53 Facts About Tod Browning

Tod Browning directed a number of films of various genres between 1915 and 1939, but was primarily known for horror films, and was often cited in the trade press as the Edgar Allan Poe of cinema.

Tod Browning is known as the director of Dracula, Freaks, and his silent film collaborations with Lon Chaney and Priscilla Dean.

Tod Browning developed a live burial act in which he was billed as "The Living Hypnotic Corpse", and performed as a clown with the renowned Ringling Brothers circus.

In 1906, the 26-year-old Tod Browning was briefly married to Amy Louis Stevens in Louisville.

Tod Browning appeared in a Mutt and Jeff sketch in the 1912 burlesque revue The World of Mirth with comedian Charles Murray.

Tod Browning was featured in several Reliance-Majestic films, including The Wild Girl.

Indeed, the thirty-one films that Tod Browning wrote and directed between 1920 and 1939 were, with few exceptions, melodramas.

The adjective most often applied to Tod Browning's cinema is 'obsessional'.

Certain shots, compositions and montages appear again and again in Tod Browning's oeuvre [leaving] an impression of frank repetition.

The overall scope of the entire Tod Browning filmography is not significantly broader than any single entry in it.

Tod Browning married his second wife Alice Watson in 1917; they would remain together until her death in 1944.

Tod Browning's handling of the former slapstick comedian Beery as Achmet reveals the actor's comedic legacy and Tod Browning's own roots in burlesque.

Tod Browning wrote or co-wrote the stories for six of the eight productions.

At M-G-M, Tod Browning would reach his artistic maturity as a filmmaker.

Tod Browning ultimately turns the application of "mental control" to serve justice.

Indeed, Tod Browning is more interested in tricks and illusions than the supernatural.

Dollar Down : Tod Browning followed The Mystic with another "crook melodrama involving swindlers" for Truart productions.

Tod Browning helps to keep the development of The Blackbird taut by employing Chaney's face as an index of the rapidly oscillating mood of the title character.

Tod Browning introduces a number of slapstick elements into The Blackbird.

Tod Browning was now poised to make his masterwork of the silent era, The Unknown.

Tod Browning's deformity is an illusion, achieved by donning a corset to bind and conceal his healthy arms.

In West of Zanzibar Tod Browning bares his carnival showman background not to betray himself as an aesthetic primitive, but to display his complete comprehension of the presentational mode, and of the film frame as proscenium.

Tod Browning remains neglected because most of the available English-language writing on his films focuses on the thematic singularities of his oeuvre, to the near-exclusion of any analysis of his aesthetic strategies.

Chaney demonstrated great sensitivity to the feelings and drives of the outcasts Tod Browning devised for him to play.

Tod Browning finds his wife dead in a church, with an infant daughter beside her.

Tod Browning swears to avenge himself both on Crane and the child he assumes was sired by Crane.

The religious symbolism that turns up periodically in Tod Browning's pictures serves two antagonistic ends.

Tod Browning secretly preys upon Crane's ivory operations employing local tribes and using sideshow tricks and illusions to seize the goods.

Tod Browning invites Crane to visit his outpost so as to expose the identity of the culprit stealing his ivory.

Tod Browning relents when Bobby rescues Toyo from an escaped tiger.

The first of his three collaborations with Lugosi, Tod Browning's handling of the actor's role as Delzante anticipated the part of Count Dracula in his Dracula.

Tod Browning affords the audience the first of those famously intense and direct into-the-camera Lugosi looks, a style of gaze that would be duplicated time and again by the likes of Christopher Lee and Lugosi's lesser imitators.

Actor Helen Chandler, who plays Dracula's mistress, Mina Seward, commented that Tod Browning seemed disengaged during shooting, and left the direction to cinematographer Karl Freund.

Tod Browning's concern was always with the bizarre desires of those on the social and cultural margins.

Tod Browning employs "a favorite device" with an animal montage early in the film to establish a metaphoric equivalence between the emergence of the vampires from their crypts and the small parasitic vermin that infest the castle: spiders, wasps and rats.

Rather than relying largely upon "editing and composition as expressive tools" Tod Browning moved away from a stationary camera "toward a conspicuous use of camera movement" under the influence of Karl Freund, cinematographer on the 1931 Dracula.

Iron Man is not an anomaly in Tod Browning's career; rather, it is a work that testifies to the continuity of his thematic concerns, as well as showcasing his growing facility with the camera after his work with [cameraman] Karl Fruend.

Tod Browning returned to M-G-M studios after completing Iron Man to embark upon the most controversial film of his career: Freaks.

Thalberg collaborated closely with the director on pre-production, but Tod Browning completed all the actual shooting on the film without interference from studio executives.

Tod Browning provides the moral rationale for the final reckoning with Cleopatra before she has discovered Hans' fortune and plans to murder him.

Tod Browning brings to bear all the thematic modes that typically motivate his characters.

Tod Browning returned to a vampire-themed picture with his 1935 Mark of the Vampire.

Tod Browning deviates from his 1927 silent film in that here the sleuth, Professor Zelen, rather than posing as a vampire himself in a dual role, hires a troupe of talented thespians to stage an elaborate hoax to deceive the murder suspect Baron Otto von Zinden.

Tod Browning reportedly composed the conventional plot scenes as he would a stage production, but softened the static impression through the editing process.

In scenes that depicted the supernatural, Tod Browning freely used a moving camera.

The climatic coup-de-grace occurs when the murderer's incredulity regarding the existence of vampires is reversed when Tod Browning cinematically creates an astonishing illusion of the winged Luna in flight transforming into a human.

Miracles for Sale was the last of the forty-six feature films Tod Browning made for Universal and M-G-M studios since he began directing in 1917.

Tod Browning's career had been in abeyance for two years after completing The Devil-Doll in 1936.

Tod Browning's is a career that ended neither with a bang nor a whisper, but a performance that makes fun of an audience that believes what it sees.

Tod Browning occasionally offered screenplays to M-G-M, but eventually disengaged entirely from the film industry and in 1942 retired to his home in Malibu, California.

Tod Browning died alone at his Malibu home on October 6,1962.

Tod Browning was sometimes called the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema' [and] much admired by the surrealists.

Tod Browning's creations were, of course, a commercial cinema as well.