Tod Browning's Underworld
Tod Browning ran away from his Kentucky home as a teenager to join the circus, and he never really left. He worked as a contortionist, a clown, and a sideshow barker before drifting into the film industry, and the world of traveling performers, carnival grifters, and criminal outcasts became the subject of virtually everything he directed. His films are populated by people who live on the margins: thieves, con artists, sideshow acts, and men so consumed by obsession that they will mutilate themselves rather than abandon it. No other director of the period returned so consistently to the same territory, and no one else made that territory feel so authentic.
Browning's greatest creative partnership was with Lon Chaney, and five of the nine films here were made together. Chaney gave physical form to the damaged, driven characters Browning imagined, enduring extraordinary discomfort to play legless crime lords, armless circus performers, and paralyzed magicians plotting revenge from the swamps of East Africa. But even without Chaney, Browning's films share a distinctive atmosphere: a fascination with deception and disguise, a sympathy for people the respectable world considers monstrous, and a willingness to push melodrama into territory so extreme it becomes something like poetry.
These nine films represent Browning's silent and early sound work. His most famous productions, Dracula and Freaks, came later and are not yet in the catalog, but the creative sensibility that produced them is fully visible here. The underworld Browning built on screen was drawn from the one he had lived in, and that firsthand knowledge gives his films a texture that studio-bound directors could never replicate.
10 films
