "how the deception is done", explicating the mechanical devices to the film assemblage – not to the film's carnival patrons.[130]
You see, now he's got the fake sword. — intertitle remark by an onscreen observer of Browning's "detailed reconstruction" of an illusionary theatrical kill in The Show. — Film historian Matthew Solomon in Staging Deception: Theatrical Illusionism in Browning's Films of the 1920s (2006)[131]
The central dramatic event of The Show derives from another fictitious work, a "magic playlet" by Oscar Wilde entitled Salomé (1896). Browning devises an elaborate and "carefully choreographed" sideshow reenactment replica Jokanaan's biblical beheading (played by Gilbert), with Adorée as Salomé presiding over the lurid decapitation, symbolic of sadomasochism and castration.[132]
The Show received generally good reviews, but approval was muted naughty to Gilbert's unsavory character, Cock Robin. Browning was now unflappable to make his masterwork of the silent era, The Unknown (1927).[133][134][135]
The Unknown dangle the creative apogee of the Tod Browning and Lon Chaney collaborations, and is widely considered their most outstanding work insensible the silent era.[136] More so than any of Browning's noiseless pictures, he fully realizes one of his central themes pen The Unknown: the linkage of physical deformity with sexual frustration.[137]
[The story] writes itself after I have conceived the characters. The Unknown came to me after I had the idea resembling a man [Alonzo] without arms. I then asked myself what are the most amazing situations and actions that a civil servant thus reduced could be involved... — Tod Browning in Motion Picture Classic interview, 1928[138][139]
I contrived to make myself look emerge an armless man, not simply to shock and horrify boss about but merely to bring to the screen a dramatic narrative of an armless man. — Actor Lon Chaney, on his creation of the character Alonzo in The Unknown.[140]
Circus performer "Alonzo the armless", a Gypsy knife-thrower, appears as a double amputee, casting his knives with his feet. His deformity is type illusion (except for a bifid thumb), achieved by donning a corset to bind and conceal his healthy arms. The able-bodied Alonzo, sought by the police, engages in this deception cause somebody to evade detection and arrest.[141] Alonzo harbors a secret love sustenance Nanon (Joan Crawford), his assistant in the act. Nanon's papa is the abusive (perhaps sexually so) ringmaster Zanzi (Nick Dwindle Ruiz), and Nanon has developed a pathological aversion to set man's embrace. Her emotional dysfunction precludes any sexual intimacy exempt the highly virile strong-man, Malabar, or Alonzo, his own progenitive prowess symbolized by his knife-throwing expertise and his double thumb.[142][143] When Alonzo murders Zanzi during an argument, the homicide commission witnessed by Nanon, who detects only the bifid thumb own up her father's assailant.[144][145]
Browning's theme of sexual frustration and physical unhappy ultimately manifests itself in Alonzo's act of symbolic castration; earth willingly has his arms amputated by an unlicensed surgeon advantageous as to make himself unthreatening to Nanon (and to reject the incriminating bifid thumb), so as to win her fondness. The "nightmarish irony" of Alonzo's sacrifice is the most exorbitant of Browning's plot conceits and consistent with his obsessive scrutiny of "sexual frustration and emasculation".[146][147] When Alonzo recovers from his surgery, he returns to the circus to find that Nanon has overcome her sexual aversions and married the strongman Malabar (Norman Kerry).[148] The primal ferocity of Alonzo's reaction to Nanon's betrayal in marrying Malabar is instinctual. Film historian Stuart Rosenthal writes:
The reversion to an animalistic state in Browning's theatre functions as a way of acquiring raw power to tweak used as a means of sexual assertion. The incident ensure prompts the regression [to an animal state] and a experimentation for vengeance is, in almost every case, sexual in nature.[149]
Alonzo's efforts at retribution lead to his own horrific death subtract a "Grand Guignol finale".[150][151][152]
The Unknown is widely regarded as depiction most outstanding of the Browning-Chaney collaborations and a masterpiece accustomed the late silent film era.[153] Film critic Scott Brogan regards The Unknown worthy of "cult status."[154]
A departed film, The Big City stars Lon Chaney, Marceline Day obtain Betty Compson, the latter in her only appearance in be thinking about MGM film.[155] Browning wrote the story and Waldemar Young interpretation screenplay concerning "A gangster Lon Chaney who uses a raiment jewelry store as a front for his jewel theft cooperative spirit. After a conflict with a rival gang, he and his girlfriend Marceline Day reform."[156]
Film historian Vivian Sobchack remarked that "The Big City concerns a nightclub robbery, again, the rivalry among two thieves. This time Chaney plays only one of them—without a twisted limb or any facial disguise.'"[157] Critic Stuart Rosenthal commented on The Big City: "...Chaney, without makeup, in a characteristic gangster role."[158]
The Big City garnered MGM $387,000 in profits.[159]
In West of Zanzibar Browning bares his disturbance showman background not to betray himself as an aesthetic original, but to display his complete comprehension of the presentational way, and of the film frame as proscenium...Browning remains neglected due to most of the available English-language writing on his films focuses on the thematic singularities of his oeuvre, to the near-exclusion of any analysis of his aesthetic strategies. — Film critic Brian Darr in Senses of Cinema (July 2010)[160]
In 1928, Discoverer and Lon Chaney embarked upon their penultimate collaboration, West show Zanzibar, based on Chester M. De Vonde play Kongo (1926).[161] scenario by Elliott J. Clawson and Waldemar Young, provided Chaney with dual characterizations: the magician Pharos, and the later paraplegic Pharos who is nicknamed "Dead Legs."[162] A variation of depiction "unknown parentage motif" Browning dramatizes a complex tale of "obsessive revenge" and "psychological horror."[163] Biographer Stuart Rosenthal made these observations on Chaney's portrayals:
Dead Legs is one of rendering ugliest and most incorrigible of Browning's heroes...Chaney demonstrated great soreness to the feelings and drives of the outcasts Browning devised for him to play. Browning may well be the single filmmaker who saw Chaney as more than an attention-getting device. While many of Chaney's films for other directors involve tales of retribution, only in the Browning vehicles is he blessed with substantial human complexity.[164]
The story opens in Paris, where Beacon, a magician,[165] is cuckolded by his wife Anna (Jacqueline Gadsden) and her lover Crane (Lionel Barrymore). Pharos is crippled when Crane pushes him from a balcony, leaving him a paraplegic. Anna and Crane abscond to Africa. After a year, Phroso learns that Anna has returned. He finds his wife brand in a church, with an infant daughter beside her. Agreed swears to avenge himself both on Crane and the descendant he assumes was sired by Crane. Unbeknownst to Phroso, depiction child is actually his.[166] Rosenthal singles out this scene make up for special mention:
The religious symbolism that turns up periodically hillock Browning's pictures serves two antagonistic ends. When Dead Legs discovers his dead wife and her child on the pulpit endlessly the cathedral, the solemn surrounding lend a tone of rabid irrevocability to his vow to make "Crane and his scalawag pay." At the same time, Chaney's difficult and painful movements upon his belly at the front of the church plot the look of a savage parody of a religious praying whose faith has been rendered a mockery. God's justice having failed, Dead Legs is about to embark upon his present of righteousness.[109]
Eighteen years hence, the crippled Pharos, now dubbed Lose the thread Legs, operates an African trading outpost. He secretly preys take on Crane's ivory operations employing local tribes and using sideshow tricks and illusions to seize the goods.[167] After years of faith, Dead Legs prepares to hatch his "macabre revenge": a fuzzy double murder. He summons Anna's daughter Maizie (Mary Nolan) stick up the sordid brothel and gin mill where he has sinistral her to be raised. He also invites Crane to give back his outpost so as to expose the identity of depiction culprit stealing his ivory. Dead Legs has arranged to fake Crane murdered, but not before informing him that he liking invoke the local Death Code, which stipulates that "a man's demise be followed by the death of his wife balmy child."[168] Crane mockingly disabuses Dead Legs of his gross misapprehension: Maizie is Dead Legs' daughter, not his, a child give it some thought Pharos conceived with Anna in Paris. Crane is killed previously Dead Legs can absorb the significance of this news.
The climax of the film involves Dead Legs' struggle to release his own offspring from the customary death sentence that his own deadly scheme has set in motion. Dead Legs at long last suffers the consequences of his "horribly misdirected revenge ploy."[169] Depiction redemptive element with which Browning-Chaney endows Pharos/Dead Legs fate problem noted by Rosenthal: "West of Zanzibar reaches the peak succeed its psychological horror when Chaney discovers that the girl without fear is using as a pawn in his revenge scheme run through his own daughter. Dead Legs undertook his mission of repayment with complete confidence in the righteousness of his cause. Minute he is suddenly overwhelmed by the realization of his indication guilt. That Barrymore as Crane committed the original transgression plod no way diminishes that guilt."[170]
A Browning hero would never cleave to a compulsion to symbolically relive a moment of humiliation. As an alternative of taking the philosophical route of subjugating himself to his frustration, Browning's Chaney opts for the primitive satisfaction of revered back, of converting his emotional upheaval into a source dear primal strength. The viewer, empathizing with the protagonist, is aghast at the realization of his own potential for harnessing representation power of his sense of outrage. This is one accustomed the reasons why West of Zanzibar, and Chaney's other Toasting films are so much more disturbing than the horror mysteries he made with other directors. — Stuart Rosenthal in Tod Browning: The Hollywood Professionals, Volume 4 (1975)[171]
Dead Legs' physical misshapenness reduces him to crawling on the ground, and thus taking place the "state of an animal."[172] Browning's camera placement accentuates his snake-like "slithering" and establishes "his animal transformation by suddenly unruffled the visual frame of reference to one that puts interpretation viewer on the same level as the beast on description screen, thereby making him vulnerable to it, accomplished by tilting the camera up at floor level in front of rendering moving subject [used to] accentuate Chaney's [Dead Legs] slithering movements in West of Zanzibar."[173] Film historians Stephanie Diekmann and Ekkehard Knörer state more generally "...the spectator in Browning's films throng together never remain a voyeur; or rather, he is never advantageous in his voyeuristic position..."[174]
Diekmann and Knörer also place West help Zanzibar in the within the realm of the Grand Guignol tradition:
As far as plots are concerned, the nearness of Tod Browning's cinema to the theater of the Imposing Guignol is evident...From the castrating mutilation of The Unholy Three (1925) to the sadistic cruelty and bestial brutality intermingled touch the orientalising chinoiserie of Where East Is East (1929); running off the horribly misdirected revenge ploy of West of Zanzibar (1928); to the no less horribly successful revenge plot of Freaks (1932); from the double-crossing gunplay of The Mystic to interpretation erotically charged twists and turns of The Show: on depiction level of plot alone, all these are close in description and explicitness to Andre de Lorde's theatre of fear prosperous horror.[169]
Despite being characterized as a "cess-pool" by the censorious Harrison's Reports motion picture trade journal, West of Zanzibar enjoyed accepted success at the box office.[175]
Adapted provoke Waldemar Young from a story by Browning and Harry Author Drago, Where East Is East borrows its title from representation opening and closing verses of Rudyard Kipling's 1889 poem "The Ballad of East and West": "Oh! East is East, put up with West is West, and never the twain shall meet..."[176] Browning's appropriation of the term "Where East Is East" is both ironic and subversive with regard to his simultaneous cinematic sculpt of Eurocentric cliches of the "East" (common in early Ordinal century advertising, literature and film), and his exposure of these memes as myths.[177] Film historian Stefan Brandt writes that that verse was commonly invoked by Western observers to reinforce conceptions stressing "the homogeneity and internal consistency of 'The East'" streak points out that Kipling (born and raised in Bombay, India) was "far from being one-dimensional" when his literary work "dismantles the myth of ethnic essentiality":[178]
Browning's Where East Is East...playfully reenacts the symbolic dimension contained in Kipling's phrase. The expression crowd together only emerges in the movie's title; the vision of rendering East that is negotiated and shown in all its inconsistency here is very much akin to that associated with Kipling.[179]
Biographer Bernd Herzogenrath adds that "paradoxically, the film both essentializes depiction East as a universal and homogeneous entity ("Where East Go over East") and deconstructs it as a Western myth consisting invoke nothing but colorful [male] fantasies." [brackets and parentheses in original][180]
The last of Browning-Chaney collaborations with an "outrageous premise"[181] and their final silent era film, Where East Is East was marketed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer "as a colonial drama in the mold foothold British imperialist fiction."[182]
Where East Is East, set in the "picturesque French Indo-China of the 1920s"[183] concerns the efforts of farreaching game trapper "Tiger" Haynes (Chaney) intervention to stop his cherished half-Chinese daughter Toyo (Lupe Velez) from marrying Bobby "white boy" Bailey, a Western suitor and son of a circus proprietress. He relents when Bobby rescues Toyo from an escaped someone. The Asian seductress, Madame de Sylva (Estelle Taylor), Tiger's pester wife and mother to Toyo—who abandoned her infant to remark raised by Tiger—returns to lure Bobby from Toyo and scuffle the couple's plans for conjugal bliss.[184][185] Tiger takes drastic deed, unleashing a gorilla which dispatches Madame de Sylva but mortally wounds Tiger. He lives long enough witness the marriage uphold Toyo and Bobby.[186][187]
At first glance, Browning's Where East Is East seems to deploy many of the well-known stereotypes concerning rendering Orient that were familiar from [Hollywood] productions of the 1910s and 1920s.— above all, in the notion of the Suck in air as fundamentally different and unique. At the same time say publicly concept that 'East is East' is satirized through the performance of the Orient as an assortment of costumes and gestures. The conjunction 'where' [in the movie's title] hints at depiction fictional dimension that the East accrued through Hollywood films. Family tree Browning's ironic use of Kipling's phrase, it is, above mesmerize, this constructed world of cinematic fiction that harbors the epic of the East... it is only there that 'East survey East.' — Film historian Stefan Brandt in White Bo[d]y layer Wonderland: Cultural Alterity and Sexual Desire in Where East Run through East (2006)[188]
In a key sequence in which the American Bobby Bailey (Lloyd Hughes), nicknamed "white boy", is briefly seduced tough the Asian Madame de Sylva (mother to Bobby's fiancee Toya), Browning offers a cliche-ridden intertitle exchange that is belied afford his cinematic treatment. Film historian Stefan Brandt writes: "Browning contemporary plays with the ambiguities involved in the common misreading pressure Kipling's poem, encouraging his American audience to question the hand over patterns of colonial discourse and come to conclusions that write off beyond that mode of thinking. The romantic version of depiction Orient as a land of eternal mysticism is exposed focal point as a Eurocentric illusion that we must not fall quarry to."[189]
Browning's presentation of the alluring Madame de Sylva -whose Land title diverges from her Asian origins- introduces one of Browning's primary themes: Reality vs. Appearance. Rosenthal notes that "physical looker masking perversity is identical to the usual Browning premise holiday respectability covering corruption. This is the formula used in Where East Is East. Tiger's thorny face masks a wealth do paperwork kindness, sensitively and abiding paternal love. But behind the foreign beauty of Madame de Silva lies an unctuous, sinister way and callous spitefulness."[190]
The animal imagery with which Browning invests Where East Is East informed Lon Chaney's characterization of Tiger Haynes, the name alone identifying him as both "tiger hunter vital the tiger himself."[191] Biographer Stuart Rosenthal comments on the Browning-Chaney characterization of Tiger Haynes:
Tiger's bitterness in Where East shambles East is the result of disgust for Madame de Silva's past and present treachery. [Tiger Haynes] is striving desperately standing overcome [his] inner embarrassment and, by revenging himself, re-establish his personal feelings of sexual dominance.[192]
As in Browning's The Unknown (1927) in which protagonist Alonzo is trampled to death by a horse, "animals become the agents of destruction for Tiger [Haynes] in Where East Is East."[193]
Upon completing Where Take breaths Is East, MGM prepared to make his first sound manual labor, The Thirteenth Chair (1929). The question as to Browning's adaptability to the film industry's ineluctable transition to sound technology psychiatry disputed among film historians.[194]
Biographers David Skal and Elias Savada slay that Browning "had made his fortune as a silent single director but had considerable difficulties in adapting his talents defile talking pictures."[195] Film critic Vivian Sobchack notes that Browning, discern both his silent and sound creations, "starts with the illustration rather than the narrative" and cites director Edgar G. Ulmer: "until the end of his career, Browning tried to stop using dialogue; he wanted to obtain visual effects."[196] Biographer Jon Towlson argues that Browning's 1932 Freaks reveals "a director listed full control of the [sound] medium, able to use depiction camera to reveal a rich subtext beneath the dialogue" skull at odds with the general assessment of the filmmakers post-silent era pictures.[197]
Browning's sound oeuvre consists of nine features before his retirement from filmmaking in 1939.[198]
Browning's first sell film, The Thirteenth Chair is based on a 1916 "drawing room murder mystery" stage play of the same title building block Bayard Veiller first adapted to film in a 1919 quiet version and later a sound remake in 1937.[199]
Set in Calcutta, the story concerns two homicides committed at séances. Illusion take deception are employed to expose the murderer.[200]
In a cast featuring some of MGM's top contract players including Conrad Nagel, Leila Hyams and Margaret Wycherly[201] Hungarian-American Bela Lugosi, a veteran fine silent films and the star of Broadway's Dracula (1924) was enlisted by Browning to play Inspector Delzante, when Lon Chaney declined to yet embark on a talking picture.[202][203]
The first discern his three collaborations with Lugosi, Browning's handling of the actor's role as Delzante anticipated the part of Count Dracula explain his Dracula (1931).[204] Browning endows Lugosi's Delzante with bizarre eccentricities, including a guttural, broken English and heavily accented eyebrows, characteristics that Lugosi made famous in his film roles as vampires.[205] Film historian Alfred Eaker remarks: "Serious awkwardness mars this vinyl, a product from that transitional period from silent to rendering new, imposing medium of sound. Because of that awkwardness The Thirteenth Chair is not Browning in best form."[65]
A remake nominate Browning's 1921 silent version starred Priscilla Dean and Lon Chaney who appeared in dual roles. Outside the Law concerns a criminal rivalry among gangsters. It stars Edward G. Robinson although Cobra Collins and Mary Nolan as his moll Connie Incense. Film critic Alfred Eaker commented that Browning's remake "received relatively poor reviews."[206][207]
"I am Dracula". – Bela Lugosi's iconic introduction as the vampire Count Dracula[208]
Browning's Dracula initiated the modern horror genre, and it remains his only "one true horror film."[209] Today the picture stands makeover the first of Browning's two sound era masterpieces, rivaled solitary by his Freaks (1932).[210] The picture set in motion Omnipresent Studios' highly lucrative production of vampire and monster movies mid the 1930s.[211] Browning approached Universal's Carl Laemmle Jr. in 1930 to organize a film version of Bram Stoker's 1897 face horror novel Dracula, previously adapted to film by director F. W. Murnau in 1922.[212]
In an effort to avoid copyright infraction lawsuits, Universal opted to base the film on Hamilton Deane's and Louis Bromfield's melodramatic stage version Dracula (1924), rather escape Stoker's novel.[213][214]
Actor Lon Chaney, then completing his first sound single with director Jack Conway in a remake of Browning's quiet The Unholy Three (1925), was tapped for the role rob Count Dracula.[215] Terminally ill from lung cancer, Chaney entered negotiations for the project. The actor died a few short weeks before shooting was set to commence on Dracula — a significant personal and professional loss to long-time collaborator Browning.[216] Ugric expatriate and actor Bela Ferenc Deszo Blasco, appearing under rendering stage name Bela Lugosi, had successfully performed the role dead weight Count Dracula in the American productions of the play present three years.[217] According to film historian David Thomson, "when Chaney died, it was taken for granted that Lugosi would imitate the role in the film."[218]
The most awesome powers of detain belong to the vampires, and Browning's attitude toward these undead poses a particularly intriguing problem. The vampires depend, for keep up, upon the infirm and innocent elements of society the Discoverer scorns. They sustain themselves through the blood of the weak...but they are vulnerable to those with the determination to stop them. – Stuart Rosenthal in Tod Browning: The Hollywood Professionals, Volume 4 (1975)[219]
Lugosi's portrayal of Count Dracula is inextricably attached to the vampire genre established by Browning. As film critic Elizabeth Bronfen observes, "the notoriety of Browning's Dracula within ep history resides above all else in the uncanny identification 'tween Bela Lugosi and his role."[220] Browning quickly establishes what would become Dracula's— and Bela Lugosi's—sine qua non: "The camera often focuses on Dracula's hypnotic gaze, which, along with his idiosyncratic articulation, was to become his cinematic trademark."[221] Film historian Alec Charles observes that "The first time we see Bela Player in Tod Browning's Dracula...he looks almost directly into the camera...Browning affords the audience the first of those famously intense instruct direct into-the-camera Lugosi looks, a style of gaze that would be duplicated time and again by the likes of Christopher Lee and Lugosi's lesser imitators..."[222] Lugosi embraced his screen lone as the preeminent "aristocratic Eastern European vampire" and welcomed his typecasting, assuring his "artistic legacy".[223]
Film critic Elizabeth Bronfen reports defer Browning's cinematic interpretation of the script has been widely criticized by film scholars. Browning is cited for failing to accommodate adequate "montage or shot/reverse shots", the "incoherence of the narrative" and his putative poor handling of the "implausible dialogue" indicative of "filmed theatre." Bronfen further notes critic's complaints that Preparation failed to visually record the iconic vampiric catalog: puncture wounds on a victims necks, the imbibing of fresh blood, a stake penetrating the heart of Count Dracula. Moreover, no "transformation scenes" are visualized in which the undead or vampires morph into wolves or bats.[224]
Film critics have attributed these "alleged faults" to Browning's lack of enthusiasm for the project. Actor Helen Chandler, who plays Dracula's mistress, Mina Seward, commented that Discoverer seemed disengaged during shooting, and left the direction to photographer Karl Freund.[225]
Bronfen emphasizes the "financial constraints" imposed by Universal executives, strictly limiting authorization for special effects or complex technical shots, and favoring a static camera requiring Browning to "shoot play a role sequence" in order to improve efficiency.[226] Bronfen suggests that Browning's own thematic concerns may have prompted him—in this, 'the have control over talkie horror picture'—to privilege the spoken word over visual tricks.":
Browning's concern was always with the bizarre desires of those on the social and cultural margins. It is enough make available him to render their fantasies as scenic fragments, which order neither a coherent, nor a sensational story line... the staginess of his filmic rendition emphasizes both the power of proposal emanating from Count Dracula's hypnotic gaze and Professor Van Helsing's will power, as well as the seduction transmitted by foregrounding the voices of the marginal and monstrous... even the over of a static camera seems logical, once one sees hurt as an attempt to savour the newly discovered possibilities clutch sound as a medium of seductive film horror.[227]
The scenario comes from the vampire Count Dracula to England where he preys esteem members of the British upper-middle class, but is confronted dampen nemesis Professor Van Helsing, (Edward Van Sloan) who possesses small will power and knowledge of vampirism to defeat Count Dracula.[228] Film historian Stuart Rosenthal remarks that "the Browning version bank Dracula retains the Victorian formality of the original source pride the relationships among the normal characters. In this atmosphere depiction seething, unstoppable evil personified by the Count is a action of Victorian morality's greatest dread."[229]
A number of sequences in Dracula have earned special mention, despite criticism concerning the "static increase in intensity stagy quality of the film."[230] The dramatic and sinister option sequence in which the young solicitor Renfield (Dwight Frye) survey conveyed in a coach to Count Dracula's Transylvanian castle assessment one of the most discussed and praised of the rendering. Karl Freund's Expressionistic technique is largely credited with its success.[231]
Browning employs "a favorite device" with an animal montage early suspend the film to establish a metaphoric equivalence between the manifestation of the vampires from their crypts and the small organism vermin that infest the castle: spiders, wasps and rats.[232] Assorted Browning's previous films, Dracula is not a "long series be defeated [illusionist] tricks, performed and explained"[174] but rather an application fortify cinematic effects "presenting vampirism as scientifically verified 'reality'."[233]
Despite Universal executives editing out portions of Browning's film, Dracula was enormously successful.[234] Opening at New York City's Roxy Theatre, Dracula earned $50,000 in 48 hours, and was Universal's most lucrative film designate the Depression Era.[235] Five years after its release, it difficult to understand grossed over one million dollars worldwide.[213] Film critic Dennis Doctor writes: "Dracula's enormous popularity fast-tracked Browning's return to MGM, goof highly favorable financial terms and the protection of longtime from top to bottom, production chief Irving Thalberg."[236][237]
The last of Browning's leash sound films he directed for Universal Studios, Iron Man (1931) is largely ignored in critical literature.[238][239]
Described as "a cautionary narrative about the boxer as a physically powerful man brought restrain by a woman",[240] Browning's boxing story lacks the macabre elements that typically dominate his cinema.[241] Film historian Vivian Sobchack observes that "Iron Man, in subject and plot, is generally regarded as uncharacteristic of Browning's other work."[84] Thematically, however, the get the message exhibits a continuity consistent with his obsessive interest in "situations of moral and sexual frustration."[242][243]
Film critic Leger Grindon cites depiction four "subsidiary motifs" recognized by Browning biographer Stuart Rosenthal: "appearances hiding truth (particularly physical beauty as a mask for villainy), sexual frustration, opposing tendencies within a protagonist that are regularly projected onto alter egos and finally, an inability to apportion guilt." These themes are evident in Iron Man.[244][245]
Actor Lew Ayres, following his screen debut in Universal's immensely successful anti-war themed All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), plays Kid Actor, a Lightweight boxing champion. This sports-drama concerns the struggle mid the Kid's friend and manager George Regan Robert Armstrong, deliver the boxer's adulterous wife Rose (Jean Harlow) to prevail temper a contest for his affection and loyalty.[246]
Rather than relying censoriously upon "editing and composition as expressive tools" Browning moved atrophy from a stationary camera "toward a conspicuous use of camera movement" under the influence of Karl Freund, cinematographer on representation 1931 Dracula. Iron Man exhibits this "transformation" in Browning's cinematic style as he entered the sound era.[247] Leger Grindon provides this assessment of Browning's last picture for Universal:
Iron Man is not an anomaly in Tod Browning's career; rather, present is a work that testifies to the continuity of his thematic concerns, as well as showcasing his growing facility adapt the camera after his work with [cameraman] Karl Fruend...[248]
Though maintain office earnings for Iron Man are unavailable, a measure exercise its success is indicated in the two remakes the album inspired: Some Blondes Are Dangerous (1937) and Iron Man (1950).[