Tod Browning

 ( American Male Film Actors ) 

Initially hired as a roustabout, he soon began serving as a "spieler" (a barker at ) and by 1901 was performing song and dance routines for Ohio and Mississippi riverboat entertainment, as well as acting as a for the Manhattan Fair and Carnival Company.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 10: "...a manager and roustabout..." And: Manhattan Company "contortionist." Browning developed a live burial act in which he was billed as "The Living Hypnotic Corpse", and performed as a clown with the Ringling Brothers circus. He would later draw on these early experiences to inform his cinematic inventions.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 10: "...a significant number of his movies are set in the world of the circus and the sideshow and Browning knew very well the milieu" he portrayed. And: See here for comment on living corpse routine.Barson, 2021: "Browning...found steady employment in circuses and carnivals as a clown, contortionist, magician's assistant, and barker."Brogan, 2008: "Browning...reportedly became a Ringling Brothers clown, a contortionist..."

In 1906, Browning was briefly married to Amy Louis Stevens in Louisville.Alford, 1995: "Browning married Amy Louise Stevens in 1906, but the union was short-lived since, according to some accounts, Browning was a no-good, money-borrowing layabout. Browning apparently abandoned his wife for vaudeville." Adopting the professional name "Tod" Browning ( tod is the German word for death),Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 10: "...baptized and reinvented himself as 'Tod' Browning..." And: Herzogenrath provides English-German translation the tod = death. Browning abandoned his wife and became a Vaudeville, touring extensively as both a magician's assistant and a blackface comedian in an act called The Lizard and the Coon with comedian Roy C. Jones. He appeared in a Mutt and Jeff sketch in the 1912 burlesque revue The World of Mirth with comedian Charles Murray.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 7: "He...later entered vaudeville, touring extensively in such acts as The World of Mirth, 'Mutt and Jeff' and 'Lizard and Coon'"
Barson, 2021: "After working in vaudeville as a blackface comedian, he was hired for the long-running burlesque revue The Whirl of Mirth, in which he appeared in sketches based on popular comic-strip characters of the period."
Brogan, 2008: "...a magician's assistant."

Film historian Boris Henry observed 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 early films that Browning would direct.Henry, 2006 p. 41Herzogenrath, 2006 pp. 10–11: "In 1909, Browning made his transition from the carnival to Hollywood (sic) New, where he started as an actor in Edward Dillon's slapstick shorts." And: "Before becoming a film director, Tod Browning acted in at least 50 short slapstick movies, working with actors he would later direct..." A number of actors that Browning performed with in his early acting career would later appear in his own pictures, many of whom served their apprenticeships with Keystone Cops director Mack Sennett, among them Wallace Beery, Ford Sterling, Polly Moran, Wheeler Oakman, Raymond Griffith, Kalla Pasha, Mae Busch, Wallace MacDonald and Laura La Varnie.Henry, 2006 p. 41: "...some of those who played in Tod Browning's movies have a slapstick background, in particular, those who acted in Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios films among Wallace Beery, Ford Sterling, Polly Moran, Wheeler Oakman, Raymond Griffith, Kalla Pasha, Mae Busch, Wallace MacDonald and Laura La Varnie..." And: "Edward Dillion was the author of most of Browning's early short films..."

In 1913, Browning was hired by film director D. W. Griffith at Biograph Studios in New York City, first appearing as an undertaker in Scenting a Terrible Crime (1913).Brogan, 2008: "He segued into acting and directing in New York City, where D.W. Griffith hired him at the Biograph Studio..."
Rosenthal, 1975 p. 13: NOTE: Rosenthal appears to mistakenly report that Browning ``entered motion pictures in either 1913 or 1914 (depending upon the source)..." parenthetical. Perhaps Rosenthal associates "entering" with "directing " film. Browning, according to Herzogenrath and Boris Henry, both report this shift to film (acting) took place earlier.
Barson, 2021: "In 1913 he was signed by the Biograph Company, where under the supervision of D.W. Griffith he was featured in a series of knockabout comedies."
Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11: At Biograph "Browning met D. W. Griffith, and both men left Biograph for the Reliance-Majestic studio in 1913."
Robinson, 1968 p. 125: Browning ``played in Griffith's Mother and the Law (1919)..." Both Griffith and Browning departed Biograph and New York that same year and together joined Reliance-Majestic Studios in Hollywood, California.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11: "...both men left Biograph for Reliance-Majestic in 1913..."Towlson, 2017 Part 2: "... fellow Kentuckian, D.W Griffith, took Browning to Hollywood as an actor." Browning was featured in several Reliance-Majestic films, including The Wild Girl (1917).Rosenthal, 1975 p. 8
Solomon, 2006 pp. 49–50: "After Browning went to work as film comedian for another Louisville native, D. W. Griffith, at the Biograph movie studios in New York, his beginning the carnival mileu (italics) were often highlighted – long dash an association that would continue throughout his entire career."

Browning's career almost ended when, intoxicated, he drove his vehicle into a railroad crossing and collided with a locomotive. Browning suffered grievous injuries, as did passenger George Siegmann. A second passenger, actor Elmer Booth, was killed instantly.Towlson, 2017 Part 2: "...a car crash in 1915 which resulted in the death of a passenger, Elmer Booth. Browning was driving under the influence when his car hit a train at a railway crossing. Browning himself suffered serious injuries: a shattered right leg, unspecified internal injuries and likely the loss of his front teeth."Barson, 2021: "In June of that year 1915, while driving drunk, he collided at high speed with a moving train. Browning and actor George A. Siegmann were seriously injured; actor Elmer Booth was killed. Film historian 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 experience into his work – radically reshaping it in the process."Towlson, 2017 Part 2 According to biographers David J. Skal and Elias Savada, the tragic event transformed Browning's creative outlook:

Indeed, the thirty-one films that Browning wrote and directed between 1920 and 1939 were, with few exceptions, melodramas.Sobchack, 2006 p. 22: Exceptions comprise "two serious dramas, two romantic films and one horror film. All others are melodramas of various types."

Browning's injuries likely precluded a further career as an actor.Brogan, year: "A car accident in 1915 ended his acting career, and he concentrated on writing during his convalescence."
Towlson, 2017 Part 2: "...Hollywood insiders of the time, such as director George E. Marshall, have asserted that Browning's injuries to some extent limited his physical activities as an adult. Whatever the true nature and extent of his injuries, the trauma that Browning experienced was genuine and profound." During his protracted convalescence,Towlson, 2017: "Browning suffered...a shattered right leg, unspecified internal injuries and likely the loss of his front teeth." Browning turned to writing screenplays for Reliance-Majestic.Sobchack, 2006 p. 35: "Browning, in is early career, worked in the story department of Majestic Pictures..."
Barson, 2021: "During Browning's long convalescence, he turned to screenwriting..." Upon his recovery, Browning joined Griffith's film crew on the set of Intolerance (1916) as an assistant director and appeared in a bit part for the production's "modern story" sequence.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 8
Barson, 2021: "After his recovery, he had a small role in Griffith's Intolerance (1916) while also functioning as an assistant director on it."Robinson, 1968 p. 125: Browning "...was one of the master's (Griffith's) assistant on Intolerance (1916)..."

Browning married his second wife Alice Watson in 1917; they would remain together until her death in 1944.Alford, 1995: "Alice Watson became his second wife in, and remained so until her death in 1944."

Returning to New York in 1917, Browning directed pictures for Metro Pictures.Barson, 2021: "Browning spent a year at Metro Pictures..."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 60: See here for Metro filmography in 1917 and 1918. There he made Peggy, the Will O' the Wisp and The Jury of Fate. Both starred Mabel Taliaferro, the latter in a dual role achieved with double exposure techniques that were groundbreaking for the time. Film historian Vivian Sobchack notes that many of these films "involved the disguise and impersonations found in later Browning films." (See Filmography below.)Sobchack, 2006 p. 22 Browning returned to Hollywood in 1918 and produced three more films for Metro, each of which starred Edith Storey: The Eyes 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 as "a successful director and script writer."Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11Rosenthal, 1975 p. 60: See here for Metro filmography and leading actors.

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 with Universal where he would direct a series of "extremely successful" films starring Priscilla Dean.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 8: "At Universal studios he made an extremely successful series of Universal "Jewels" prestige with Priscilla Dean." And p. 60: See Filmography section on "Bluebird"Barson, 2021: Browning "signed with the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1918. There he made nine films with leading actress Priscilla Dean."

The Dean films exhibit Browning's fascination with 'exotic' foreign settings and with underworld criminal activities, which serve to drive the action of his films. Dean is cast as a thieving demimonde who infiltrates high society to burgle jewelry in The Exquisite Thief (1919); in Under Two Flags (1922), set in colonial French Algiers, Dean is cast as a French-Arab member of a harem—her sobriquet is "Cigarette—servicing the French Foreign Legion; and in Drifting (1923), with its "compelling" Shanghai, China scenes recreated on the Universal backlot, Dean plays an opium dealer.Sobchack, 2006 p. 23: "Browning loved exotic settings" in which in his pictures "depends upon the physical strangeness of place for their effectiveness and plot movement." In Browning's final Dean vehicle at Universal, White Tiger, he indulged his fascination with "quasi-theatrical" productions of illusion—and revealed to movie audiences the mechanisms of these deceptions. In doing so, Browning—a former member of the fraternity of magicians—violated a precept of their professional code.Solomon, 2006 p. 52: "...Browning's films explicitly violate the magician's professional code, which stipulates that stage illusions remain concealed to the spectator...Browning did not hesitate to expose the methods of magic tricks on screen." And pp. 50–51: "...prior to his career as a director, Browning was a magician...a 1914 movie fan magazine described him...as a sideshow escape artist..." And: "A number of Browning films of the 1920s contain striking reproductions of theatrical- or quasi-theatrical- illusions that are staged not only for spectators within the films, but for contemporaneous viewers of the films themselves."

Perhaps the most fortuitous outcome of the Dean films at Universal is that they introduced Browning to future 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" as early as 1919 for his work at Universal.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11: Chaney was "The Man of a Thousand Faces" as early as 1919. Universal's vice-president Irving Thalberg paired Browning with Chaney for the first time in The Wicked Darling (1919), a melodrama in which Chaney played the thief "Stoop" Conners who forces a poor girl (Dean) from the slums into a life of crime and prostitution.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11: "Browning and Chaney were brought together by Irving Thalberg at Universal...The their first of a highly productive series of collaborations..."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 35: "Chaney's "first major role with Browning was in The Wicked Darling (1919)..."
Rosenthal, 1975 p. 8: "By 1919 Browning was directing programme films for Universal where he first established contact with Lon Chaney..."
Solomon, 2006 p. 56: "Browning made two films at Universal with Chaney, The Wicked Darling (1919) and Outside the Law (1920)."

In 1921, Browning and Thalberg enlisted Chaney in another Dean vehicle, Outside the Law, in which he plays the dual roles of the sinister "Black Mike" Sylva and the benevolent Ah Wing. Both of these Universal production exhibit Browning's "natural affinity for the melodramatic and grotesque." In a special effect that drew critical attention, Chaney appears to murder his own dual character counterpart through trick photographyRosenthal, 1975 p. 8 and "with Thalberg supporting their imaginative freedom, Chaney's ability and unique presence fanned the flames of Browning's passion for the extraordinary."Baxter, 1970 pp. 99–100: "...Browning had a natural affinity for the melodramatic and grotesque which made him the logical choice to direct Lon Cheney."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 34: "Certainly, Browning's best work was for MGM...all his films for Universal were made before 1924 and his maturity as a filmmaker...some credit must go to Irving Thalberg who, a vice-president at Universal while Browning was there" And p. 24: See here for "trick" photography.
Towlson, 2012: "...Carl Laemmle and Irving Thalberg paired Browning up with Lon Chaney for Outside the Law (1921). Thereafter he developed a reputation for the macabre, working with Chaney on a number of silent horror films that have become regarded as classics..."
Charles, 2006 p. 85: "Browning cast Lon Chaney in the dual roles of the villainous Black Mike and the mild-mannered Chinaman Ah Wing." Biographer Stuart Rosenthal remarks upon the foundations of the Browning-Chaney professional synergy:

When Thalberg resigned as vice-president at Universal to serve as production manager with the newly amalgamated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1925, Browning and Chaney accompanied him.Sobchack, 2006 p. 36: "...when he Thalberg left Universal in 1925 to join the newly-formed MGM." he brought Browning and Chaney with him.

The first of these MGM productions established Browning as a talented filmmaker in Hollywood, and deepened Chaney's professional and personal influence on the director: The Unholy Three.Sobchack, 2006 p. 35: "Lon Chaney's influence on Browning seems considerable...their significant collaboration really began at MGM and with The Unholy Three (1925)."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 19: "In these films one can sense a personal rapport between actor and director which must have been deeper than mere professional respect."Eaker, 2016: "The original, silent Unholy Three (1925) catapulted Browning into star director status."

The Unholy Three is an outstanding example of Browning's delight in the "bizarre" (though, here, not macabre) melodrama and "the perverse characterizations" that Browning and Chaney devised anticipated their subsequent collaborations.Eaker, 2016: "The Unholy Three is not, on the surface, as macabre as later Browning-Chaney films but perverse characterizations and surreal plot."
Barson, 2021: "...the shocking (for the time) circus tale The Unholy Three (1925), with Chaney as a transvestite ventriloquist who teams with a dwarf sic (Harry Earles), a strongman (Victor McLaglen), and a pickpocket (Mae Busch) to go on a crime spree that culminates in murder..."
Robinson, 1968 p. 125: The Unholy Three (1925), about a transvestite ventriloquist, a dwarf sic and a strongman who conduct a criminal business under cover of a pet store, was a promising (and profitable) beginning."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 25: "...contains the major elements of Browning's bizarre melodramas..."

Lon Chaney doubles as Professor Echo, a sideshow ventriloquist, and as Mrs. "Granny" O'Grady (a cross-dressing Echo), the mastermind of the gang. Granny/Echo operates a talking parrot pet shop as a front for the operation. Film critic Alfred Eaker notes that Chaney renders "the drag persona with depth of feeling. Chaney never camps it up and delivers a remarkable, multifaceted performance."Eaker, 2016

Harry Earles, a member of The 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.)Eaker, 2016: "As powerful as Chaney is in the lead role, he is eclipsed by his dwarf sic co-star Earles."

Victor McLagen is cast as weak-minded Hercules, the circus strongman who constantly seeks to assert his physical primacy over his cohorts. Hercules detests Granny/Echo, but is terrified by the ventriloquist's "pet" gorilla. He doubles as Granny O'Grady's son-in-law and father to Little Willie.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 36

The pickpocket Rosie, played by Mae Busch, is the object of Echo's affection, and they share a mutual admiration as fellow larcenists. She postures as the daughter to Granny/Echo and as the mother of Little Willie.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 30Blyn, 2006 p. 121: Echo's "love interest, Rosie..."

The pet shop employs the diffident bookkeeper, Hector "The Boob" MacDonald (Matt Moore) who is wholly ignorant of the criminal proceedings. Rosie finds this "weak, gentle, upright, hardworking" man attractive.Brenez, 2006 p. 105Blyn, 2006 p. 117: "...The Boob..."

When Granny O'Malley assembles her faux-"family" in her parlor 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, the baby a libidinous, greedy midget, and the pet...an enormous gorilla." Browning's portrait is a "sarcastic distortion" that subverts a cliched American wholesomeness and serves to deliver "a harsh indictment...of the bourgeois family."Brenez, 2006 pp. 104–105: Quotes here are a composite. And p. 104 for character descriptions.

Film historian Stuart Rosenthal identifies "the ability to control 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 of their wealth, much as circus sideshow patrons are deceived: Professor Echo and his ventriloquist's dummy distract a "hopelessly naive and novelty-loving" audience as pickpocket Rosie relieves them of their wallets.Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 18–19Blyn, 2006 p. 121 Browning ultimately turns the application of "mental control" to serve justice. When bookkeeper Hector takes the stand in court, testifying in his defense against a false charge of murder, the reformed Echo applies his willpower to silence the defendant, and uses his voice throwing power to provide the exonerating testimony. When Hector descends from the stand, he tells his attorney "That wasn't me talking. I didn't say a word." Browning employs a set of dissolves to make the ventriloquists role perfectly clear.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 14: "The ability to assume control of another being is vital to The Unholy Three. Echo the ventriloquist delivers testimony in court through the mouth of Hector....as the words pour from the witness stand, Browning repeatedly dissolves Echo onto Hector and vice versa, establishing the performer's complete responsibility for what is being said."Blyn, 2006 pp. 117, 121

Film historian Robin Blyn comments on the significance of Echo's courtroom confession:

With The Unholy Three, Browning provided MGM with a huge box-office and critical success.Sobchack, 2006 p. 34: "The film was, of course, a huge success."

Dollar Down (1925): Browning followed The Mystic with another "crook melodrama involving swindlers" for Truart productions. Based on a story by Jane Courthope and Ethyl Hill, Dollar Down stars Ruth Roland and Henry B. Walthall.Sobchack, 2006 p. 32Rosenthal, 1975 p. 63

Following these "more conventional" crime films, Browning and Chaney embarked on their final films of the late silent period, "the strangest collaboration between director and actor in cinema history; the premises of the films were outrageous."Robinson, 1968 p. 125: After a more conventional crime film, The Mystic (1925), Browning and Chaney embarked on a series of seven further films: The Blackbird (1926), The Road to Mandalay (1926) The Unknown (1927), London After Midnight (1927), The Big City (1928), West of Zanzibar (1928) and Where East Is East (1929). The premises of the films were outrageous."Eaker, 2016: The Browning-Chaney collaborations "one of the most unsettling actor/director collaborations in the history of cinema....the strangest collaboration between director and actor in cinema history."

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 is a persona he uses to periodically evade suspicion by the police under "a phony mantle of christian goodness"—an image utterly at odds with the persona of The Blackbird.Eaker, 2016: "The scenes of Chaney frantically changing identities with constables from Scotland Yard waiting below are deliriously incredible." According to film historian Stuart Rosenthal, "Tate's masquerade as the Bishop succeeds primarily because the Bishop's face so believably reflects a profound spiritual suffering that is absolutely foreign to the title character The."Miller, 2008 TCM: "...set in London's Limehouse district, a lower-class waterfront area named for the large warehouses where the British Navy stored the citrus fruit that protected its sailors from scurvy."
Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 39–40: "The Bishop's forlorn expression reveals a propensity for passive suffering...since this inclination toward self-subjugation is incompatible with the assertive traits that Browning prizes, Dan Tate is split into two. The phoney suffering and soft manner go into one package, the Bishop, while the scornful aggressiveness and rough-hewn features are combined in the Blackbird."

Tate's competitor in crime, the "gentleman-thief" Bertram "West End Bertie" Glade (Owen Moore, becomes romantically involved with a Limehouse cabaret singer, Mademoiselle Fifi Lorraine (Renée Adorée). The jealous Tate attempts to frame Bertie for the murder of a policeman, but is mortally injured in an accident while in the 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 lover Fifi are united in matrimony.Miller, 2008 TCM: "The name West End Bertie suggests that the character is a gentleman thief, coming from the more fashionable side of London."
Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 22–23: See here for Browning and Chaney handling of the Dan Tate character.
Sobchack, 2006 p. 24: "The Blackbird (1926) is also a crook melodrama in which Chaney plays two roles" as the character Dan Tate...posing as both a rescue mission worker named "The Bishop" and "The Blackbird" a phony twin brother Tate creates to conceal his criminal activities. And p. 57: "...christian goodness..."
Solomon, 2006 pp. 56–57: "In The Blackbird, the criminal Dan Tate (Chaney), The Blackbird, periodically assumes the character of The Bishop, who hobbles about on a crutch, to elude the police."

Chaney's adroit "quick-change" transformations from the 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.Solomon, 2006 p. 56: "Browning films like The Blackbird place the act of masquerade onscreen, explicitly revealing the visual deception to the viewer." And pp. 56–57: "While other characters in the film, or course, never see the two purported twin brothers together, the viewer is given immediate access to the acts of quick-change" in which Tate (Chaney) transforms himself from The Blackbird to The Bishop.

Browning introduces a number of slapstick elements into The Blackbird. Doris Lloyd, portrays Tate's ex-wife Limehouse Polly, demonstrating her comic acumen in scenes as a flower girl,Miller, 2008: "Doris Lloyd received solid notices as the Blackbird's ex-wife, who still loves him. She would build a long career, specializing in playing British maids and cleaning ladies into her seventies." and Browning's Limehouse drunkards are "archetypical of burlesque cinema." Film historian Boris Henry points out that "it would not be surprising if the fights that Lon Chaney as Dan Tate mimes between his two characters (The Blackbird and The Bishop) were inspired by actor-director Max Linder's performance in Be My Wife, 1921."Henry, Boris, 2006 p. 41: Polly Moran's "slapstick background" is displayed in her role as a flower girl in The Blackbird. And p. 42: "The Blackbird...inspired by Max Linder's performance in Be My Wife, 1921." And p. 43: Some scenes in The Blackbird "are archetypical of burlesque cinema...a drunk totters unsteadily, notices suddenly he is going the wrong way and turns on his heels."
Rosenthal, 1975 p. 63: Filmography, brief sketch of film.
Solomon, 2006 p. 56: "Browning films like The Blackbird place the act of masquerade onscreen, explicitly revealing the visual deception to the viewer." And pp. 56–57: "While other characters in the film, or course, never see the two purported "twin" brothers together, the viewer is given immediate access to the acts of quick-change" in which Tate transforms himself from The Blackbird to The Bishop.
Miller, 2008 TCM: "With the revelation that the twin brothers are actually the same man, with the physically twisted mission worker as a front for the criminal, Chaney treated his fans to several scenes in which he transforms from one to the other."

Film historian Stuart Rosenthal identifies Browning's characterization of Dan Tate/the Blackbird as a species of vermin lacking in nobility, a parasitic scavenger that feeds on carrion and is unworthy of sympathy.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 12: "...the protagonist Dan of The Blackbird must ultimately fail in his jealous vendetta against Bertie...as his name implies Tate/Blackbird falls into the category of scavengers and parasites...his motives are corrupt and, in the end, he does not succeed." In death, according to film critic Nicole Brenez, The Blackbird "is deprived of himself...death, then, is no longer a beautiful vanishing, but a terrible spiriting away."Brenez, 2006 p. 96: "...to die as one's double means being deprived of oneself even in death: death, then, is no longer a beautiful vanishing, but a terrible spiriting away."

Though admired by critics for Chaney's performance, the film was only modestly successful at the box office.Miller, 2008: "The film's $36,000 profit was the lowest for any of Chaney's MGM films. Although the film received strong reviews...MGM picked up Chaney's contract, raising his salary to $3,000 a week and gave Browning a new contract doubling his salary to $20,000 a picture with a $5,000 bonus for each film brought in on time and on budget.

In a story that Browning wrote with screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz , The Road to Mandalay (not related to author Rudyard Kipling's 1890 poem), is derived from the character "dead-eyed" Singapore Joe (Lon Chaney), a Singapore brothel operator. As Browning himself explained:

The picture explores one of Browning's most persistent themes: that of a parent who asserts sexual authority vicariously through their own offspring.Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 25–26: "Browning regularly introduces the theme of secondary of "indirect" sexual frustration through the plot device of a parent who is unaware of the identity of his own child, or in the reverse situation." And pp. 25–30: See these pages for Rosenthals examples of these themes, including The Devil-Doll (1936), The Show (1927), White Tiger (1923) and others. And: the "horrific One-Eyed-Joe in The Road to Mandalay..." As such, an Oedipal complex narrative is established, "a narrative that dominates Browning's work" and recognized as such by contemporary critics.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 185: "...Herman J. Mankiewicz might have been familiar with Sigmund Freud concepts...Whether through Mankiewicz influence or otherwise, the Oedipus complex as a narrative structure...dominates Browning's work."

Joe's daughter, Rosemary (Lois Moran), now a young adult, has been raised in a convent where her father left her as an infant with her uncle, Father James (Henry B. Walthall). Rosemary is ignorant of her parentage; she lives a chaste and penurious existence. Brothel keeper Joe makes furtive visits to the shop where she works as a clerk.Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 25–26: "Singapore Joe is so ugly that he feels his daughter (who indeed, abhors that hideous man when he patronizes the store in which she clerks) would be ashamed if she were aware of their kinship." His attempts to anonymously befriend the girl are met with revulsion at his freakish appearance. Joe resolves to undergo plastic surgery to achieve a rapprochement with his daughter and redeem his sordid history. Father James doubts his brothers' commitment to reform and to reestablish his parenthood. A conflict emerges when Joe's cohorts and rivals in crime, "The Admiral" Herrington (Owen Moore) and 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 is instantly smitten with her; his genuine resolve to abandon his criminal life wins Rosemary's devotion and a marriage is arranged. 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 her father, mortally wounding him. The denouement is achieved when the dying Joe consents to her marriage and Father James performs the last rites upon his brother.Eaker, 2016: See here for a concise overview of the characters and scenario.

Film critic Alfred Eaker observes: " The Road to Mandalay is depraved, pop-Freudian, silent melodrama at its ripest. Fortunately, both Browning and Chaney approach this hodgepodge of silliness in dead earnest."Eaker, 2016
Rosenthal, 1975 p. 26: "The struggle that results when the Admiral, one of Joe's smuggling colleagues, announced his plans to wed Joe's has overtones of a fight to maintain the sexual integrity of the family. When this conflict is juxtaposed with efforts to hold his position as top dog in the local underworld, the infighting among the hoodlums acquires the aspect of a battle for sexual supremacy. Keeping the community of gangsters under control becomes primarily a matter of machismo."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 23: "One frequent minor theme in the exotic melodramas is that of sacrifice...Singapore Joe dies saving his daughter from a fate worse than death..." Religious imagery commonly appears in Browning's films, "surrounding his characters with religious paraphernalia." Browning, a Freemasonry, uses Christian iconography to emphasize Joe's moral alienation from Rosemary.Eaker, 2016: "Browning, a Mason, repeatedly used religious imagery and themes..." Biographer Stuart Rosenthal writes:

Rosenthal adds ""Religion for the Browning hero is an additional spring of frustration – another defaulted promise."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 57

As in all of the Browning-Chaney collaborations, The Road to Mandalay was profitable at the box office.Sobchack, 2006 p. 36: "...it should be emphasized that most Browning films – until Freaks – made money."

London After Midnight is widely considered by archivists the Holy Grail and "the most sought after and discussed lost film of the silent era."Eaker, 2016: The still-photo reconstruction by TCM in 2003 "is probably the only version of the film we, and future generations, will ever see."
Eisenberg, 2020: "Of all the "lost" films in the history of cinema that have remained "lost," London After Midnight has passed into legend as the equivalent of the Holy Grail." A detailed photo reconstruction, based on stills from the film was assembled by Turner Classic Movies' Rick Schmidlin in 2002.Eaker, 2016: "In 2003, Rick Schmidlin of Turner Classic Movies arduously produced a photo reconstruction of London After Midnight..."

Based on Browning's own tale entitled "The Hypnotist", London After Midnight is a "drawing room murder mystery'—its macabre and Gothic film atmosphere resembling director Robert Wiene's 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.Sobchack, 2006 p. 35: " London After Midnight came from a story by Browning called The Hypnotist. And p. 36: Browning ``knew the work of Wiene on Caligari" (Sobchack quoting Edgar G. Ulmer, footnote 67).
Eaker, 2016: "Even from a stills-only reproduction, it is clear that Midnight is the original American Goth film. Chaney's vampire, partly inspired by Werner Krauss' Caligari..." And: "drawing room murder mystery..."

Sir Roger Balfour is found dead at the estate of his friend Sir James Hamlin. The gunshot wound to Balfour's head appears self-inflicted. The Scotland Yard inspector and forensic hypnotist in charge, "Professor" Edward C. Burke (Lon Chaney) receives no reports of foul play and the death is deemed a suicide. Five years past, and the estates current occupants are alarmed by a ghoulish, fanged figure wearing a cape and top hat stalking the hallways at night. He is accompanied by a corpse-like female companion. The pair of intruders are the disguised Inspector Burke, masquerading as a vampire (also played by Chaney), and his assistant, "Luna, the 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 series of elaborate illusions and applications of hypnotism to discover the identity of the murderer among Balfour's former associates.Brenez, 2006 p. 96: "...the creation of a double...the vampire a in London After Midnight..."Eisenberg, 2020: "The likeness of Chaney's "vampire," also popularly known as 'the man in the beaver hat'" And short plot synopsis.Solomon, 2006 p. 51: "...it is the contrived haunted house in which a detective and his assistant, dressed in elaborate disguises, ensnare a murderer."

Browning's "preposterous" plot is the platform on which he demonstrates the methods of 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 trick photography is employed.Solomon, 2006 p. 51: "the paranormal occurrence seen in the film are staged illusions, not...the deceptions, as such, are revealed to the viewers." And p. 56: "...London After Midnight presents apparently supernatural phenomena as the work of stage magic."
Eaker, 2016: "The film...is essentially a drawing room murder mystery, with a detective hiring actors to play vampires in order to smoke out the guilty party through sheer fright. As with most of Browning films, the plot is painstakingly preposterous..." "illusion, hypnotism and disguise" are used to mimic the conceits and pretenses of the occult, but primarily for dramatic effect and only to reveal them as tricks.Sobchack, 2006 p. 31: ... the occult and the supernatural are used at one level for their dramatic value but are invariably revealed as tricks.``
Eisenberg, 2020: "The movie poster and lobby cards played up the film's crime story and assumed supernatural element."

After the murderer is apprehended, Browning's Inspector Burke/The Man in the Beaver Hat reveals the devices and techniques he has used to extract the confession, while systematically disabusing the cast characters—and the movie audience—of any supernatural influence on the foregoing events.Solomon, 2006 p. 58: "...London After Midnight presents apparently supernatural phenomena as the work of stage magic." And: see quote from Philip J. Riley, footnote #36. And pp. 58–59: "...the paranormal occurrences seen in the film are staged by police inspector Burke (Chaney) to catch a killer."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 33: "...critics found the 'plausible' ending of London After Midnight disappointing in its final refusal to accept the supernatural premises the film had set up." Film historians Stefanie Diekmann and Ekkehard Knörer observe succinctly that "All in all, Browning's scenarios including appear as a long series of tricks, performed and explained."Diekmann, Knorer, 2006 p. 74

Lon Chaney's make-up to create the menacing "Man with the Beaver hat" is 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 teeth producing a hideous grin, a ludicrous wig under a top hat, and white pancake makeup achieved Chaney's kinky look. To add to the effect Chaney developed a misshapen, incongruous walk for the character."

London After Midnight received a mixed critical response, but delivered handsomely at the box office "grossing over $1,000,000 in 1927 dollars against a budget of $151,666.14."Eisenberg, 2020: "Despite the subpar reviews, the film was a hit upon its release, grossing over $1,000,000 in 1927 dollars against a budget of $151,666.14." And: "After all, there is nothing to indicate the film, as directed by Tod Browning, was any sort of masterpiece. The reviews on London After Midnight's release were slight at best."
Eaker, 2016: "...London After Midnight received mixed reviews upon its release in 1927, but the majority of the reviews were positive." And: "Of all the Browning/Chaney films, Midnight reaped the biggest box office."

Screenwriter Waldemar Young based the scenario on elements from the author Charles Tenny Jackson's The Day of Souls.Eaker, 2016: "The screenplay for The Show (1927) was written by frequent Tod Browning collaborator Waldemer Young (with uncredited help from Browning)...very (italics) loosely based on Charles Tenney Jackson's novel, 'The Day of Souls.'" (italics in original)
Wood, 2006 TCM: "The subplots of the blind father and Cock Robin's moral redemption are virtually the only ingredients that survived from Charles Tenney Jackson's novel The Day of Souls (from which the script was officially adapted)."
Sobchack, 2006 pp. 34–35: "...The Show suggested by Charles Jackson's novel The Day of Souls...an avid reader of gothic literature, Browning likely discovered the novel as."

The Show is a tour-de-force demonstration of Browning's penchant for the spectacle of carnival sideshow acts combined with the revelatory exposure of the theatrical apparatus and techniques that create these illusions. Film historian Matthew Solomon notes that "this is not specific to his films with Lon Chaney."Solomon, 2006 p. 60 Indeed, The Show features two of MGM's leading actors: John Gilbert, as the unscrupulous ballyhoo Cock Robin, and Renée Adorée as his tempestuous lover, 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 comprise the plot and its "saccarine" ending.Eaker, 2016: "John Gilbert plays Cock Robin, the ballyhoo man at the Palace of Illusions. A character with the name of an animal is a frequent Browning trademark." And: "Unfortunately, The Show is flawed by a saccharine finale..."
Wood, 2006 TCM: "Its pairing of Gilbert and Adoree was a throwback to the wildly successful The Big Parade (1925)." And: "Much of the criticism was leveled at the largely unsympathetic character of Gilbert's Cock Robin."
Rosenthal, 1975 p. 63: Synopsis in full: "A jealous quarrel presented against a carnival background results in several murders and attempted murders."

Browning presents a menagerie of circus sideshow novelty acts from the fictitious "Palace of Illusions", including disembodied hands delivering tickets to customers; an illusionary beheading 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 Spider perched on her web. Browning ultimately reveals "how the trick is done", explicating the mechanical devices to the film audience – not to the film's carnival patrons.Sobchack, 2006 p. 25: "The Show (1927) is set in a Budapest circus and fairway show called The Palace of Illusions." And p. 29: "Besides the constantly noted physical oddities of major characters, another common element shared by these bizarre melodramas is a hint of perverse sexuality..."
Solomon, 2006 pp. 61, 64: images of Palace of Illusion performers. See caption for photos p. 61: "The 'true forms' for the acts are later revealed to the film audience."

The central dramatic event of The Show derives from another literary work, a "magic playlet" by Oscar Wilde entitled Salomé (1896). Browning devises an elaborate and "carefully choreographed" sideshow reenactment of Jokanaan's biblical beheading (played by Gilbert), with Adorée as Salomé presiding over the lurid decapitation, symbolic of sadomasochism and castration.Solomon, 2006 pp. 63–64: See here for a concise analysis of the sequence.
Sobchack, 2006 p. 29: "...The Show focuses on the Salome/John the Baptist 'illusion' a that speaks sadomasochism and symbolic castration."
Eaker, 2016: "In The Show (1927), the sadomasochistic drama of Salome is reenacted and almost played out in the actors' lives..."

The Show received generally good reviews, but approval was muted due to Gilbert's unsavory character, Cock Robin. Browning was now poised to make his masterwork of the silent era, The Unknown (1927).Sobchack, 2006 pp. 25–26: "... the negative New York Times review (focused on John Gilbert's performance)..."Wood, 2006 TCM: "Much of the criticism was leveled at the largely unsympathetic character of Cock Robin. Variety predicted The Show "undoubtedly will hurt John general popularity with the women..."Eaker, 2016: "The Unknown (1927) is one of the final masterpieces of the silent film era...the one film in which the artists' obsessions perfectly crystallized."

Circus performer "Alonzo the armless", a Gypsy knife-thrower, appears as a double amputee, casting his knives with his feet. His deformity is an illusion (except for a Bifid penis 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 to evade detection and arrest.Soloman, 2006 p. 51: Alonzo "masquerades as an armless freak" one of Browning's portrayal of "elaborate deceptions that take place on the level of mise-en-scene."
Stafford, 2003 TCM: "the character of Alonzo in The Unknown is one of his most disturbing creations and the most twisted film in his ten-year association with director Tod Browning." Alonzo harbors a secret love for Nanon (Joan Crawford), his assistant in the act. Nanon's father is the abusive (perhaps sexually so) ringmaster Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz), and Nanon has developed a pathological aversion to any man's embrace. Her emotional dysfunction precludes any sexual intimacy with the highly virile strong-man, Malabar, or Alonzo, his own sexual prowess symbolized by his knife-throwing expertise and his double thumb.Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 32–33: Chaney's character is "infatuated with Crawford who has a neurotic aversion to being handled by men, and naturally, an armless man is the only lover she can abide." And: Alonzo's "heightened sexual prowess represented his supernumerary thumb" and his high-functioning performance without arms.Eaker, 2016: "Nanon's sadistic father, Antonio Zanzi (Nick de Ruiz, hinted at being the abusive source for Nanon's hatred of a man's touch)." When Alonzo murders Zanzi during an argument, the homicide is witnessed by Nanon, who detects only the bifid thumb of her father's assailant.Eaker, 2016: "But, Alonzo must have, marry, and own Nanon, but she would certainly hate the hands of the double-thumbed murderer."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 33: "...if Alonzo proceeds to marry Nanon, his wife will discover his secret" as the killer of her father.

Browning's theme of sexual frustration and physical mutilation ultimately manifests itself in Alonzo's act of symbolic castration; he willingly has his arms amputated by an unlicensed surgeon so as to make himself unthreatening to Nanon (and to eliminate the incriminating bifid thumb), so as to win her affection. The "nightmarish irony" of Alonzo's sacrifice is the most outrageous of Browning's plot conceits and consistent with his obsessive examination of "sexual frustration and emasculation".Rosenthal, 1975 p. 33: "The amputations take on the significance of castration...Nanon aroused only by 'sexless' men."
Brenez, 2006 p. 100: "... The Unknown, the most drastic film in regard" to "the defects and excess" of dismemberment.
Sobchack, 2006 p. 29: The Unknown shares a "common element of Browning's bizarre melodramas...a hint of perverse sexuality....Estrellita (Nanon) Joan Crawford is horrified at being touched by men's hands Alonzo's Chaney surgery for love of her is to say the least, excessive."
Conterio, 2018: "The Unknown is a sublime fusion of Sadomasochism imagery, male self-loathing, misandry, castration symbolism and nightmarish irony."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 11: "Alonzo Chaney, in The Unknown is among the most rabid and instinctive of Browning's protagonists..." And pp. 32–33: "The Unknown defines a sexual basis for the frustration theme of the entire Browning-Chaney cycle and relates it to the star's inevitable physical deformity.'"
Brenez, 2006 p. 100: "...The Unknown, the most drastic film in regard" to "the defects and excess" of dismemberment.
Towlson, 2017 Part 2: ".. one of the key themes in Browning's work...is the emasculation/castration theme, in particular, one Browning explored obsessively in his films (especially those made with Lon Chaney)." 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).Conterio, 2018: "Fixated on human disfigurement and underworld figures, the films are marked by a star k, obsessive aesthetic and themes of compulsion." The primal ferocity of Alonzo's reaction to Nanon's betrayal in marrying Malabar is instinctual. Film historian Stuart Rosenthal writes:

Alonzo's efforts at retribution lead to his own horrific death in a "Grand Guignol finale".Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 11–12: "Alonzo...chooses animals — horses – as his means for disarticulating his nemesis, Malbar, the Strongman. Alonzo's death beneath the horse's hooves, therefore, occurs in his own element." And: "...a lust for retribution...for those who have made them outcasts."Eaker, 2016: The Unknown "ends with a startling, ferociously driven, symbolic finale."
Safford, 2003 TCM: "the Grand Guignol finale."Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 p. 73: "As far as plots are concerned, the proximity of Browning's cinema to the theatre of the Grand Guignol is evident..."

The Unknown is widely regarded as the most outstanding of the Browning-Chaney collaborations and a masterpiece of the late silent film era.Brogan, 2008: "When they made The Unknown in 1927, star Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning were among the biggest names in Hollywood...The Unknown is now considered by many to be the best of the Chaney/Browning collaborations...the sixth of ten collaborations between Chaney and director Tod Browning."
Conterio, 2018: "Generally considered to be the pair's best film together, and Browning's masterpiece..."
Eaker, 2016: " The Unknown (1927) is one of the final masterpieces of the silent film era...the one film in which the artists' obsessions perfectly crystallized."
Stafford, 2003 TCM: "the character of Alonzo in The Unknown is one of his most disturbing creations and the most twisted film in his ten-year association with director Tod Browning." Film critic Scott Brogan regards The Unknown worthy of "cult status."Brogan, 2019: "The Unknown is quite possibly the most unusual, and the most deserving of 'cult film' status" among the Browning-Chaney film collaborations.
Eaker, 2016: "The Unknown is...an entirely idiosyncratic work of art, which has never been remotely mimicked, nor could it be."

Film historian Vivian Sobchack remarked that " The Big City concerns a nightclub robbery, again, the rivalry between two thieves. This time Chaney plays only one of them—without a twisted limb or any facial disguise.'"Sobchack, 2006 p. 24: see here for See her for excerpts from contemporary NYT reviews. Critic Stuart Rosenthal commented on The Big City: "...Chaney, without makeup, in a characteristic gangster role."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 64: quote from photo caption.
Erickson, Allmovie: " The Big City was perhaps the most "normal" of the Lon Chaney-Tod Browning collaborations. Minus makeup, Chaney plays gangster boss Chuck Collins, who despite his ruthlessness is a basically decent fellow."

The Big City garnered MGM $387,000 in profits.Erickson, Allmovie: "As it turned out, Chaney's star-power enabled The Big City to score a box-office success to the tune of $387,000 in profits."

The story opens in Paris, where Pharos, a magician,Solomon, 2006 p. 51: "...the prototypical figure of the stage magician is found most clearly in West of Zanzibar, 1928. It is worth knowing that before being crippled in an accident, the music-hall illusionist Phroso (Lon Chaney) resembles not so much the archetypal Mesphistophelian visage of Hermann the Great, but rather – with his finely waxed mustache – looks much like Browning himself..." 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 dead in a church, with an infant daughter beside her. He swears to avenge himself both on Crane and the child he assumes was sired by Crane. Unbeknownst to Phroso, the child is actually his.Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 30–31: "Dead Legs' wife is stolen and (he believes) impregnated by an adulterous lover..." And p. 57: " Rosenthal singles out this scene for special mention:

Eighteen years hence, the crippled Pharos, now dubbed Dead Legs, operates an African trading outpost. He secretly preys upon Crane's ivory operations employing local tribes and using sideshow tricks and illusions to seize the goods.Darr, 2010: "...Chaney's magician character's manipulative schemes..." After years of anticipation, Dead Legs prepares to hatch his "macabre revenge": a sinister double murder. He summons Anna's daughter Maizie (Mary Nolan) from the sordid brothel and gin mill where he has left her to be raised. He also invites Crane to visit his outpost so as to expose the identity of the culprit stealing his ivory. Dead Legs has arranged to have Crane murdered, but not before informing him that he will invoke the local Death Code, which stipulates that "a man's demise be followed by the death of his wife or child."Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 27–28 Crane mockingly disabuses Dead Legs of his gross misapprehension: Maizie is Dead Legs' daughter, not his, a child that Pharos conceived with Anna in Paris. Crane is killed before Dead Legs can absorb the significance of this news.

The climax of the film involves Dead Legs' struggle to save his own offspring from the customary death sentence that his own deadly scheme has set in motion. Dead Legs ultimately suffers the consequences of his "horribly misdirected revenge ploy."Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 p. 73 The redemptive element with which Browning-Chaney endows Pharos/Dead Legs fate is noted by Rosenthal: " West of Zanzibar reaches the peak of its psychological horror when Chaney discovers that the girl he is using as a pawn in his revenge scheme is his own daughter. Dead Legs undertook his mission of revenge with complete confidence in the righteousness of his cause. Now he is suddenly overwhelmed by the realization of his own guilt. That Barrymore as Crane committed the original transgression in no way diminishes that guilt."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 44

Dead Legs' physical deformity reduces him to crawling on the ground, and thus to the "state of an animal."Sobchack, 2006 p. 31: Browning's "fascination of physical deformity (generated, perhaps, by self-consciousness about his own badly scarred leg and limp, the result of a horrific automobile accident in 1915.)..."
Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 9–10: "The typical Browning protagonist is a man who has been reduced to a state of an animal. In almost every instance he displays a physical deformity that reflects the mental mutilation he has suffered at some element of callous society." And p. 31: "The incident that prompts the regression to and search for vengeance is, in almost every case, sexual in nature." Browning's camera placement accentuates his snake-like "slithering" and establishes "his animal transformation by suddenly changing the visual frame of reference to one that puts the viewer on the same level as the beast on the screen, thereby making him vulnerable to it, accomplished by tilting the camera up at floor level in front of the moving subject used accentuate Chaney's Dead slithering movements in West of Zanzibar."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 48: See Photo caption "slithering" Film historians Stephanie Diekmann and Ekkehard Knörer state more generally "...the spectator in Browning's films can never remain a voyeur; or rather, he is never safe in his voyeuristic position..."Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 p. 74

Diekmann and Knörer also place West of Zanzibar in the within the realm of the Grand Guignol tradition:

Despite being characterized as a "cess-pool" by the censorious Harrison's Reports motion picture trade journal, West of Zanzibar enjoyed popular success at the box office.Harvey, 2009: "...Harrison's Report, a self-described advocate for independent exhibitors, remembered Kongo and asked in a front-page editorial, "How any normal person could have thought this horrible syphilitic play could have made an entertaining picture?" The film fueled the crusades of the censorship-minded, who used it as blatant evidence of Hollywood's 'cesspools'", but " West of Zanzibar did quite well at the box office..."
Wood, 2006 TCM: " West of Zanzibar was first screened in Los Angeles in November 1928. Its official opening was December 28, 1928 at New York's Capitol Theatre (the palace where MGM premiered its major productions). The response was overwhelming. It earned an unbelievable $88,869 in its first week at the Capitol. Motion Picture News wrote, "If you do not have a S.R.O. (Standing Room Only) sign in your theater... you had better order one immediately before playing this picture."

Biographer Bernd Herzogenrath adds that "paradoxically, the film both essentializes the East as a universal and homogeneous entity ("Where East Is East") and deconstructs it as a Western myth consisting of nothing but colorful male fantasies." bracketsHerzogenrath, 2006 p. 15
Brandt, 2006 pp. 130, 131: "As a highly ambivalent work of art, Browning's Where East Is East is caught in a strange predicament. While replicating some dominant images of the East and thus validating the Eurocentric ideology connected to them, the film also seeks to subvert and destabilize the authority of these myths.... Where East Is East is marked by a complicated strategy of reinvention and deconstruction of ethnic stereotypes in the binary logic of whiteness is symbolically suspended." Composite quote.

The last of Browning-Chaney collaborations with an "outrageous premise"Robinson, 1968 p. 125: "...Where East Is East (1929)...The premises of the films were outrageous."
Eaker, 2016: Where East Is East does not subscribe to any sort of orthodox realism..."
Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 p. 73: "...the sadistic cruelty and bestial brutality intermingled with the orientalizing chinoiserie of Where East Is East (1929)..." and their final silent era film, Where East Is East was marketed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer "as a colonial drama in the mold of British imperialist fiction."Eaker, 2016: "Where East Is East (1929) was the last of the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaborations, it was the last of Browning's silent films, and it contained many themes from their previous efforts together."
Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11: "...their final collaboration Where East Is East, 1929..." And p. 15 "...last co-production of Tod Browning with Lon Chaney..."
Brandt, 2006 p. 130

Where East Is East, set in the "picturesque French Indo-China of the 1920s"Brandt, 2006 pp. 129–130: Brief synopsis of film. concerns the efforts of Big-game hunting trapper "Tiger" Haynes (Chaney) intervention to stop his beloved half-Chinese daughter Toyo (Lupe Velez) from marrying Bobby "white boy" Bailey, a Western suitor and son of a circus owner. He relents when Bobby rescues Toyo from an escaped tiger. The Asian seductress, Madame de Sylva (Estelle Taylor), Tiger's former wife and mother to Toyo—who abandoned her infant to be raised by Tiger—returns to lure Bobby from Toyo and ruin the couple's plans for conjugal bliss.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 15: "...the film's dilemma is epitomized by the figure of Bobby Bailey (Floyd Hughes), the 'white boy' who finds himself torn between his fiance (accent) Toyo Haynes (Lupe Velez) and her mother Madame de Sylva (Estelle Taylor), an oriental beauty whose scheming nature threatens to tear the whole family apart."Eaker, 2016: "Tiger and Bobby run into Tiger's ex-wife and Toya's mother, Mme. de Sylva (Estelle Taylor, the real-life one time wife of Jack Dempsey)." Tiger takes drastic action, unleashing a gorilla which dispatches Madame de Sylva but mortally wounds Tiger. He lives long enough witness the marriage of Toyo and Bobby.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 28: "Tiger, in Where East Is East, has his entire life tied up with his daughter, Toyo, and is very ill at ease over her proposed marriage to Bobby Bailey until Bobby demonstrates his manliness in fending off an escaped tiger." And p. 64: Rosenthal provides short synopsis.Sobchack, 2006 p. 23: "...one frequent minor theme worth noting in the exotic melodramas is that of sacrifice...Tiger Haynes is mauled to death for love of his daughter in Where East Is East."

In a key sequence in which the American Bobby Bailey (Lloyd Hughes), nicknamed "white boy", is briefly seduced by the Asian Madame de Sylva (mother to Bobby's fiancee Toya), Browning offers a cliche-ridden intertitle exchange that is belied by his cinematic treatment. Film historian Stefan Brandt writes: "Browning here plays with the ambiguities involved in the common misreading of Kipling's poem, encouraging his American audience to question the existing patterns of colonial discourse and come to conclusions that go beyond that mode of thinking. The romantic version of the Orient as a land of eternal mysticism is exposed here as a Eurocentric illusion that we must not fall prey to."Brandt, 2006 p. 135 and see p. 136 for on this subject.

Browning's presentation of the alluring Madame de Sylva -whose French title diverges from her Asian origins- introduces one of Browning's primary themes: Reality vs. Appearance. Rosenthal notes that "physical beauty masking perversity is identical to the usual Browning premise of respectability covering corruption. This is the formula used in Where East Is East. Tiger's thorny face masks a wealth of kindness, sensitively and abiding paternal love. But behind the exotic beauty of Madame de Silva lies an unctuous, sinister manner and callous spitefulness."Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 24–25

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 and the tiger himself."Brandt, 2006 p. 139 Biographer Stuart Rosenthal comments on the Browning-Chaney characterization of Tiger Haynes:

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."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 12: "Similarly, animals become the agents of destruction for Tiger in Where East Is East ..."

Biographers David Skal and Elias Savada report that Browning "had made his fortune as a silent film director but had considerable difficulties in adapting his talents to talking pictures."Skal and Savada, 1995 p. 4 Film critic Vivian Sobchack notes that Browning, in both his silent and sound creations, "starts with the visual rather than the narrative" and cites director Edgar G. Ulmer: "until the end of his career, Browning tried to avoid using dialogue; he wanted to obtain visual effects."Sobchack, 2006, pp. 35–36: See footnotes for Ulmer source. Biographer Jon Towlson argues that Browning's 1932 Freaks reveals "a director in full control of the sound medium, able to use the camera to reveal a rich subtext beneath the dialogue" and at odds with the general assessment of the filmmakers post-silent era pictures.Towlson, 2021: "the widely held critical opinion that Tod Browning was unable to adapt to the coming of sound in the 1930s...seems to me to be a fallacy that has unfortunately become general wisdom, arising from the necessity (originating in the 1940s, as a result of his falling out of favour with the studios) to denigrate Browning as a director over...it subsequently became the adopted position of conservative-minded critics...tarnishing Browning's reputation as a filmmaker."

Browning's sound oeuvre consists of nine features before his retirement from filmmaking in 1939.Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 64–66: Filmography section

Set in Calcutta, the story concerns two homicides committed at séances. Illusion and deception are employed to expose the murderer.Eaker, 2016: "Two murders...a phony medium, a series of séances, a mysterious manor, stolen love letters, and potential blackmail all add up to standard Browning fare..."

In a cast featuring some of MGM's top contract players including Conrad Nagel, Leila Hyams and Margaret WycherlyNixon, 2006 TCM: "The suspects are played by a virtual who's-who of recognizable character actors: Conrad Nagel...Leila Hyams, later Venus in Browning's Freaks... Margaret Wycherly...Joel McCrea's scenes were deleted before the film's release." Hungarian-American Bela Lugosi, a veteran of 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.Nixon, 2006 TCM: "Lugosi made a number of silent film appearances before his runaway success on Broadway in Dracula." And: "...a matinee idol in. His first American film was The Silent Command (1923)."Barson, 2020: "...Chaney was not yet open to the notion of making a sound picture, so Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi was recruited to play the police inspector investigating a murder at a seance."

The first of his three collaborations with Lugosi, Browning's handling of the actor's role as Delzante anticipated the part of Count Dracula in his Dracula (1931).Eaker, 2016: "...the main testing was the upcoming role of Dracula and for that reason Browning grabbed Lugosi, who had made the role a mega hit on the stage circuit."... And: "Browning's work with Lugosi traces an interesting development through the three films they collaborated on." 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.Eaker, 2016: "Lugosi had lived in the states and performed the stage for years before the film version so the actor's delivery for Dracula was a directorial choice, as indicated in interviews." Film historian Alfred Eaker remarks: "Serious awkwardness mars this film, a product from that transitional period from silent to the new, imposing medium of sound. Because of that awkwardness The Thirteenth Chair is not Browning in best form."

In an effort to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits, Universal opted to base the film on Hamilton Deane's and Louis Bromfield's melodramatic stage version Dracula (1924), rather than Stoker's novel.Bronfen, 2006 p. 158Thomson, 2010: "The Bram Stoker novel had become a sensation on the New York stage in 1927..."

Actor Lon Chaney, then completing his first sound film with director Jack Conway in a remake of Browning's silent The Unholy Three (1925), was tapped for the role of Count Dracula.Sobchack, 2006 p. 29: Dracula (1931) "originally slated for Lon Chaney..." 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.Sobchack, 2006 p. 36: "Chaney's connection with Browning was, at the very least, catalytic."
Baxter, 1970 p. 100: "Browning had hoped to use Chaney in Dracula, but the actor died in August 1930, just after completing work on his first sound film, a remake by Jack Conway of his 1925 success The Unholy Three..."
Harvey, 2009: Chaney's "complications from pneumonia and lung cancer ...spiraled out of control. He'd been originally cast as the star..."
Nixon, 2003 TCM: "Universal first intended to make the picture with Lon Chaney, under the guidance of Chaney's frequent director, Tod Browning." Hungarian expatriate and actor Bela Ferenc Deszo Blasco, appearing under the stage name Bela Lugosi, had successfully performed the role of Count Dracula in the American productions of the play for three years.Bronfen, 2006 pp. 158, 159 According to film historian David Thomson, "when Chaney died, it was taken for granted that Lugosi would have the role in the film."Thomson, 2010
Baxter, 1970 p. 100: Due to Chaney's terminal illness "Browning had to use the Hungarian Bela Lugosi, who had played the role on Broadway."
Harvey, 2009: "With Chaney gone, the role went to its stage interpreter, Hungarian thespian Bela Lugosi..."
Barson, 2021: "Lugosi had already played the part of onstage for three years, and that version was the primary basis for the film."
Brogan, year: "Browning originally wanted Chaney for Dracula and was reportedly unhappy with Bela Lugosi's portrayal."

Lugosi's portrayal of Count Dracula is inextricably linked to the vampire genre established by Browning. As film critic Elizabeth Bronfen observes, "the notoriety of Browning's Dracula within film history resides above all else in the uncanny identification between Bela Lugosi and his role."Bronfen, 2006 p. 160
Barson, 2021: "Lugosi's " unctuous line readings that made him inseparable from the character of the elegant vampire.
Eaker, 2016: "Lugosi himself discussed how intensely Browning directed his acting in the film, stating that the direction was very different than the way he had played the part on Broadway." Browning quickly establishes what would become Dracula's— and Bela Lugosi's— sine qua non: "The camera repeatedly focuses on Dracula's hypnotic gaze, which, along with his idiosyncratic articulation, was to become his cinematic trademark."Bronfen, 2006 p. 153 Film historian Alec Charles observes that "The first time we see Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning's Dracula...he looks almost directly into the camera...Browning affords the audience the first of those famously intense and 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..."Charles, 2006 p. 81 Lugosi embraced his screen persona as the preeminent "aristocratic Eastern European vampire" and welcomed his typecasting, assuring his "artistic legacy".Bronfen, 2006 p. 160: Bronfen provides a sympathetic sketch of Lugosi's post-Dracula career.
Eaker, 2016: "...Browning did have a rewarding collaborative partnership with...Lugosi, even if he did not find it as satisfying" as his association with Lon Chaney.

Film critic Elizabeth Bronfen reports that Browning's cinematic interpretation of the script has been widely criticized by film scholars. Browning is cited for failing to provide adequate "montage or shot/reverse shots", the "incoherence of the narrative" and his putative poor handling of the "implausible dialogue" reminiscent of "filmed theatre." Bronfen further notes critic's complaints that Browning 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.Bronfen, 2006 p. 157: "Critics have repeatedly faulted Browning for not having adequately used the filmic means available to him, by letting not only the vampires fatal bites but also his own death occur off screen..." And pp. 158–159: Bronfen includes David Skal and James Ursine among Browning critics on these matters. And p. 163: "Browning does not show the actual consummation of the Count's lust."

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 Browning seemed disengaged during shooting, and left the direction to cinematographer Karl Freund.Bronfen, 2006 p. 159: "This shift in attitude is often attributed to Browning ...had wanted Lon Chaney for the part of the Count" but had Chaney had declined the role "because of the progressive stage of his throat cancer... and during the shooting." And: See Chandler's observations on Browning.
Nixon, 2003 TCM: "According to David Manners, the production was "extremely disorganized." Asked about the experience of working with Tod Browning, Manners said, "It's funny you should ask. Someone asked me who directed Dracula and I had to say, I hadn't the faintest idea!...the only directing I saw was done by Karl Freund, the cinematographer."
Towlson, 2012: "...Karl Freund (who himself had ambitions to direct, took advantage of Browning's problems with Universal on Dracula to direct The Mummy)."

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 in sequence" in order to improve efficiency.Bronfen, 2006 p. 158: Universal "categorically opposed any hefty additional production costs...forced to shoot the film in sequence and frugal use of special effects" enforced by studio management. Bronfen suggests that Browning's own thematic concerns may have prompted him—in this, 'the first talkie horror picture'—to privilege the spoken word over visual tricks.":

The scenario follows the vampire Count Dracula to England where he preys upon members of the British upper-middle class, but is confronted by nemesis Professor Van Helsing, (Edward Van Sloan) who possesses sufficient will power and knowledge of vampirism to defeat Count Dracula.Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 16–17: Van Helsing's "will is strong."
Eaker, 2016: "The Dracula of Browning and Lugosi is an outsider...who comes to nourish on the aristocratic London Society, who he, paradoxically, yearns to join." Film historian Stuart Rosenthal remarks that "the Browning version of Dracula retains the Victorian formality of the original source in the relationships among the normal characters. In this atmosphere the seething, unstoppable evil personified by the Count is a materialization of Victorian morality's greatest dread."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 35

A number of sequences in Dracula have earned special mention, despite criticism concerning the "static and stagy quality of the film."Sobchack, 2006 p. 29: "Much has been written by various critics about the static and stagy quality of the film...Nonetheless, every critic who emphasizes the film's 'uncinematic' qualities goes on to describe those 'few' scenes that are cinematic. Indeed, there is quite a list."
Eaker, 2016: "The much maligned second half of the film shifts perspective, but still does not resemble a real world at all and casts an aquatic spell over the receptive viewer." The dramatic and sinister opening sequence in which the young solicitor Renfield (Dwight Frye) is conveyed in a coach to Count Dracula's Transylvanian castle is one of the most discussed and praised of the picture. Karl Freund's Expressionistic technique is largely credited with its success.Nixon, 2003 TCM: "The opening sequence of Dracula, with its Transylvania setting, is among the finest work Browning ever did on screen, and it owes much to cameraman Karl Fruend."
Bronfen, 2006 p. 152: "Most critics have praised the opening sequences of Dracula for its convincing cinematic dramaturgy, attributing it primarily to cameraman Karl Freund..."
Eaker, 2016: "The introduction to the inhabitants of Castle Dracula is among the most discussed in the annals of Universal Horror...The static silence is punctuated with genuine dread, surreal humor, and the unnerving whimpers of an opossum. Karl Freund's camera pans over a decidedly unreal set..."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 29: "...the artistry of Renfield's (Dwight Frye) carriage ride to Castle Dracula" Sobchack

Browning employs "a favorite device" with an animal montage early in the film to establish a metaphoric equivalence between the emergence of the vampires from their crypts and the small parasitic vermin that infest the castle: spiders, wasps and rats.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 54: "In Dracula, Browning clarifies some of the early action by means of one of his favorite devices, an animal montage in which a particularly sinister event is intercut with shots of small creatures. As each of Dracula's wives emerges from her tomb a rooting rat disappears behind a ledge or a wasp pulls itself from a tiny coffin-shaped compartment. The metaphor defines the nature of the vampire and conveys the impression of a reawakening of evil and parasitic search for sustenance." Unlike Browning's previous films, Dracula is not a "long series of illusionist tricks, performed and explained" but rather an application of cinematic effects "presenting vampirism as scientifically verified 'reality'."Solomon, 2006 p. 58: "Unlike Browning's Dracula (1931), which uses largely cinematic effects to ultimately present vampirism as scientifically verified 'reality', London After Midnight presents apparently supernatural phenomena as the work of stage magic."
Bronfen, 2006 pp. 167–168: "The danger of Browning's vampire consists precisely in the fact that it isn't corporeal but spectral." Count The illusionist legerdemain is not explained to the movie audience.

Despite Universal executives editing out portions of Browning's film, Dracula was enormously successful.Conterio, 2018: "Dracula (1931)...was altered by Universal to avoid offending the public and religious groups...Dracula was recut for its 1936 rerelease, shorn of roughly 10 minutes and tweaks made to the soundtrack (the muting of Dracula's death sigh, for example)."
Eaker, 2016: In his original edit, Dracula was ten minutes longer and was even more deliberately paced, with Lugosi's count almost entirely invisible during the second half...But, Universal spoiled that by cutting several scenes and adding close-up shots of the vampire grimacing, much to Browning's permanent dismay (he refused to ever watch the film again)." Opening at New York City's Roxy Theatre, Dracula earned $50,000 in 48 hours, and was Universal's most lucrative film of the Great Depression.Bronfen, 2006 p. 158: "After its opening night on February 13, 1931, at the Roxy Theatre in New York City, it sold over 50,000 tickets within the first two days, bringing in a profit of $700,000 in the first year. As the most commercially successful film for Universal during the Depression." Five years after its release, it had grossed over one million dollars worldwide. Film critic Dennis Harvey writes: "Dracula's enormous popularity fast-tracked Browning's return to MGM, under highly favorable financial terms and the protection of longtime ally, production chief Irving Thalberg."Harvey, 2009Barson, 2021: "The success of Dracula enabled Browning to flourish throughout the early 1930s."

Described as "a cautionary tale about the boxer as a physically powerful man brought down by a woman",Grindon, 2006 p. 173 Browning's boxing story lacks the macabre elements that typically dominate his cinema.Grindon, 2006 p. 173: Iron Man is "an important but neglected film among Browning's ourve...the film has been neglected in the critical literature, probably because it lacks the macabre quality for which Browning's films are known." Film historian Vivian Sobchack observes that "Iron Man, in subject and plot, is generally regarded as uncharacteristic of Browning's other work." Thematically, however, the picture exhibits a continuity consistent with his obsessive interest in "situations of moral and sexual frustration."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 9Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 16: "...the thematic continuity between Browning's more famous tales of grotesque horror and this boxing film. The moral and sexual frustrations that Stuart Rosenthal argues are central to Browning's work are readily apparent."

Film critic Leger Grindon cites the 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 often projected onto alter egos and finally, an inability to assign guilt." These themes are evident in Iron Man.Grindon. 2006 p. 175Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 8–9: "obsessive" and "compulsive." And pp. 23–43 for Rosenthal's discussion of these four themes.

Actor Lew Ayres, following his screen debut in Universal's immensely successful anti-war themed All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), plays Kid Mason, a Lightweight boxing champion. This sports-drama concerns the struggle between the Kid's friend and manager George Regan Robert Armstrong, and the boxer's adulterous wife Rose (Jean Harlow) to prevail in a contest for his affection and loyalty.Grindon, 2006 p. 175: "Jean Harlow's golddigging vamp is avaricious, aspiring and sexually predatory." Caption for photo.

Rather than relying largely upon "editing and composition as expressive tools" Browning moved away from a stationary camera "toward a conspicuous use of camera movement" under the influence of Karl Freund, cinematographer on the 1931 Dracula. Iron Man exhibits this "transformation" in Browning's cinematic style as he entered the sound era.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 16 Leger Grindon provides this assessment of Browning's last picture for Universal:

Though box office earnings for Iron Man are unavailable, a measure of its success is indicated in the two remakes the film inspired: Some Blondes Are Dangerous (1937) and Iron Man (1950).

Browning returned to MGM after completing Iron Man to embark upon the most controversial film of his career: Freaks (1932).Baxter, 1970 p. 100: "Browning left Universal and joined Metro after. MGM appears frequently in the Thirties as a producer of horror films..."Harvey, 2009: "Dracula's enormous popularity fast-tracked Browning's return to MGM, under highly favorable financial terms and the protection of longtime ally, production chief Irving Thalberg.

The studio purchased the rights and enlisted screenwriter Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon to develop the script with Browning.Sobchack, 2006 p. 34: Sobchack, reports that Browning (who produced the film for MGM), convinced Thalberg that the story by Tod Robbins was suitable for adaption, and Thalberg purchased the rights.
Morris and Vieira, 2001: "In mid-1931, MGM production head Irving Thalberg summoned scenarist Willis Goldbeck and commissioned Goldbeck to write a vehicle for Browning's comeback, something 'even more horrible than Dracula.'"
Henry, 2006 p. 42 Thalberg collaborated closely with the director on pre-production, but Browning completed all the actual shooting on the film without interference from studio executives.Towlson, 2012: "While Browning helped Thalberg oversee the whole production for, there is no evidence that the mogul interfered during shooting once production commenced. Browning was left alone to direct.
Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 58–59: "Tod Browning had the good fortune of being a complete filmmaker, producing and developing scenarios for many of his pictures. Without this kind of independence Freaks, undoubtedly the most personal film made at MGM during the Thirties, would have been an impossible project." Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's president, Louis B. Mayer, registered his disgust with the project from its inception and during the filming, but Thalberg successfully intervened on Browning's behalf to proceed with the film.Eaker, 2016: "From the beginning of Freaks' genesis...Louis B. Mayer, was vehemently opposed to it even at the conceptual stage, and his objections only intensified... Fortunately, Thalberg came to Browning's aid and saved filming from being sabotaged on numerous occasions."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 34: "Thalberg came to Browning's defense in relation to Freaks (1932)." The picture that emerged was Browning's "most notorious and bizarre melodrama."Sobchack, 2006 p. 27

A "morality play", Freaks centers around the cruel seduction of a circus sideshow midget Hans (Harry Earles) by a statuesque trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova). She and her lover, strongman Hercules (Henry Victor), scheme to murder the diminutive Hans for his inheritance money after sexually humiliating him. The community of freaks mobilizes in Hans' defense, meting out severe justice to Cleopatra and Hercules: the former trapeze beauty is surgically transformed into a sideshow freak. Barson, 2021: "Browning delivered a surprise with Freaks (1932), a truly shocking morality play that boldly cast a number of actual sideshow performers."

Browning enlisted a cast of performers largely assembled from carnival freak shows—a community and milieu both of which the director was intimately familiar. The circus freaks serve as dramatic and comedic players, central to the story's development, and do not appear in their respective sideshow routines as novelties.Eaker, 2016: "...Browning only shows the freaks in their natural, behind the scene, daily environment. Browning never resorts to showing the freaks on stage or in performance."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 27: "Not only does the film treat the freaks compassionately, it also allows for a humor that underscores their humanity and Browning's respect for them."Eaker, 2016: "During filming, many on the MGM lot found the sight of the freaks so disturbing that they sought to have the production stopped..."

Two major themes in Browning's work—"Sexual Frustration" and "Reality vs. Appearances"—emerge in Freaks from the conflict inherent in the physical incompatibility between Cleopatra and Hans.Towlson, 2017 Part 2: "Reality vs. appearance (physical beauty masking perversity) is one of the key themes in Browning's work. Another is sexual frustration and emasculation. These themes lie at the very heart of Freaks." The guileless Hans' self-delusional fantasy of winning the affection of Cleopatra—"seductive, mature, cunning and self-assured"—provokes her contempt, eliciting "cruel sexual jests" at odds with her attractive physical charms.Morris and Vieira, 2001: "...The "beautiful" characters – Cleopatra and Hercules, whose working lives depend (like movie stars) almost entirely on the way they look – are maimed or killed. The movie shows the folly of trusting the kind of beautiful surface..."
Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 35–36: "Sexual frustration is the very essence of Freaks...We are struck by the gross incongruity of the pair and the collision of absolute sexual opposites...an opportunity for to enjoy the kind of cruel sexual jest upon which she thrives." Browning emphasizes the disparity in their physical stature, appearance. Browning provides the moral rationale for the final reckoning with Cleopatra before she has discovered Hans' fortune and plans to murder him. Film historian Stuart Rosenthal explains:

Browning addresses another theme fundamental to his work: "Inability to Assign Guilt". The community of freaks delay judgement on Cleopatra when she insults Frieda (Daisy Earles), the midget performer who loves Hans.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 36: See here for description of scene. Their social solidarity cautions restraint, but when the assault on Hans becomes egregious, they act single-mindedly to punish the offender. Browning exonerates the freaks of any guilt: they are "totally justified" in their act of retribution.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 14: "Since this is one of those rare instances in Browning's pictures in which guilt can be indisputably fixed, the freaks can be totally justified in their attack." Stuart Rosenthal describes this doctrine, the "crux" of Browning's social ideal:

Browning cinematic style in Freaks is informed by the precepts of German Expressionism, combining a subdued documentary-like realism with "chiaroscuro shadow" for dramatic effect.Sobchack, 2006 p. 27: "Freaks combines the heightened chiaroscuro shadows and lightning bolts of Expressionism with a flat gray documentary style." And p. 28: "...the freaks' revenge on Cleopatra and Hercules is visualized in near Expressionistic style."
Towlson, 2012: "... Freaks demonstrate a sophisticated use of staging, framing, editing, and camera movement...Browning's control of the editing...is reflected in his comment that 'the director does the real writing of the story in the cutting and projection rooms'...Browning's close involvement in all the facets of production, the guiding hand in the script-to-screen process, including the camera shots and the editing, seems to have been Browning's...the cinematic skill evidenced in Freaks...is attributable mainly to him."

The wedding banquet sequence in which Cleopatra and Hercules brutally degrade Hans is "among the most discussed moments of Freaks" and according to biographer Vivian Sobchack "a masterpiece of sound and image, and utterly unique in conception and realization."Sobchack, 2006 pp. 27–28: "...the famous wedding feast..sequence is a masterpiece of sound and image, and utterly unique in conception and realization."
Eaker, 2016: "The wedding banquet scene is still among the most discussed moments of Freaks." And: "The sequence is beautifully filmed by Browning."
Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 37–38: Rosenthal explains the significance of the scene.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 196: The significance of the wedding banquet sequence presented here.

The final sequence in which the freaks carry out their "shocking" revenge and Cleopatra's fate is revealed "achieves the most sustained level of high-pitched terror of any Browning picture."Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 pp. 75–76: The final scene in Freaks "a shocking fit of grandguignolesque mutilation and horrific vengeance..."
Rosenthal, 1975 p. 50: See here of Browning's technical handling of the sequence.

Freaks was given general release only after Thalberg excised 30 minutes of footage deemed offensive to the public.Eaker, 2016: "When Browning finished Freaks, Thalberg, who had previously defended Browning, did not hesitate to cut nearly a half hour of footage from the film (and, as was the norm at that time, burned the excised footage)."
Conterio, 2018: "...Freaks (1932)...was altered by MGM, to avoid offending the public and religious groups. Up to 30 minutes was chopped from Freaks..." Though Browning had a long history of making profitable pictures at MGM, Freaks was a "disaster" at the box office, though earning mixed reviews among critics.

Browning's reputation as a reliable filmmaker among the Hollywood establishment was tarnished, and he completed only four more pictures before retiring from the industry after 1939. According to biographer Alfred Eaker, " Freaks, in effect, ended Browning's career."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 59: "The disastrous public reaction to Freaks seems to have shaken front office confidence in the director. In the following seven years he worked on only four pictures..."
Barson, 2021: "...Freaks was greeted with almost universal revulsion upon its original release... Freaks all but finished Browning's Hollywood career; he would direct only four more films."Harvey, 2009: "...Freaks struck many as deeply distasteful and it proved a major contributor to Hollywood's stringent enforcement of the Production Code beginning in 1934. Though not universally decried at the time, Freaks was enough of a scandal and money-loser that Browning's career never fully recovered."
Eaker, 2016: "... Freaks, in effect, ended Browning's career."

The script for Fast Workers by Karl Brown and Laurence Stallings dramatizes the mutual infidelities, often humorous, that plague a ménage à trois comprising a high-rise construction worker and seducer Gunner Smith (John Gilbert), his co-worker and sidekick, Bucker Reilly (Robert Armstrong) and Mary (Mae Clarke), an attractive "Gold digger" seeking financial and emotional stability during the Great Depression.Cady, 2004 TCM: "...both Gilbert and Browning managed to transform Fast Workers into a perversely fascinating melodrama cut with streetwise humor."The title "fast workers" is a double entendre alluding "both to the construction workers' skill at riveting and to their style with women."
Rosenthal, 1975 p. 44
Wood, 2006 TCM: "Browning and Gilbert re-teamed in 1933 for the racy pre-Code drama Fast Workers, where Gilbert plays 'Gunner' Smith, another detestable womanizer in need of redemption." Browning brings to bear all the thematic modes that typically motivate his characters.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 23-24 Film historian Stuart Rosenthal writes:

The betrayals, humiliations and retaliations that plague the characters, and the moral legitimacy of their behaviors remains unresolved. Rosenthal comments on Browning's ambivalence: " Fast Workers is Browning's final cynical word on the impossibility of an individual obtaining justice, however righteous his cause, without critically sullying himself. Superficially, things have been set right. Gunner and Bucker are again friends and, together are equal to any wily female. Yet Gunner, the individual who is the most culpable, finds himself in the most secure position, while the basically well-intentioned Mary is rejected and condemned by both men."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 46 An outstanding example of Browning's ability to visually convey terror—a technique he developed in the silent era—is demonstrated when Mary perceives that Bucker, cuckolded by Gunner, reveals his homicidal rage.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 44: "...the series of events that lead to Bucker's premeditatedly allowing Gunner to fall off a skyscraper." And p. 45: "The technique that Browning used for constructing instants of terror was workably carried over into the sound era. It is apparent that Browning conceived horror primarily in visual terms...the camera movement in Fast Workers, when Mary realizes that Bucker is contemplating murder, is positively chilling."
Cady, 2004 TCM: "As for Browning, he stages several strong scenes, particularly one in which Robert Armstrong's Bucker realizes the depth of his friend's betrayal. The director's style here has echoes of his silent work with Lon Chaney..."

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer committed $525,000 to the film's production budget, quite a high sum for a relatively short feature. Ultimately, MGM reported earnings of only $165,000 on the film after its release, resulting in a net loss of $360,000 on the motion picture. "Fast Workers (1933), Toronto Film Society (Ontario, Canada), June 20, 2018. Retrieved November 19, 2020.

With Mark of the Vampire, Browning follows the plot conceit employed in London After Midnight: An investigator and hypnotist seeks to expose a murderer by means of a "vampire masquerade" so as to elicit his confession.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 63: See synopsis for London After Midnight in Filmography Browning deviates from his 1927 silent film in that here the sleuth, Professor Zelen (Lionel Barrymore),Sobchack, 2006 p. 31:"Barrymore "resembles...Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) in Dracula (1931) rather than posing as a vampire himself in a dual role, hires a troupe of talented thespians to stage an elaborate hoax to deceive the murder suspect Baron Otto von Zinden (Jean Hersholt).Evans and Banks, 2020: "It would definitely be London After Midnight, a 1927 film with Lon Chaney and directed by Tod Browning. That was really the template for Mark of the Vampire…"
Conterio, 2018: "1935's Mark of the Vampire, an atmospheric remake of London after Midnight, re-teamed Browning with Bela Lugosi. Bela Lugosi was enlisted to play the lead vampire in the troupe, Count Moro.Charles, 2006 p. 83: "...Count Moro is not vampire at all but an actor hired to scare a murder suspect…"
Eaker, 2013: "Browning ended his collaboration with Lugosi with this film. Their work together started with The Thirteenth Chair (1929) ." As a direct descendant of Browning's carnival-themed films, Browning offers the movie audience a generous dose of Gothic iconography: "hypnotic trances, flapping bats, spooky graveyards, moaning organs, cobwebs thick as curtains – and bound it all together with bits of obscure Eastern European folklore..."Wood, 2006 TCM: "Intending to one-up his own definitive vampire film, Browning loaded Mark of the Vampire with horror movie iconography…"
Eaker, 2016: "...Mark of the Vampire is saturated with sensational Gothic texture (which includes opossums inhabiting the castle).
Sweney, 2006 p. 203-204: "Mark of the Vampire is not a typical vampire film. The opening sequence signals of world of different traditions, one with a different language and beliefs we may not share nor understand...the villagers and servants in the film speak Czech...the world is split between what is 'real' and what is 'modern'."

As such, Mark of the Vampire leads the audience to suspend disbelief in their skepticism regarding vampires through a series of staged illusions, only to sharply disabuse them of their credulity in the final minutes of the movie.Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 16-17: "The exposition of the vampires as faked by a theatre company puts the film into Browning's pictures about the carnival…"Sweney, 2006 p. 206: The picture is "in the realm of Browning's carnival films...showing the audience how easy it is to dupe them…In the last five minutes of the film, the vampires are revealed to be actors" hired by Professor Zelen. Browning reportedly composed the conventional plot scenes as he would a stage production, but softened the static impression through the editing process. In scenes that depicted the supernatural, Browning freely used a moving camera. Film historian Matthew Sweney observes "the special effects shots...overpower the static shots in which the film's plot and denouement take place...creating a visual tension in the film."

Cinematographer James Wong Howe's lighting methods endowed the film with a spectral quality that complimented Browning's "sense of the unreal".Sweney, 2006 p. 204: See here for cinematographer James Wong Howe's comments on Browning film direction. Quotation are Sweney's, not Howe's.
Sweney, 2006 p. 204-205: Though Howe was "credited as the film's sole cinematographer" though he was removed by production manager JJ Cohn because of Howe's handling of the lighting effects . See p. 205 for complaint registered by star Elizabeth Allan re: Howe.
Conterio, 2018: " James Wong Howe's spectral use of light bathes gothic sets in an eerie glow."
Eaker, 2016: "For Mark of the Vampire, Browning worked with cinematographer James Wong Howe. Howe's work in the film was praised, but Howe did not care for working with Browning, who he said 'did not know one end of the camera from the other'" Critic Stuart Rosenthal writes:

Mark of the Vampire is widely cited for its famous "tracking shot on the stairwell" in which Count Mora (Bela Lugosi) and his daughter Luna (Carol Borland) descend in a stately promenade. Browning inter-cuts their progress with images of vermin and venomous insects, visual equivalents for the vampires as they emerge from their own crypts in search of sustenance.Sweney, 2006 p. 205-206: "By far the most interesting part of the film is its famous tracking shot which occurs approximately 17 minutes into the film...This one-minute sequence is one of the greatest visual feasts in the cinema of the macabre..." Rosenthal describes the one-minute sequence:

In another notable and "exquisitely edited" scene Browning presents a lesbian-inspired seduction. Count Mora, in the form of a bat, summons Luna to the cemetery where Irene Borotyn (Elizabeth Allan) (daughter of murder victim Sir Karell, awaits in a trance.) When vampire Luna avidly embraces her victim, Count Moro voyeuristically looks on approvingly. Borland's Luna would inspire the character Morticia in the TV series The Addams Family.Sweney, 2006 p. 206: "The sexual aspect, here a lesbian scene with a male voyeur, in undeniable...inherent in vampirism itself. Sweney praises Ben Lewis for the "exquisite" editing.
Eaker, 2016: "The visceral editing somehow adds to the film's appeal...adding up to an outrageous, hallucinatory film with genuinely perverse personality and a surreal, ominous style…" And: "...Borland is equally impressive. Her Luna...inspired Charles Addams' Morticia in The Addams Family (1964 TV series)

The soundtrack for Mark of the Vampire is notable in that it employs no orchestral music aside from accompanying the opening and closing credits. Melodic passages, when heard, are provided only by the players. The sound effects provided by recording director Douglas Shearer contribute significantly to the film's ambiance.Sweney, 2006 p. 204: "...there is no orchestral music in the film at all, except for the opening and closing credits (it is an MGM film)..." And: "The soundtrack of Mark of the Vampire contributes in no small part to the overall atmosphere…Douglas Shearer, 12-time Oscar winner and brother to Norma Shearer, is credited as Recording Director." Sweney, 2006 p. 204: "...the only melodic music within the film is made by the performers: the singing and violin playing of the villagers, and the melodramatic organ (played by a dead man…)" Film historian Matthew Sweney writes:

The climatic coup-de-grace occurs when the murderer's incredulity regarding the existence of vampires is reversed when Browning cinematically creates an astonishing illusion of the winged Luna in flight transforming into a human. The rationalist Baron Otto, a witness to this legerdemain, is converted into a believer in the supernatural and ultimately confesses, under hypnosis, to the murder of his brother Sir Karell.Sweney, 2006 p. 206-207: "...a great piece of cinematography" with Luna's "extraordinarily convincing transformation form monster to human...it makes murderer Baron Otto a believer" in vampires.

In the final five minutes of Mark of the Vampire, the theatre audience is confronted with the "theatrical trap" that Browning has laid throughout the picture: none of the supernatural elements of film are genuine—the "vampires" are merely actors engaged in a deception. This is made explicit when Bela Lugosi, no longer in character as Count Moro, declares to a fellow actor: "Did you see me? I was greater than any real vampire!"Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 p. 74: "...only in the last five minutes of Mark of the Vampire (1935), the audience will learn that everything it has witnessed over the last 50 or 60 minutes was nothing but a setup – a theatrical trap designed to lure a suspect into a reenactment of a crime."
Wood, 2006 TCM: "But the film's crowning achievement is the elaborately twisted ending that Browning springs on the viewer like a diabolical jack-in-the-box."
Sweney, 2006 p. 201: "...its melodramatic plot only enhances the surprise ending; its surprise ending, so patently false, does not negate what has come before it, but rather asserts the dream logic of the film itself." And p. 207: Lugosi quote.

Based on the novel Burn, Witch, Burn (1932) by Abraham Merritt, the script was crafted by Browning with contributions from Garrett Fort, Guy Endore and Erich von Stroheim (director of Greed (1924) and Foolish Wives (1922)), and "although it has its horrific moments, like Freaks (1932), The Devil-Doll is not a horror film."Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11: "The Devil-Doll, scripted with Erich von Stroheim…"
Eaker, 2016: "The Devil Doll (1936) is based on Abraham Merritt's novel "Burn, Witch, Burn" with the screenplay by Guy Endore, Erich von Stroheim, and Browning. "
Sobchack, 2006 p. 29: See here for quotation.

In The Devil-Doll, Browning borrows a number of the plot devices from his 1925 The Unholy Three.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 25: "... The Devil-Doll follows the same pattern as in Browning's The Unholy Three (1925)."

Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) has spent 17 years incarcerated at Devil's Island, framed for murder and embezzlement committed by his financial associates. He escapes from the prison with fellow inmate, the ailing Marcel (Henry B. Walthall). The terminally ill scientist divulges to Lavond his secret formula for transforming humans into miniature, animated puppets. In alliance with Marcel's widow Malita (Rafaela Ottiano), the vengeful Lavond unleashes an army of tiny living "dolls" to exact a terrible retribution against the three "unholy" bankers.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 25: "...Lionel Barrymore breaks out of prison in order to destroy the three bankers who framed him for the embezzlement they committed." And: p. 14: "Barrymore's instruments of revenge in The Devil-Doll are tiny, deadly, living dolls who have no wills of their own and respond to his telepathic commands. By extension through these miniatures he is able to dominate his enemies..."
Eaker, 2016: "Malita (Rafaela Ottiano), who also is, conveniently, a mad scientist. Marcel dies, but not before showing Lavond the scientific discovery that he and Malita have been working on for years. They are able to shrink animals and people to a sixth of their normal size." Biographer Vivian Sobchack acknowledges that "the premises on which the revenge plot rest are incredible, but the visual realization is so fascinating that we are drawn, nonetheless, into a world that seems quite credible and moving" and reminds viewers that "there are some rather comic scenes in the film..."Sobchack, 2006 p. 28-29
Toole, 2003 TCM: "...part of the film's cult appeal is Browning's twisted sense of humor, which is most evident in the scenes with Malita who becomes addicted to miniaturizing humans."

Barrymore's dual role as Lavond and his cross-dressing persona, the elderly Madame Mandilip, a doll shop proprietor, is strikingly similar to Lon Chaney's Professor Echo and his transvestite counterpart "Granny" O'Grady, a parrot shop owner in The Unholy Three (1925). Rosenthal, 1975 p. 25: "Browning drags out Chaney's old lady make-up from The Unholy Three (1925) as a disguise for Barrymore as he goes about his work of angry destruction… Echo Chaney made up as the grandmother Granny bears a remarkable resemblance to Barrymore disguised as the elderly woman Madame who sells dolls in the Devil-Doll."
Baxter, 1970 p. 101-102: "The Devil Doll (1936) is still one of the Thirties' most effective examples of atmospheric fantasy. The characteristic Browning elements- long dash greed as a motive, transvestism- long dash reappear in the story of an escaped convict who is given the secret of reducing human beings to miniatures and uses it to revenge himself on the men who put him on Devil's Island." Film critic Stuart Rosenthal notes that Browning recycling of this characterization as a plot device "is further evidence for the interchangeability of Browning's heroes, all of whom would act identically if given the same set of circumstances."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 25

Thematically, The Devil-Doll presents a version of Browning "indirect" sexual frustration.Rosenthal, 1975 p. 25: See here for "indirect frustration" definition, also p. 23. Here, Lavond's daughter Lorraine (Maureen O'Sullivan), ignorant of her father's identity, remains so. Stuart Rothenthal explains:

Rosenthal points out another parallel between The Devil-Doll and The Unholy Three (1925): "Lavond's concern for his daughter and refusal to misuse his powers mark him as a good man...when his revenge is complete, like Echo in, Lavond demonstrates a highly beneficent nature."Rosenthal, 1975 p. 25: See here for "indirect frustration" definition, also p. 23. And: p. 39: "In Browning's films, real suffering brings out the dangerous qualities in a man. Whatever good deed he may eventually do is the result of his initial strength of character and in spite of externally imposed suffering that forces men like Paul Lavond into new and deeper guilt. Levond is a snarling, hateful man."
Eaker, 2016: "As Lavond, Barrymore delivers a subdued, controlled performance... Although a sympathetic character, Barrymore conveys genuine creepiness in the revenge scenes..."

Browning proficient use of the camera and the remarkable special effects depicting the "miniature" people are both disturbing and fascinating, directed with "eerie skill."Toole, 2003 TCM: The Devil-Doll is a "very smooth, visually accomplished piece of cinema...The special effects are impressive for the era, particularly the scenes featuring oversized sets and "miniature" people."
Eaker, 2016: "By the time of The Devil Doll, Browning was comfortable with the sound medium and the film benefits from this, fluid camera work, and the charmingly rudimentary flx for the incredibly shrunken people."
Sobchack, 2006 p. 28-29: "The scenes that involve the 'dolls' (really miniaturized people) as they attempt to carry out the murderous telepathic commands of a vengeful Lavond are often chilling, but most often also interesting (italics) – observed by a camera objectively recording the fascinating details of their progress."
Baxter, 1970 p. 102: The idea of miniaturization is used with more drama in this film than in others of its kind, and the attacks which Lionel Barrymore engineers...are directed with eerie skill…"

Film historians Stefanie Diekmann and Ekkehard Knörer report that the only direct link between Browning's fascination with "the grotesque, the deformed and the perverse"Sobchack, 2006 p. 31 and the traditions of the French Grand Guignol is actor Rafaela Ottiano who plays doll-obsessed scientist Matila. Before her supporting role in The Devil-Doll, she enjoyed "a distinguished career as a Grand Guignol performer."Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 p. 73: "The only direct connection we could find between the worlds of Grand Guignol and Browning is the actress Rafaela Ottiano who, after a distinguished career as a Grand Guignol performer went on to play went on to play in a number of supporting roles in a number of Hollywood movies, Tod Browning's The Devil Doll, 1936, among them."
Eaker, 2016: "What makes The Devil Doll unique is the science fiction angle and a female mad scientist in Ottiano (who has an Elsa Lanchester like streak in her hair)."

Shortly after the completion of The Devil-Doll, Irving Thalberg, Browning's mentor at MGM, died at age 37. It would be two years before his final film: Miracles for Sale (1939).Eaker, 2015: "...Thalberg's protective umbrella vanished when the producer died prematurely, shortly after the release of Browning's The Devil Doll (1936)." And: "...The Devil Doll (1936) he did not even receive screen credit…" And "...The Devil Doll. was also the beginning of the end for Browning's unparalleled brand of artistry." And: "After Devil Dolls, Browning sat dormant for two years until he was able to direct Miracles for Sale (1939)... "