The adjective most frequently applied to Browning's cinema is "obsessional." Although the work of any auteur will repeatedly emphasise specific thoughts and ideas, Browning is so aggressive and unrelenting in his pursuit of certain themes that he appears to be neurotically fixated upon them. He is inevitably attracted to situations of moral and sexual frustration. In this, as well as in his preoccupation with interchangeable guilt, interchangeable personalities and patterns of human repulsion and attraction, he coincides remarkably with Chabrol. What sets Browning apart is his abnormal fascination with the deformed creatures who populate his films—a fascination that is not always entirely intellectual, and one in which he takes extreme delight.

Browning expresses his obsessive content in a manner that may be properly described as compulsive. Certain shots, compositions and montages appear again and again in the Browning oeuvre and, however appropriate they are to his ideas, they leave an impression of frank repetition. In fact, he has a limited catalogue of both themes and effects from which he compiles each of his pictures. The overall scope of the entire Browning filmography is not significantly broader than that of any single entry in it. (pp. 8-9)

The typical Browning protagonist is a man who has been reduced to the state of an animal. In almost every instance he displays a physical deformity that reflects the mental mutilation he has suffered at the hands of some element of callous society…. [Direct] evidence of the animal affinities of Browning characters can be found in their names: "Tiger," the circus trapper in Where East Is East, "Cock Robin," the carnival performer in The Show, and the title character in The Black Bird, to name a few. As animals they act in response to very simple, innate passions, the strongest of which is a lust for retribution. Their steadfast confidence in their own righteousness and their ascetic dedication to their singular goals contributes to the inexhaustible strength which allows them to triumph over those who have made them outcasts. (pp. 9-11)

Although, in their instinctive behaviour, Browning's heroes are oblivious to the moral contradictions of revenge, they do maintain a latent sense of fairness which influences their dealings with those who have not afflicted them. This is one aspect of Barrymore's willingness to sacrifice his own happiness in The Devil-Doll in order to avoid embarrassing his daughter who is ashamed of him. It also accounts for his unwillingness to continue to exploit his "devil dolls" after he has vindicated himself. Chaney trades his own life for that of his daughter in Where East Is East and West of Zanzibar and risks imprisonment to free the clerk framed by the burglary ring in The Unholy Three. The appetite for revenge can be viewed as an extreme of this concern with fairness.

Freaks is the film that is most explicit about the closeness of equitability and retribution. The freaks live by a simple and unequivocable code that one imagines might be the crux of Browning's ideal for society: "Offend one of them and you offend them all." (Browning's other films, however, belie the possibility of practically implementing such an ideal system.) The freaks, as a group, have taken responsibility for the welfare of each individual member. (pp. 12-13)

The solidarity of the freaks is a feature introduced to the story by Browning. It does not occur in "Spurs," the Tod Robbins short story from which Freaks is adapted. Browning's handiwork is also evident in the fairness that tempers the implementation of their doctrine. The group does not respond to Cleopatra's disparagement of Frieda, delaying action against Cleopatra and Hercules until it has undeniable proof of their intention to murder Hans. Since this is one of those rare instances in Browning's pictures in which guilt can be indisputably fixed, the freaks can be totally justified in their attack. (p. 14)

In the lower levels of society, to which Browning devoted most of his film-making energies, self-reliance, shrewdness and authority are valuable, highly regarded characteristics. Accordingly, Browning has great respect for men who are in command of their circumstances. This esteem is constant and irrespective of the moral nature of their activities. This serves as one explanation for Browning's attraction to such grossly debased characters as Alonzo in The Unknown, Black Mike Silva in Outside the Law and Cock Robin in The Show. (pp. 17-18)

Having a characterisation in mind, Browning built his films by generating an elaborately interlocking structure of frustration around that individual. Frustration is Browning's dominant theme. It occurs in several distinct patterns, each of which can be recognised in almost every Browning film. These modes of frustration include:

1. Reality versus Appearance. The standard criteria by which we form "first impressions" are useless in Browning's universe. Physical beauty and positions of public trust are frequently façades for the most reprehensible villains.
2. Sexual Frustration. In Browning's films a man's offspring represent extensions of his own sexuality. The father-child relationship is especially sacred. An insult to a son or daughter is also an insult to the parent, and vice versa. Under these conditions bastardy is a particularly intolerable state. Sexual frustration is Browning's work may be either experienced first hand or indirectly, through a close relative.
3. Conflict of Two Opposing Tendencies within an Individual. This is an internal, identity-related frustration. It may be manifested by the use of alter egos or by the symbolic separation of the pair of qualities into two individuals.
4. Inability to Assign Guilt. Any system of justice, especially the Browning hero's revenge drive, is frustrated by situations in which guilt cannot be clearly fixed. In such instances the avenger himself must often sin in order to punish the sins of others. (pp. 23-4)

[As an example of the first form, Browning uses the dichotomy between appearance and reality in Freaks, where the bulk of the film] is spent dispelling the viewer's initial revulsion to the title characters. They are shown in the activities of normal life—eating, chatting, playing, working, arranging matrimony and celebrating the birth of a child. The freaks surmount their handicaps by going through sets of bizarre movements. Browning presents these in a matter-of-fact manner rather than as tricks. The involved procedure used by the Human Torso, a man without arms or legs, to light his cigarette is handled as incidental action in a contrived dialogue scene. At the other end of the scale, Browning prevents his audience from pitying the freaks by using their deformities as the basis for a great deal of black humour.

Running countercurrent to the normalisation of the freaks is the bestialising of Cleopatra, the trapeze artist, and of her boyfriend, Hercules the Strongman. In contradistinction to their strange circus colleagues, these two are opportunistic, insensitive, unscrupulous and without allegiance to anyone except themselves. Physical beauty masking perversity is identical to the usual Browning premise of respectability covering corruption. (pp. 24-5)

Browning regularly introduces the theme of secondary or "indirect" sexual frustration through the plot device of a parent who is unaware of the identity of his own child, or the reverse situation. Singapore Joe in Road to Mandalay is so ugly that he feels his daughter (who, indeed, abhors that hideous man when he patronises the store in which she clerks) would be ashamed if she were aware of their kinship. The struggle that results when the Admiral, one of Joe's smuggling colleagues, announces his plan to wed her has overtones of a fight to maintain the sexual integrity of the family. (pp. 25, 27)

As Browning approached the peak of his career, the sexual undercurrents of his films became less and less covert. While Freaks affords the most explicit expression of the fears that haunt the background of all his pictures, Dracula borders upon the surreal as an evocation of repressed sexual horror….

[The] nocturnal blood lust equates to necrophilic passion and the demon appears as a pestilent incubus, preying at night upon sleeping female innocence and turning his victims, through the touch of his fangs, into willing slaves. Dracula was originally billed as "The strangest love story of all."

Though updated from Bram Stoker's novel, the Browning version of Dracula retains the Victorian formality of the original source in the relationships among the normal characters. In this atmosphere the seething, unstoppable evil personified by the Count is a materialisation of Victorian morality's greatest dread. (pp. 33, 35)

Sexual frustration is the very essence of Freaks. The central event—the marriage of Hans, the dwarf, to Cleopatra, the statuesque trapeze artiste—is a collision of absolute sexual opposites—the attempted consummation of an impossible union…. Cleopatra is seductive, mature, cunning and self-assured in contrast to Hans who looks like a baby and is uncertain of her response to his guilelessly open admiration. In viewing them we are struck primarily by the gross incongruity of the pair, but our reaction to the scene is a product of the two mutually exclusive points of view that are comprised in it. For Hans, a chance at the big lady is a wild goal beyond reach or reason, representing the fulfilment of his most extravagant fantasies. The smug trapeze performer contemptuously regards the midget as an opportunity to enjoy the kind of cruel sexual jest upon which she thrives.

It is here that Browning justifies the disruption of an individual's sexual equanimity as a cause for retaliation. Cleopatra's decision to wed the dwarf for his wealth and then dispose of him is not, in itself, a significant advance in villainy. In the context of the film, her most heinous crime is committed when she teases Hans by provocatively dropping her cape to the floor and then gleefully kneels to allow her victim to replace it upon her shoulders. The decision to commit a murder is merely the natural development of her eagerness to taunt and sexually belittle the dwarf. This kind of exploitation appears more obscene by far than the fairly clean act of homicide. (pp. 35-6)

Contrast the insecurity of the normal-sized leads with the unruffled attitudes of the Freaks. They have accepted their limitations and adapted to them. Even the individuals with radical amputations (which, as elsewhere in Browning, carry strong connotations of castration) have adjusted marvellously to their physical constraints, using arms as legs and mouths as hands. Beyond this, many of the freaks represent reconciliations of prevalent sexual apprehensions. Beside the "half-man, half-woman" there is the comically complaisant attitude toward a kind of miscegenation in the birth of a child to the "human skeleton" and the bearded fat lady. (pp. 36-7)

In the Browning canon Freaks is almost allegorical in that it singles out individuals about whose guilt there can be no doubt. Justice is perfectly served because retribution is meted out only for the absolute crime of "attempted murder," but the sentence is such that it appropriately covers the crime of sexual humiliation. Usually, however, there is situational confusion in assigning guilt in Browning's stories. This generates a level of frustration that is directly concerned with the instinctive plane of justice the Browning films seek.

Alonzo, in The Unknown, commits what amounts to an act of self-castration. He is driven to that point by Estrellita …, who not only leads him into a position in which it is desirable to be without arms but, having brought him there, arbitrarily reverses herself after the damage is irreparable. "Estrellita," a title reads, "wishes God had taken the arms from all men." She is, accordingly, both the film's provoker and the mortal enemy of the kind of physical man Chaney represents—even though she is unaware that Alonzo is exactly the sort she most despises.

In regarding Estrellita's betrayal, it is easy to overlook the fact that Alonzo's guilt is immaterial to his yearning for her. He has murdered a man and thus created a whole new set of circumstances under which armlessness is an asset. He has two reasons, then, for blackmailing the doctor into surgically removing his upper extremities. The first is entirely of his own making while the other results from his victimisation at the hands of his maladjusted female ideal. The implication that Alonzo's affair with Estrellita was a contributing factor in maintaining the tension between him and the circus owner further obfuscates the question of whether the major responsibility for his ultimate solution rests primarily with Alonzo or with Estrellita.

Another facet in this intricate structure of guilt arises from Alonzo's choice of Malabar as the target for retribution. Logically, Alonzo's anger should be directed toward the girl, not the strongman. But in a film in which the sexual tension is almost palpable, it does not seem unreasonable to accept the unification of Estrellita and Malabar as a medium by which the blame may be transferred, or at least redistributed. On symbolic grounds it is fitting that Alonzo should avenge his own castration by attacking a figure of exaggerated masculinity, while the "arm for an arm" punishment, as an illusion of justice, mirrors Alonzo's illusion of the strongman's guilt. In the long view, it is these ambiguous and outrageously twisted threads of guilt and justice that makes The Unknown so audacious. (pp. 41-4)

For the most part, Browning's films grip their audience by conditioning it to expect some harrowing event and then holding it at the point of anticipation. The stories are fashioned around the central character and most of our dread springs from fear for or of him. Browning punctuates these formations of psychological suspense with moments of outright shock. His set procedure for generating horror is quickly to throw the audience off balance, overwhelm it with some terrible threat and then cut away abruptly to let the viewer draw his own conclusions. The audience (which has already been put on edge by the film's intrinsic tension) is disconcerted by an unexpected change in camera angle or perspective. These alterations come as a jolt in contrast to the simple three-shot narrative style used for the rest of the film. (p. 46)

The climax of Freaks probably achieves the most sustained level of high-pitched terror of any Browning picture. The tension begins to accrue when the ubiquitous aberrations start to appear behind every door, window and wagon wheel, like a force of inevitable doom. The horror builds from there in short, staccato shocks as their macabre bodies pull themselves through the mud between flashes of lightning. Toward the end of the sequence their familiar forms are barely recognisable as they scramble in jerky, energetic movements to carve up their victims.

The technique that Browning used for constructing instants of horror in his silent films was workably carried over into the sound era. It is apparent that Browning conceived horror primarily in visual terms. The track behind the bloodsucking activities in Dracula carries only distant street or wildlife sounds and the devil dolls do their work in almost absolute silence. These two films, as well as Mark of the Vampire, rely upon a minimum of mood music. (p. 50)

Most of Browning's films stick to the format of melodrama with episodes of horror, but there are at least two in which he carefully develops suspense over an extended period of time.

Nearly one half of White Tiger is played out in the secluded cabin where Sylvia, Hawkes and Roy have cloistered themselves following a daring jewellery heist. Each feels that the others are planning a double-cross and Roy suspects Hawkes of being the man who informed on his father. Browning emphasises this mistrust by isolating the characters in separate close-ups as they survey their partners and then, after Longworth's unexpected arrival, separating them into constantly changing groups…. Several superstitious omens—a black cat, thirteen pieces of jewellery, a broken mirror—add empirically to the mounting suspense. The claustrophobic cabin contains the action in such a way that the pressure builds to an explosive point. (pp. 51, 53)

In Dracula, Browning clarifies some of the early action by means of one of his favourite devices, an animal montage in which a particularly sinister event is intercut with shots of small creatures. As each of Dracula's wives emerges from her tomb a rooting rat disappears behind a ledge or a wasp pulls itself from a tiny coffin-shaped compartment. The metaphor defines the nature of the vampire and conveys the impression of a rewakening of evil and a parasitic search for sustenance. On the other hand, the corresponding sequence in Mark of the Vampire uses the inserts to give impetus to an intricately rhythmic passage. As Bela Lugosi and the bat-girl descend the cobweb-covered staircase of the abandoned mansion, their progress is broken into a series of shots, each of which involves continuous movement of either the camera, the players or both. This creates the impression of an easy, unearthly gliding motion. By alternating these with glimpses of bats, rats and insects scurrying about, Browning provides a beat which accents the steady, deliberate progress of the horrific pair. There is no sacrifice of smoothness and the two seem to be, at once, floating and walking. The strange varieties of animals used has a bearing upon establishing the unnatural atmosphere. Spiders and rats are familiar fright symbols, but one is occasionally taken aback by the sight of an armadillo lurking about the crypt. The effect is disorientation and the viewer becomes ill-at-ease because he has entered a universe that is entirely outside his realm of natural experience. (pp. 54-5)

The religious symbolism which turns up periodically in Browning's pictures serves two antagonistic ends. When Dead Legs discovers his dead wife and her child on the pulpit of the cathedral, the solemn surroundings lend a tone of a fanatical irrevocability to his vow to "make Crane and his brat pay." The altar statue of the Virgin and child attests to the innocence of his spouse and baby. At the same time, Chaney's difficult and painful movements upon his belly at the front of the church … have the look of a savage parody of a religious supplicant whose faith has been rendered a mockery. God's justice having failed, Dead Legs is about to embark upon his own mission of righteousness.

As Singapore Joe gazes longingly at his daughter through the window of the curio shop, the display of crucifixes testifies of his love for her while paradoxically acting as a barrier between them. The Black Bird/Bishop easily deceives Fifi, Bertie, the police and the locals with his phoney mantle of religious goodness. When Paul Lavond threatens the last of the bankers with a coded note, decipherable by assembling words from the Bible, the "Good Book" suddenly carries a message of effective justice. Religion for the Browning hero is, then, an additional spring of frustration—another defaulted promise.

Browning's overall contribution to the cinema is an insulated one. Many people, to be sure, have emulated the style of Dracula and the titles of some of the Chaney films have become legendary…. Browning's work acquires its full impact only when considered cumulatively. It is only then that we begin to sense the fanaticism behind the director's pursuit of his themes of justice and frustration and his intense involvement with his monster heroes, and start to develop intuitive feelings about the ferocious vision that gave rise to the audacious Freaks and revelled in the fantasised decapitation in The Show. Each newly discovered film of this talented monomaniac strengthens our impressions of the rest of his output. Browning, then, is a perfect model of the way an auteur approach can enhance our appreciation of the work of selected movie-makers. (pp. 57-8)

Stuart Rosenthal, "Tod Browning," in The Hollywood Professionals: Tod Browning & Don Siegel, by Stuart Rosenthal and Judith M. Kass (copyright © 1975 by The Tantivy Press London, Great Britain), Tantivy, 1975, pp. 7-59.