Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers

The three films included on the Criterion Collection’s Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers collectively suggest a miniature narrative of Browning’s evolution as a filmmaker. Though this two-disc set offers but a dip of the toe into Browning’s work, it’s governed by a persuasive through line. Here we get a film, 1925’s The Mystic, that’s rich in promise and less personal than the other two, one a perverse masterwork, 1927’s The Unknown, that’s criminally underseen by contemporary audiences, and the other a cult classic, 1932’s Freaks, that’s too often discussed in terms of its notoriety. Watching these films together offers a sketch of an artist’s sensibility reaching fruition, as a fine-grained empathy rises to the fore.

Browning’s affinity for outcasts has been well-documented and is discussed at length in the supplements included with this set, particularly in a new interview with author Megan Abbott about Browning and pre-Code horror. Browning worked in circuses himself, though the line between self-mythology and reality is difficult to parse, and his struggle with alcoholism led to a car accident that left him and one of his passengers, actor and director George Siegmann, with serious injuries (a second passenger, actor Elmer Booth, died on the scene).

Browning was a man interested in damage, and artists looking to plumb physical and mental scars often find themselves in the horror genre, which is friendly to metaphors for self-loathing. The horror film is often said to exploit a fear of death, which is fine as far as that goes but about as perceptive as observing that people drawn to donuts like sweets. Horror films often pivot on a fear of rejection, of not only dying but dying alone with your worst vulnerabilities exposed and pitilessly found wanting. These films show Browning honing this fear of rejection to an edge.

Few sequences in American cinema dramatize rejection as forcefully as the wedding dinner scene in Freaks. It’s an apotheosis of the fears that drive the film and the horror genre at large. Browning spends much of the film’s 62 minutes preparing the audience for its climatic sledgehammer, sketching the characters’ personalities through a series of delicate vignettes of daily life. The majority of Freaks is cast with real circus folk, physically unconventional people who use their bodies to make a living on the margins of show business. There are people without arms, people without any appendages at all, conjoined sisters, gender-bending people and little people, among others, and Browning regards them with a casual tenderness that’s startling.

Considering when the film was made, it’s remarkable that Browning didn’t sensationalize his characters more. And from a contemporary vantage point, it’s astonishing to see Browning regard his actors as more than representational totems. The “freaks” of this incredibly unflinching film are neither monsters nor martyrs. To Browning, they’re human.

The little person at the center of Freaks, Hans (Harry Earles), is a poignant fool who treats the feelings of his lover, Frieda (Daisy Earles), with a recklessness that’s very recognizable in many men larger than himself. Hans is smitten with Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), a sexy trapeze artist, but it’s understood that he’s broadly intoxicated with the idea of being attractive to “normal” women. Anyone with a shred of experience can recognize that Cleopatra is exploiting Hans, and the other members of the traveling circus, including Frieda, see it and dread the fallout.

This suspense runs like a wire through pastoral scenes that have little to do with overt narrative. Rather, these scenes are portraiture, Browning’s gestures of love. The filmmaker shows the “bearded lady” (Olga Roderick) having a child with everyone cloistered around her, and the “human skeleton” (Peter Robinson) passing out cigars to the men. Browning is a master of the telling, all-summing close-up that freezes a minute gesture in your mind.

Rather than pitying his characters, Browning celebrates the physical ingenuity required for them to do things that many take for granted. For instance, there are achingly lovely shots of people without arms drinking and eating and smoking with their feet. Unforgettable details continue to abound, such as the gloves that the “human torso” (Johnny Eck) wears on his hands, which serve as his feet. Browning effortlessly sees the world through the eyes of the circus folk. Cleopatra and her partner, Hercules (Henry Victor), come to reveal their hideousness, possibly incriminating the audience in the process. How often have we sighed at someone different than us who may, say, take longer at a check-out lane in the grocery store? We come to fear Cleopatra’s humiliation of Hans out of empathy for him and out of an anxiety as to how closely her misbehavior may mirror the biases of our lizard brains.

During a dinner for Hans and Cleopatra, following a sham wedding intended by Cleopatra and Hercules to get Hans’s money, the sideshow performers invite the woman into their world with their iconic “gooble-gobble” chant. Cleopatra and Hercules behave even worse than we fear, calling the performers “scum” and jostling Hans around like a baby, playing to his most acute anxiety as to how others see him—that is, as a child. Figurative castrations abound in Browning’s work, but Hans’s emasculation may be the hardest to witness. This act is an annihilation of his sense of dignity, a realizing of his fears of insignificance.

As acts of callousness go, Hans and Cleopatra’s behavior during the wedding dinner is up there with the jokes that drive the carnage of Brian de Palma’s Carrie. These are singular moments of cinematic humiliation, and they each hit the audience at several pressure points at once. After this dinner, or Carrie’s prom, we’re primed for vengeance and willing to accept virtually anything that the outcasts are willing to do in retaliation, and in each case the retaliation is severe. In each case, destruction of ideals is met with physical violence, and we desperately want this revenge for the “freaks” and Carrie alike, who represent the wounded portions of all of us. And yet each filmmaker refuses to shortchange the horror of the aftermath. Catharsis gives way to disgust, an evolution in feeling that is integral to the horror genre at large.

The Unknown, one of Browning’s many collaborations with Lon Chaney, is more lurid than Freaks but driven by similar impulses. It’s a castration fantasy that’s obsessed with the need of the castrated to settle a score. Chaney is Alonzo, an armless circus performer infatuated with Nanon (Joan Crawford), the daughter of the ringmaster and a woman who, in the grips of trauma, loathes being touched by men. All the men in the film covet Nanon sexually, but Alonzo, given his perceived harmlessness, has the inside track to her affections, or so he believes.

Alonzo is a stark example of Browning’s refusal to sentimentalize his neurotic or oppressed characters, as he’s shown to be capable of deceit and savagery in his aim to have Nanon. And yet, as embodied by Chaney in an extraordinary performance, Alonzo is moving as well as sexy, a blend of the oppressed/oppressor polarities embodied by the various characters of Freaks.

There’s a moment of operatic power in The Unknown—when Alonzo learns after making a huge sacrifice that Nanon is now able to enjoy men and is committed to another—in which Browning holds on Chaney’s face as hope dies in Alonzo’s eyes in real time. Chaney’s fluid features paint a portrait of a man succumbing in that moment to his most disgusting instincts, and there’s probably a portion of many of us who yearn to see him retaliate, even if his misfortunes are brought about by his own selfishness and insanity. Anger is the most addictive emotional response to heartache, and Browning’s understanding of this irony, and of the horror film’s ability to plumb it, can only be rivaled by a few other filmmakers.

The Mystic is notably lacking in the neuroses that drive Freaks and The Unknown, suggesting a genre bauble onto which Browning’s pet interests have been sprinkled. A castration symbol is dropped playfully in the first scene as a sort of amuse bouche, but the film is largely a supernaturally charged swindle caper that anticipates Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley. In both cases, mystic acts are used to horn in on upper-crust society, but in the case of The Mystic, the results are surprisingly bland given the subject matter and director. A romantic plot is taken at face value, with few of the obsessive curlicues that complicate the relationships driving other Browning productions, and the resolution is unforgivably redemptive.

Yet Browning’s personality is visible in the séance scenes, particularly the joyous attention paid to the fine details of a hustle, such as the ghostly beauty of the specters that the con artists conjure for their marks. These figments of make-believe have a shivery power, a mysterious tactility, that shame the special effects of modern filmmaking. Browning truly conjures the exhilaration of going to see a mystic and witnessing the blurring of the real and the uncanny. Sure, it’s fake, but it might not be. It’s a similar need for the irrational that drives Hans and Alonzo to the point of destruction: Both believe that they can’t possibly be loved by a woman, but they might be. Hope, sprung eternal, can be ugly. And Browning was a poet of such ugliness.

Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers is available now on the Criterion Collection.