Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning : Hollywood's Master of the Macabre

PROLOGUE The Director Vanishes It was perhaps fitting that a man who loved baseball for at least seventy of his eighty-two years should die in the middle of the World Series, the game tied 1-1 between the Yankees and the Giants. As a long-naturalized Californian, Tod Browning might be expected to favor the Giants. In fact he preferred Cincinnati, but was never one to let sentiment influence his bets. In his carefully guarded private life, Browning adored animals and schmaltzy figurines, but when it came to the sphere of public spectacle, his approach was clinical and unsparing. As a director of motion pictures, he forged a reputation as the "Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema," a Hollywood prince of criminality, darkness, and the grotesque. His foremost concern as a storyteller was the plight of outsiders, at first depicted as garden-variety criminals, but, as his career progressed, in fantastic distortions worthy of Dorian Gray's infamous portrait. The criminal-outsider, played as often as not by the protean silent-film actor Lon Chaney, Sr., began to display physical anomalies reflective of disordered inner states: characters in Browning films wouldn't be merely wronged, guilty, or vengeful; they would also be scarred, crippled, or spectacularly mutilated. Eventually, Browning's cast-asides would include real sideshow freaks, who, through accidents of birth, surpassed anything Lon Chaney could accomplish with rubber humps and harnesses--as well as utterly fantastic alien strangers like the predatory Count Dracula. Freaks and Dracula would, in fact, be his two most famous films, fascinating audiences more than six decades after their initial releases as timeless evocations of otherness, alienation, and dread. Tod Browning had one of Hollywood's most singular careers, with a tremendous shaping influence on two significant American genres: the gangster picture and the horror film--not to mention their stylish cinematic nuptials in noir. His firsthand knowledge of the industry and its personalities, from D. W. Griffith's pioneering Biograph Company to the sophisticated dream factory of Louis B. Mayer's MGM, would have been the material of a terrific Hollywood memoir. But Tod Browning didn't like to talk--not about his career, at least. Now, lying in his coffin in a Santa Monica funeral home, he was dead of a wasting illness that had, finally, deprived him of any possibility of speech. It was a grimly ironic comment on the life and death of a man who had made his fortune as a silent- film director, but who had had considerable difficulties in adapting his talents to the medium of talking pictures. He would become angry, in his final years, whenever a person he had allowed to become intimate would begin to press for details about his life in Hollywood. There was much to be curious about. Few directors had displayed such a singular preoccupation with the grotesque--his Freaks had been one of the biggest disasters of the early talkie era, repulsing and infuriating audiences and critics with its unprecedented display of real human deformities, and had been banned in some parts of the world for thirty years. There was his legendary collaboration with the equally secretive Chaney, the "Man of a Thousand Faces" who never revealed his own. There was Dracula with Bela Lugosi. And whether his subject was the criminal underworld or the nether realm of the undead, Browning's films are filled with repeated, almost interchangeable, themes, characters, and compositions that impress the viewer with the disturbing power of recurrent dreams. As critic Stuart Rosenthal noted in 1975 in the only substantial critical essay ever published on Browning's work, "Although his pursuit of certain themes that he appears to be neurotically fixated on them.... Browning expresses his obsessive content in a manner that may be properly described as compulsive."[read more]