San Sebastián's retrospective of Tod Browning offers a rare chance to see more from the influential father of the modern horror film, as Nick Thomas reports
Imagine trying to pitch the following to a modern-day Hollywood studio executive: a movie where the main character has his arms amputated because the woman he loves cannot bear to be touched; a movie where an escaped convict sells dolls that are miniaturised humans; and a movie where the cast comprises midgets, bearded ladies, cretins and a limbless man.
This, he might say, as you are gently, but firmly, escorted from the premises by security, is hardly studio fare. Stick to the day job. But hang on, you might retort, that last one might just work
It is, of course, Freaks, the 1932 film now recognised as a masterpiece of American cinema. It and the other films described above (The Unknown, with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford; and The Devil Doll, scripted by Erich von Stroheim and starring Lionel Barrymore) were made by American director Tod Browning. Not as some one-man-band set-up, either, but, amazingly, for that epitome of a Hollywood studio, MGM, in the 20s and 30s.
San Sebastián offers a welcome chance to see these, and a host of other, Browning films, from his on-screen debut as an actor in 1913's Scenting a Terrible Crime to his final film as director, 1939's Miracles for Sale. It should provide evidence that there is more to his career than his two best-known films, Freaks and the 1931 Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.
Browning's own life would certainly make a good movie. He ran away from school to join a circus, then toured the world with travelling acts a background which he clearly drew on in Freaks, The Unholy Three and The Show, for example. Eventually he made his way to Hollywood as a comedy actor, working for the Biograph studio from 1913. He appeared in DW Griffith's Intolerance in 1916, also working as an assistant director for crowd scenes. In fact, he began his own directing career, at the prompting of Griffith, in 1915, joining Universal Studios four years later, where he made his first film with Lon Chaney.
That relationship took off after Browning joined MGM in 1925, resulting in a series of classic horror films which made the most of Chaney's protean ability to transmute himself in front of the camera. Before Chaney's death in 1930, he produced for Browning a series of performances as a little old lady, a cripple, and an armless circus performer, among others which helped shape the tradition of macabre, weird, physical horror movies that lives on today.
His atmospheric version of Dracula, made for Universal in 1931, made a legend of Bela Lugosi, and also helped define the modern horror genre by adding one key element comedy. If Browning had had his way, it would also have added that other missing factor into the mix sex. Released on Valentine's Day, 1931, the film was billed, bizarrely, as 'The strangest love story ever told', but in fact several of the love elements of the classic story were excised from the film because of their 'questionable' aspects.
Browning's approach to filmmaking, (like his personality, by all accounts) was actually quite conventional, even stolid, which makes his fascination with the 'questionable', the grotesque, even more unnerving. And in Freaks, made for MGM at the request of Irving Thalberg himself, over the objections of others within the studio, Browning pushed this fascination to the limit.
In adapting Clarence Robbins' grisly story Spurs for the screen, Browning brought to it an element of gothic social commentary which resembled the sociological 'message' films being produced by MGM's rival, Warner Bros, at that time. The film seeks to juxtapose the innate humanity of the circus 'freaks' with the venality and abnormality of the so-called normal people. And in many respects the film is noble in intent. It never shows us the freaks on stage as circus sideshows, for example, but as humans going about their business. Yet amid the grand guignol of the finale, where the freaks exact their revenge on the evil Cleo, the humanist ideals become a little lost.
Yet Freaks retains an unforgettable power. Described by one critic as 'a virtual textbook on the horror film' its influence has been huge, and is detectable in the work of directors as diverse as Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Alexander Jodorowsky, not to mention David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Lars von Trier. This is despite the film being banned in many countries for decades after its release. It was, however, honoured at the Venice Film Festival in 1962, and remains perhaps the definitive cult film.
This latest chance to see more of the director's little-known oeuvre should not be missed. With his almost modern emphasis on characterisation rather than plot, and his weird, uniquely baroque view of the world, his films certainly have the capacity to linger in the mind, as all great cinema must. Nick Thomas
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