Tod Browning (1880 to 1962) was the American director of Dracula, Freaks and The Unknown, and Lon Chaney’s most important collaborator.
Quick Specs
| Born | Charles Albert Browning Jr., July 12, 1880, Louisville, Kentucky |
| Died | October 6, 1962, Malibu, California, aged 82 |
| Before film | carnival talker, contortionist, Ringling Brothers clown and vaudeville performer |
| Started in | film acting around 1909; with D.W. Griffith at Biograph from 1913 |
| Directing debut | The Lucky Transfer (1915) |
| With Lon Chaney | ten films from 1919 to 1929, including The Unholy Three (1925), The Unknown (1927) and London After Midnight (1927) |
| Key sound films | Dracula (1931), Freaks (1932), Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Devil-Doll (1936) |
| Last film | Miracles for Sale (1939) |
| Honors | Directors Guild of America life membership (1949); Freaks (1994) and Dracula (2000) in the National Film Registry |
Who He Is
Charles Albert Browning Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 12, 1880, the second son of a bricklayer, carpenter and machinist, in a middle-class Baptist household. His uncle was Pete Browning, the ballplayer whose nickname gave the Louisville Slugger bat its name. As a boy he put on plays in the backyard, and he was obsessed with the circus.
At 16, before finishing high school, he ran away to join a traveling show. The outline of what came next is in every serious account, though his biographers warn that much of the detail survives only as anecdote. He worked as a roustabout, then as a talker for attractions including the “Wild Man of Borneo.” He did song and dance on riverboats, worked as a contortionist, and performed a live-burial act billed as “The Living Hypnotic Corpse.” He was a clown with Ringling Brothers. In vaudeville he was a magician’s assistant, a dancer and a blackface comedian, and somewhere along the way he became “Tod.” The word means “death” in German, though nothing records whether that’s why he picked it.
He moved into film acting around 1909, appearing in dozens of slapstick shorts. In 1913 D.W. Griffith hired him at Biograph, where his first part was an undertaker in Scenting a Terrible Crime, and he followed Griffith west to Reliance-Majestic in Hollywood. He directed his first short, The Lucky Transfer, in 1915.
That same year he crashed his car at speed while drunk. His passenger, actor Elmer Booth, was killed instantly; George Siegmann was badly hurt, and Browning spent a long time recovering from his own injuries. He wrote scripts while he convalesced, then worked as one of Griffith’s assistant directors on Intolerance (1916), with a bit part as a crook. His biographers David J. Skal and Elias Savada see a pattern from then on: “moralistic melodrama, with recurrent themes of crime, culpability and retribution.” Drink stayed with him; Skal and Savada describe “the alcoholism that would plague him throughout his life.”
The Work, and What He Did in It
His first feature was Jim Bludso (1917). At Metro he directed Mabel Taliaferro in a dual role made with double exposure, and at Universal he made nine features with Priscilla Dean, crime melodramas full of disguise and impersonation. In The Wicked Darling (1919), Irving Thalberg paired him with Lon Chaney for the first time. In Outside the Law (1920) Chaney plays two parts, the gangster Black Mike Sylva and the servant Ah Wing. Universal took him off The Hunchback of Notre Dame and let his contract lapse in 1923, but in 1925 Browning, Chaney and Thalberg all ended up at the new MGM.
There Browning and Chaney made eight films, for a total of ten together, usually from Browning’s own stories with Waldemar Young writing. The Unholy Three (1925) was the breakthrough. Adapted from Tod Robbins’s 1917 novel, it stars Chaney as a sideshow ventriloquist running a burglary gang while disguised as sweet old Granny O’Grady in a pet shop, with Harry Earles as a “baby” grandson. Browning did not direct the 1930 sound remake, Chaney’s only talkie; Jack Conway did.
The Unknown (1927) is the masterpiece of the partnership. Chaney is Alonzo the Armless, a circus knife-thrower who throws with his feet at his partner, Nanon, played by a young Joan Crawford. Alonzo has arms; he straps them down to hide from the police, who could identify him by a double thumb. Nanon can’t stand being touched by men’s hands, so Alonzo blackmails a surgeon into actually cutting his arms off, then comes back to find she has gotten over her fear and fallen for the strongman. The foot work in the frame was done by a real armless performer, Paul Desmuke, with Chaney’s face and body above. For decades the film survived only in an incomplete copy, until a 35mm print turned up at the Cinematheque francaise in 1968.
London After Midnight (1927) is the famous lost one, and only what’s documented can be said about it. Released on December 3, 1927, written by Waldemar Young from Browning’s story “The Hypnotist,” it starred Chaney as Scotland Yard inspector Edward Burke, investigating a death in a house later occupied by vampire-like tenants, including the Man in the Beaver Hat. The surviving script shows that Burke himself is behind the vampire act, a hoax staged to trap the killer. It cost about $152,000 and grossed about $1 million. The last known print burned in the 1965 fire in MGM’s Vault 7. In 2002 TCM aired a reconstruction by Rick Schmidlin built from the script and production stills.
He also made West of Zanzibar (1928), with Chaney as a magician paralyzed by his wife’s lover who rules a Congo outpost with stage tricks, and Where East Is East (1929), their last film together. Chaney wouldn’t make talkies, so for Browning’s first sound film, The Thirteenth Chair (1929), he cast Bela Lugosi as the inspector.
Dracula (1931) came next, at Universal for Carl Laemmle Jr., based mainly on the Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston stage play rather than directly on Stoker. Chaney had been lined up for the Count and died weeks before shooting. Lugosi, who had played Dracula on stage for three years, lobbied for the part. Other actors were considered, though film historian David Thomson’s view is that once Chaney died, it was taken for granted the role was Lugosi’s. Browning built the film around Lugosi’s hypnotic stare straight into the camera, which became the screen Dracula’s trademark, and opened in the crypt with a montage of vermin, spiders, wasps and rats, a favorite device of his.
Who directed what is still argued. Karl Freund, the German cinematographer, shot the film and gets much of the credit for its famous opening. Actors Helen Chandler and David Manners both later remembered Freund, not Browning, doing the directing on set. On the other side, Universal’s tight budget forced a static, stagy camera, and Browning’s next film, Iron Man (1931), shows him using the moving camera he had picked up from Freund. Neither “Freund directed it” nor “Browning directed every scene” can be proved.
At night, on the same sets, George Melford’s crew shot a Spanish-language version with Carlos Villarias as the Count and Lupita Tovar as Eva. It runs about 104 minutes to the English version’s 75, and the Spanish unit watched the day crew’s footage and tried to top it. Browning’s Dracula was an enormous hit. It launched Universal’s monster cycle and sent him back to MGM on good terms, under Thalberg’s protection.
Freaks (1932) was the film he had carried for years. Harry Earles brought him Tod Robbins’s short story “Spurs” (1923) hoping to star, and MGM bought it at Browning’s urging. Thalberg kept the project alive over Louis B. Mayer’s disgust. Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon got the screenplay credit after about five months of rewriting. Browning’s crucial decision was to cast real sideshow performers, not as novelty acts but as the dramatic and comic heart of the film. Harry and Daisy Earles, conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, Johnny Eck, Prince Randian, Schlitzie, Josephine Joseph, Angelo Rossitto and others play a community that courts, marries, works and celebrates a birth. The “normal” trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) marries Hans (Harry Earles) for his money and plots with the strongman to poison him. At the wedding banquet the performers welcome her with the chant “We accept her, one of us,” and she screams her contempt at them. Then they take their revenge.
After disastrous previews in January 1932, Thalberg cut about 30 minutes and added a new prologue and ending. The cut footage is lost, and the released film runs 64 minutes. It failed at the box office, and Browning’s scholars put it bluntly: it effectively ended his career. MGM later leased it to exploitation showman Dwain Esper, who toured it under titles like Forbidden Love. The British censors rejected it in 1932, refused it again on resubmission, and only passed it, with an X certificate, in May 1963.
He made four more films. MGM assigned him to Fast Workers (1933) without a director credit. Mark of the Vampire (1935) remakes London After Midnight’s hoax, splitting Chaney’s double role between Lionel Barrymore as the investigator and Lugosi as the hired “vampire,” Count Mora. It has a gliding staircase shot by James Wong Howe, almost no music, and Lugosi breaking character at the end: “Did you see me? I was greater than any real vampire!” In The Devil-Doll (1936) Barrymore plays an escaped convict who shrinks people into living dolls for revenge and, like Chaney before him, hides out disguised as an old woman shopkeeper. Thalberg died soon after, and with him Browning’s protection. Miracles for Sale (1939), with Robert Young as a stage magician who solves murders, was his last film, and it lost money. After some story work at MGM, he retired to Malibu in 1942.
Cool Verified Facts
- When his wife Alice died in 1944, Variety published Browning’s obituary by mistake.
- Chaney stayed strapped in the arm harness through breaks on The Unknown. Joan Crawford recalled Browning offering to untie him, and Chaney answering: “No, the pain I am enduring now will help the scene.”
- Burt Lancaster called Chaney’s moment in The Unknown, when Alonzo learns he lost his arms for nothing, “one of the most compelling and emotionally exhausting scenes I have ever seen an actor do.”
- In Freaks, Prince Randian, who was born without arms or legs, rolls a cigarette, strikes a match and lights it using only his mouth, as he did in his Coney Island act.
- The Man in the Beaver Hat, from a film nobody alive has seen, inspired the monster in The Babadook (2014).
- Elmer Booth’s sister, Margaret Booth, later one of MGM’s top film editors, reportedly never forgave Browning for her brother’s death.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- Start with the outsider. Browning joked about how he and Chaney planned a picture: Chaney would ask, “Well, what’s it going to be, boss?” and Browning would answer, “This time a leg comes off, or an arm, or a nose.”
- Disguise and doubles everywhere: Chaney as ventriloquist and granny, gangster and old man, inspector and vampire; Barrymore as convict and old woman. He rebuilt the same device for twenty years.
- He wrote with pictures. “The unnecessary subtitle is an abomination upon the face of the silver sheet,” he wrote. “The director does the real writing of his story in the cutting and projection rooms.”
- He knew the carnival from the inside, and his films are full of it: fake spiritualists, magicians, sideshows and con men. White Tiger (1923) even shows how stage illusions are done.
- Critic Stuart Rosenthal finds four themes running through his films: reality against appearance, sexual frustration, opposing selves inside one person, and guilt that never lands cleanly. His summary: “Frustration is Browning’s dominant theme.”
- On Freaks, production histories report, the sideshow cast ate apart from the MGM commissary after other studio staff objected.
Why He Matters
Browning directed the film that started the sound horror era and gave the world its picture of the vampire: Lugosi, staring into the lens. A decade earlier, with Chaney, he had built a kind of American Grand Guignol on mutilated outsiders and double lives, and he was called “the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema.” Then he made Freaks, a studio film that made sideshow performers its moral center and the beautiful people its monsters. It wrecked his career. It was banned in Britain for 31 years, revived in Europe in 1962 around the time he died, and is now in the National Film Registry; Andrew Sarris called it “one of the most compassionate films ever made.” In 2023 the man Variety buried by mistake got his own Criterion box set.