Tod Browning (born Charles Albert Browning Jr.; July 12, 1880 – October 6, 1962) was an American film director, film actor, screenwriter, vaudeville performer, and carnival sideshow and circus entertainer. He directed a number of films of various genres between 1915 and 1939, but was primarily known for horror films. Some film writers have referred to Browning as "the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema."
Browning's career spanned the silent and sound film eras. He is known as the director of Dracula (1931), Freaks (1932), and his silent film collaborations with Lon Chaney and Priscilla Dean.
Early life
Charles Albert Browning, Jr., was born in Louisville, Kentucky on July 12, 1880,
Circus, sideshow and vaudeville
Browning was fascinated by circus and carnival life as a child. At the age of 16, and before finishing high school, he ran away from his well-to-do family to join a traveling circus.
Initially hired as a roustabout, he soon began serving as a "spieler" (a barker at sideshows) and by 1901 was performing song and dance routines for Ohio and Mississippi riverboat entertainment, as well as acting as a contortionist for the Manhattan Fair and Carnival Company. 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.
In 1906, Browning was briefly married to Amy Louis Stevens in Louisville. Adopting the professional name "Tod" Browning (tod is the German word for death), Browning abandoned his wife and became a vaudevillian, 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.
Film actor: 1909–1913
In 1909, after 13 years performing in carnivals and vaudeville circuits, Browning, age 29, transitioned to film acting. Browning's work as a comedic film actor began in 1909 when he performed with director and screenwriter Edward Dillon in film shorts. In all, Browning was cast in over 50 of these one- or two-reeler slapstick productions.
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. 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.
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). Both Griffith and Browning departed Biograph and New York that same year and together joined Reliance-Majestic Studios in Hollywood, California. Browning was featured in several Reliance-Majestic films, including The Wild Girl (1917).
Early film directing and screenwriting: 1914–1916
Film historian Vivian Sobchack noted that "a number of one- or two-reelers are attributed to Browning from 1914 to 1916" and biographer Michael Barson credits Browning's directorial debut to the one-reeler drama The Lucky Transfer, released in March 1915.
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. 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." 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.
Browning's injuries likely precluded a further career as an actor. During his protracted convalescence, Browning turned to writing screenplays for Reliance-Majestic. 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.
Director: early silent feature films, 1917–1919
In 1917, Browning wrote and directed his first full-length feature film, Jim Bludso, for Fine Arts/ Triangle film companies, starring Wilfred Lucas in the title role. The story is based on a poem by John Hay, a former personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War.
Browning married his second wife Alice Watson in 1917; they would remain together until her death in 1944.
Returning to New York in 1917, Browning directed pictures for Metro Pictures. 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.) 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."
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.
Universal Studios: 1919–1923
During his tenure at Universal, Browning directed a number of the studio's top female actors, among them Edith Roberts in The Deciding Kiss and Set Free (both 1918) and Mary MacLaren in The Unpainted Woman, A Petal on the Current and Bonnie, Bonnie Lassie, all 1919 productions. Browning's most notable films for Universal, however, starred Priscilla Dean, "Universal's leading lady known for playing 'tough girls'" and with whom he would direct nine features.
The Priscilla Dean films
thumb|Priscilla Dean, publicity still, Outside the Law (1920)
thumb|Outside the Law, lobby poster
Browning's first successful Dean picture—a "spectacular melodrama"—is The Virgin of Stamboul (1920). Dean portrays Sari, a "virgin beggar girl" who is desired by the Turkish chieftain Achmet Hamid (Wallace Beery). Browning's handling of the former slapstick comedian Beery as Achmet reveals the actor's comedic legacy and Browning's own roots in burlesque. Film historian Stuart Rosenthal wrote that the Dean vehicles possess "the seemingly authentic atmosphere with which Browning instilled his crime melodramas, adding immeasurably to later efforts like The Black Bird (1926), The Show (1927) and The Unholy Three (1925)."
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. 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.
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. 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.
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 photography and "with Thalberg supporting their imaginative freedom, Chaney's ability and unique presence fanned the flames of Browning's passion for the extraordinary." 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.
The Browning-Chaney collaborations at MGM: 1925–1929
After moving to MGM in 1925 under the auspices of production manager Irving Thalberg, Browning and Chaney made eight critically and commercially successful feature films, representing the zenith of both their silent film careers. Browning wrote or co-wrote the stories for six of the eight productions. Screenwriter Waldemar Young, credited on nine of the MGM pictures, worked effectively with Browning. At MGM, Browning would reach his artistic maturity as a filmmaker.
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.
The Unholy Three (1925)
thumb|The Unholy Three, publicity still. L to R: Ventriloquist dummy, Lon Chaney, Tod Browning.
In a circus tale by author Tod Robbins—a setting familiar to Browning—a trio of criminal ex-carnies and a pickpocket form a jewelry theft ring. Their activities lead to a murder and an attempt to frame an innocent bookkeeper. Two of the criminal quartet reveal their humanity and are redeemed; two perish through violent justice.
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.
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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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. 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.
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.
The Mystic (1925)
While Lon Chaney was making The Tower of Lies (1925) with director Victor Sjöström Browning wrote and directed an Aileen Pringle vehicle, The Mystic. The picture has many of the elements typical of Browning oeuvre at MGM: Carnivals, Hungarian Gypsies and séances provide the exotic mise-en-scene, while the melodramatic plot involves embezzlement and swindling. An American con man Michael Nash (Conway Tearle) develops a moral conscience after falling in love with Pringle's character, Zara, and is consistent with Browning's "themes of reformation and unpunished crimes." and the couple achieve a happy reckoning. Browning, a former sideshow performer, is quick to reveal to his movie audience the illusionist fakery that serves to extract a fortune from a gullible heiress, played by Gladys Hulette.
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.
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."
The Blackbird (1926)
thumb|The Blackbird (1926) publicity still. L to R, Lon Chaney as Dan Tate, Doris Lloyd as his wife Limehouse Polly.
Browning and Chaney were reunited in their next feature film, The Blackbird (1926), one of the most "visually arresting" of their collaborations.
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. 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 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.
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.
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, 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."
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. 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."
Though admired by critics for Chaney's performance, the film was only modestly successful at the box office.
The Road to Mandalay (1926)
thumb|The Road to Mandalay (1926), publicity still. L to R, director Tod Browning, actor Lon Chaney.
Any comprehensive contemporary evaluation of Browning's The Road to Mandalay is problematic. According to Browning biographer Alfred Eaker only a small fraction of the original seven reels exist. A 16 mm version survives in a "fragmented and disintegrated state" discovered in France in the 1980s.
In a story that Browning wrote with screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz ,
The picture explores one of Browning's most persistent themes: that of a parent who asserts sexual authority vicariously through their own offspring. As such, an Oedipal narrative is established, "a narrative that dominates Browning's work" and recognized as such by contemporary critics.
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. 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.
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." Religious imagery commonly appears in Browning's films, "surrounding his characters with religious paraphernalia." Browning, a mason, uses Christian iconography to emphasize Joe's moral alienation from Rosemary. Biographer Stuart Rosenthal writes:
Rosenthal adds ""Religion for the Browning hero is an additional spring of frustration – another defaulted promise."
As in all of the Browning-Chaney collaborations, The Road to Mandalay was profitable at the box office.
London After Midnight (1927)
thumb|Director Tod Browning and actors Polly Moran and Lon Chaney (dressed as Inspector Burke), on the set of London After Midnight (1927)
Whereas Browning's The Road to Mandalay (1926) exists in a much deteriorated 16 mm abridged version, London After Midnight is no longer believed to exist, the last print destroyed in an MGM vault fire in 1965.
London After Midnight is widely considered by archivists the Holy Grail and "the most sought after and discussed lost film of the silent era." A detailed photo reconstruction, based on stills from the film was assembled by Turner Classic Movies' Rick Schmidlin in 2002.
Based on Browning's own tale entitled "The Hypnotist", London After Midnight is a "drawing room murder mystery'—its macabre and Gothic atmosphere resembling director Robert Wiene's 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
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 pass, and the estate's 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.
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. "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.
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. Film historians Stefanie Diekmann and Ekkehard Knörer observe succinctly that "All in all, Browning's scenarios [including London After Midnight] appear as a long series of tricks, performed and explained."
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."
The Show (1927)
In 1926, while Lon Chaney was busy making Tell It to the Marines with filmmaker George W. Hill, Browning directed The Show, "one of the most bizarre productions to emerge from silent cinema." (The Show anticipates his subsequent feature with Chaney, a "carnival of terror": The Unknown).
Screenwriter Waldemar Young based the scenario on elements from the author Charles Tenny Jackson's The Day of Souls.
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." 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 redemption and his reconciliation with Salome comprise the plot and its "saccharine" ending.
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.
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.
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).
The Unknown (1927): A silent era chef d'oeuvre
The Unknown marks the creative apogee of the Tod Browning and Lon Chaney collaborations, and is widely considered their most outstanding work of the silent era. More so than any of Browning's silent pictures, he fully realizes one of his central themes in The Unknown: the linkage of physical deformity with sexual frustration.
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 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. 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. When Alonzo murders Zanzi during an argument, the homicide is witnessed by Nanon, who detects only the bifid thumb of her father's assailant.
thumb|The Unknown (1927) Lon Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, John George as Cojo
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), in order 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." 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). 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".
The Unknown is widely regarded as the most outstanding of the Browning-Chaney collaborations and a masterpiece of the late silent film era. Film critic Scott Brogan regards The Unknown worthy of "cult status."
The Big City (1928)
A lost film, The Big City stars Lon Chaney, Marceline Day and Betty Compson, the latter in her only appearance in an MGM film. Browning wrote the story and Waldemar Young the screenplay concerning "A gangster Lon Chaney who uses a costume jewelry store as a front for his jewel theft operation. After a conflict with a rival gang, he and his girlfriend Marceline Day reform."
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." Critic Stuart Rosenthal commented on The Big City: "...Chaney, without makeup, in a characteristic gangster role."
The Big City garnered MGM $387,000 in profits.
West of Zanzibar (1928)
thumb|West of Zanzibar (1928). Publicity still. Lon Chaney as the magician Pharos.
thumb|West of Zanzibar (1928). Publicity still. Lon Chaney as Dead Legs, Mary Nolan as Maizie.
In 1928, Browning and Lon Chaney embarked upon their penultimate collaboration, West of Zanzibar, based on Chester M. De Vonde play Kongo (1926). The scenario by Elliott J. Clawson and Waldemar Young, provided Chaney with dual characterizations: the magician Pharos, and the later paraplegic Pharos who is nicknamed "Dead Legs." In a variation of the "unknown parentage motif," Browning dramatizes a complex tale of "obsessive revenge" and "psychological horror." Biographer Stuart Rosenthal made these observations on Chaney's portrayals:
The story opens in Paris, where Pharos, a magician, 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, Pharos 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 Pharos, the child is actually his. Rosenthal singles out this scene for special mention: