FREAKS: Tod Browning's Sideshow Shockers (MGM, 1925, 27, 32) Criterion
Suitably referenced as the Edgar
Allen Poe of American cinema, director, Tod Browning’s legendary run in
Hollywood yielded some stimulating specimens in ground-breaking pre-code films,
later bludgeoned in the editing room until some bore no earthly resemblance to his
original vision. Even under Tinsel Town’s then ‘laissez fair’ approach to
making movies, it seems Browning’s propensity for perversity was oft frowned upon
as pushing the boundaries of acceptable screen ‘art’ too far into the
grotesque. From his earliest days as a Vaudeville performer and carnie/circus
entertainer, Browning was unreservedly captivated by the dodgy ambiance of
these traveling sideshows. Indeed, Browning regarded this world, with its’
non-judgmental charm, as a refreshing departure from the straight-jacketed
conformity dictating social mores and manners elsewhere. Today, Tod Browning
remains much regarded in American cinema for two enduring early sound
masterworks – Universal’s Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932) –
curiously made at MGM, a studio not in tune with Browning’s particular verve
for humanity’s oddities.
At age 16, Browning left school, abjuring
the affluence of his ancestral family, to become a roustabout. By age 21, he
was performing on a riverboat, acting as a contortionist for Ringling Brothers,
having developed a live ‘burial’ act – his first departure into the macabre.
Born, Charles Albert Browning, he adopted ‘tod’ as his first name, believing
its derivation from the German, meaning - ‘death’ – added darkly purposed cache
to his marquee presence. In 1909, Browning came to the movies as an actor.
Barely 4 years later, he was directing for D. W. Griffith at Biograph Studios
in New York City, marking 2-reelers he had also written and produced. A near-death
collision with a train while under the influence, resulting in the death of one
of his passengers, sobered up Browning. It also altered the trajectory of his
tastes in cinema, now skewed toward morality plays in which criminals or the
physically deformed became the heroes of his stories. To some extent, Browning’s
movies became formulaic with time, fueling his neurotic fixation with sexual
frustration and substitutable conscience – the quagmire afflicting all human self-loathing
and desirability.
From 1925 to 1929, Browning
indulged his talents at MGM under the auspices of Irving Thalberg, finding his
muse in Lon Chaney, the studio’s most celebrated ‘man of a thousand faces.’ All
8 of the Browning/Chaney collaborations proved highly successful – one of them,
presented for consideration in Criterion’s triumvirate of Metro horror classics:
The Unknown (1927). Prior to
this, Browning made The Mystic (1925) for MGM, a bizarre tale of a triumvirate
of reprobates out to bilk rich clientele by ‘supposedly’ channeling the spirits
of the dead through a medium. Given its title, the movie is actually far less
interested in the occult or the supernatural – even in debunking it – than the
perverted manipulations of an audience having paid for the luxury to believe in
the impossible. For several years thereafter, Browning would embark upon a string
of legendary pictures, one of them – London After Midnight (1926), no
longer believed to exist. The following year, Browning unleashed The Unknown
(1927), arguably his masterpiece with Chaney as his star. It told the wicked
tale of a cruel and obsessive love affair, nearly to destroy the happiness of a
carnival performer, Nanon (played by an up-and-coming Joan Crawford at her most
luminous and alluring).
In it, Chaney is Alonzo, a gypsy/knife-wielding
circus performer, feigning the loss of both his arms in an accident prior to
joining their show. Chaney, who, of course had arms, herein uses his feet, not
only to perform Alonzo’s act, but also convincingly to light cigarettes and strum
his guitar. In reality, Alonzo is concealing his arms under a heavy cloak to
placate Nanon’s odd aversion at being touched. This is credited to the abuse
Nanon endured at the hands of her father, ringmaster - Zanzi (Nick De Ruiz),
whom Alonzo later murders. However, Nanon still does not wish a sexual
relationship with any man. So, Alonzo, to please and possess her, secretly has
his limbs amputated, erroneously believing this will draw him nearer to her
sexually. Alas, upon his recovery, Alonzo discovers Nanon has since overcome
her fear of intimacy to take up with circus strongman, Malabar (Norman Kerry),
whom Alonzo now plots to destroy. Fate intervenes, and Alonzo is instead trampled
to death by his own wickedness, allowing Nanon and Malabar to live happily ever
after.
The Unknown was Browning’s
most successful collaboration with Chaney, and one of MGM’s brightest money-makers
of the year. From this golden epoch, Browning’s reputation would swiftly rise
and endure, but a scant 4 more years before his undoing with what would
ultimately become his most scandalous – yet enduring – masterwork: Freaks (1932).
Just prior to its debut, Browning had achieved his ultimate success with Dracula
(1931) – the picture to kickstart Universal’s cycle into horror classics to see
out the remainder of the thirties, only to be bastardized in recycled and
increasingly silly monster mash-ups at Universal throughout the 1940’s. Based
on the success of Dracula, Irving Thalberg was eager to woo Browning to
MGM, and accepted his rough-draft story proposal based loosely on Tod Robbins'
circus-themed short story - Spurs (1926). Alas, the rechristened Freaks
would quickly unravel into a ravishing oddity; Browning, importing all manner
of legitimate sideshow performers whose grotesque physical deformities became
the bane of the studio’s ‘legit’ stars’ existence. Studio raja, Louis B. Mayer strenuously
objected. Thalberg, however, persisted.
Once again, Browning’s focus is on
a morality play. Freaks is the tale of a midget/circus performer, Hans
(Harry Earles), systematically being poisoned by statuesque, high-wire artiste,
Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), who feigns an attraction to Hans but is actually engaging
in after-hours badinage with the show’s strongman, Hercules (Henry Victor).
Together, Cleo and Herc’ conspire to do away with Hans who hails from moneyed
ancestry, thereupon to live handsomely off his considerable wealth. Hans
refuses to believe Cleo would so callously betray him. Despite the
protestations of fellow midget, Frieda (actually, Harry’s real-life wife, Daisy
Earles), Hans allows Cleo some latitude to carry out her diabolical plan. At
some point, however, Hans deduces Freida and the rest of the freaks have his
best interests at heart. Catching Cleo in her deception, Hans and the freaks
hunt down Cleo and Herc’ one dark and stormy night. They emasculate the strongman,
performing a home-made castration, and, brutalize Cleo, whose legs and tongue
are amputated, transforming her into the chicken woman – the ultimate sideshow
freak, tarred and feathered, and, desperately clucking to be heard by an
audience only come to gawk at her grotesque transformation.
Even for film audiences previously
fascinated by such maladies of the flesh, Freaks proved too much to
handle. Reportedly, at a sneak peek, some members of the prevue audience were
made physically ill, while others stormed out of the theater to register their
disgust. Apoplectic, Browning agreed to make the necessary ‘trims’ to create a
more ‘mainstream’ appeal for the general release. However, by the time Freaks
hit the theater circuit it had lost more than 30-minutes, hacked away to
eliminate virtually all the major chills and pivotal plot twists, including the
penultimate ruin of Hercules and Cleopatra. Only a glimpse of the post-operative
Cleo, clucking in her pen survived these cuts. The fate of Hercules would remain
unknown, though speculated upon for decades to follow. Regardless, Freaks was
an unmitigated box office disaster, hastening the loss of Tod Browning’s
autonomy to further explore his thematic frustrations on the screen. Not only
at MGM, Browning would soon discover he had fast become persona non grata in
Hollywood.
Still under contract, Browning had
only 4 more pictures to contribute to his canon, each systematically blunted in
the editing process and judged as inferior ghost flowers to his earlier period
of prosperity. In 1939, Browning was forced into retirement after 46 movies of
vary degrees in quality. With the coming
of the second world war, his macabre sensibilities rapidly fell out of fashion.
After all, there were too many real horrors to contend with in the world. And
MGM, upon the installation of Hollywood’s self-governing code of ethics, by the
mid-1930’s had moved away from its aspirations to compete with Universal’s
home-grown Transylvania. Instead, Mayer indulged in pictures built upon a
superficial sheen of glamor, marked by considerable prestige. And thus,
Browning was virtually blackballed in Hollywood. With the death of his beloved
wife in 1944, he became a virtual recluse in his Malibu Beach house, trundled
out by Hollywood’s rather perverse display of belated philanthropy for 1949’s prestigious
‘Directors Guild’ award. For the next 20 years, Browning and his reputation
were allowed to molder with the past. Failed surgery performed in 1962 to
remove cancer from his larynx rendered him mute. He died of the disease later
that same year.
In the intervening decades, Browning’s
reputation has been resurrected, mostly by cinema surrealists, finding
something genuinely disturbing, yet sympathetic in Browning’s darkly purposed
morality melodramas. Given this renewed fascination with the man and his work,
it is a bit of an oddity itself that, so far, only 3 of his works have come
back into the light – remastered in hi-def, but farmed out by their current
rights holder, Warner Brothers, to Criterion for this new-to-Blu release. The
Mystic, The Unknown and Freaks have not weathered well at all.
Through improper storage, decades of general neglect, and ultimately, a lack of
preservation efforts until much of what survives is only rough-hewn source
material, truncated and cobbled together from 16 and 35mm prints, the level of
mastering quality in this Blu-ray set ranges from admirable to disappointing. Of
the 3 movies, only Freaks rises to a level of true preservation/restoration.
When the image is culled from 35mm elements (no original negative survives),
the results can be quite pleasing, with rich, solid black levels, a good
representation of fine details, and film grain accurately preserved to resemble
an original nitrate print. Alas, image quality toggles between this, and very ugly,
muddy and overly-contrasted 16mm elements, inserted into the movie to bring
back some – if not all – of what Browning was forced to excise from it in 1932.
The Unknown offers the
second-best image in this set; the restoration performed by George Eastman and
a Polish archive with elements culled from the best surviving nitrates found in
America and Italy. General wear, streaks, mold damage, badly spliced jump cuts,
sprocket wear, scratches and dirt have not been removed. So, the image is in
fairly rough shape, occasionally to exhibit grave instability and, again, a
general softening when 16mm elements are briefly inserted to bridge the
absences of surviving 35mm stock. The absolute worst rendering in this set is
owed The Mystic – a movie, virtually unseen since its theatrical debut
and never available on any home video format. Regrettably, this Blu-ray is NOT
cause for celebration. Much of the image is affected by the aforementioned
age-related anomalies. Those are forgivable…to a point. Wholly unforgivable –
the aliasing, edge enhancement and other digitally based distortions that cause
the entire feature to suffer from an effect that comes close to the
bad-old-days of digital combing, a persistent duplication of the image,
creating a VERY distracting effect. All three films in this set are derived
from 2K scans and sport Criterion’s usual 1.0 PCM soundtrack. The silent
features have musical accompaniment. The Mystic actually gets a new
score by Dean Hurley; The Unknown, by Philip Carli. Freaks’ early
sound recording exhibits all of the shortcomings of primitive Westrex.
Criterion has padded out the
goodies on Freaks and The Unknown with audio commentaries by
David Skal. The Mystic only rates an intro by Skal. Megan Abbott weighs
in, in a newly produced featurette on Browning and pre-Code horror. Also
curated for our pleasure, the vintage hour-long doc on Freaks, featuring
various perspectives on the movie and its enduring importance. From 2019, we
get Kristen Lopez’s podcast on Freaks. Skal returns to read ‘Spurs’.
There’s also a prologue and alternate endings and a photo gallery for Freaks.
Finally, historian, Farran Smith Nehme contributes a printed essay. Bottom
line: what survives of Browning’s storied past in Hollywood is, regrettably,
crumbs off a much more well-appointed table of oddities still MIA on home
video. Some will never be seen again,
owing to their complete disintegration over time. But others are still
moldering in vaults around the world, and deserve to be unearthed before it is
too late. Criterion’s triumvirate from Browning’s catalog is a start, alas,
with only 2 movies in it, watchable. The Mystic’s quality – or lack
thereof - is an utter waste of your time. Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
The Mystic - 3
The Unknown – 4.5
Freaks – 4
VIDEO/AUDIO
The Mystic – 1
The Unknown – 2.5
Freaks – 3.5
EXTRAS
3
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