SLIFF 2015: Tribute to Tod Browning This Friday – THE UNKNOWN and FREAKS

“Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us.”

Cinema St. Louis presents a Tribute to Tod Browning Friday November 13th at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. The program includes a 35mm screening of Browning’s 1927 silent shocker THE UNKNOWN with live music by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra followed by a screening of Browning’s 1932 masterpiece FREAKS. The event begins at 7:30pm and will be hosted by We Are Movie Geeks own Tom Stockman. Ticket information can be found HERE

Tod Browning (1880-1962) was a pioneering director who helped establish the horror film genre. Born in Louisville Kentucky, Browning ran away to join the circus at an early age which influenced his later career in Hollywood and echoes of those years can be found in many of his films. Though best known as the director of the first sound version of DRACULA starring Bela Lugosi in 1931, Browning made his mark on cinema in the silent era with his extraordinary 10-film collaboration with actor Lon Chaney, the ‘Man of a Thousand Faces’. Despite the success of DRACULA, and the boost it gave his career, Browning’s chief interest continued to lie not in films dealing with the supernatural but in films that dealt with the grotesque and strange, earning him the reputation as “the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema”. Browning’s bizarre circus drama FREAKS (1932) was one of the biggest box-office disasters of the early thirties and his career never recovered from the loathing audiences and critics had for it. A complicated, troubled, and fiercely private man, Browning was a visionary director whose films deserve reassessment. Cinema St. Louis presents A Tribute to Tod Browning with screenings of two of his most important works, both set in the circus. THE UNKNOWN (1927) stars Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford and will be screened in 35mm with live music accompaniment by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra. This will be followed by FREAKS, now considered a cult classic. Tom Stockman of We Are Movie Geeks will introduce both movies and speak about Browning’s life and career.

THE UNKNOWN:

The ten films that director Todd Browning and actor Lon Chaney made together are among the strangest of the silent era. Their macabre 1927 collaboration THE UNKNOWN is a dark drama that spotlights Chaney’s legendary skill at playing handicapped outcasts. He stars as Alonzo the Armless, who can fire a rifle, play guitar, light cigarettes, and drink wine with his toes. He’s employed as a knife-thrower in a turn-of-the-century Spanish circus where he’s fallen in love with Nanon (a young Joan Crawford), the gypsy girl who works as his ‘target’. Nanon is repulsed by physical contact with any man, so the only one that she trusts is Alonzo, simply because he has no arms with which to touch her. It’s not a match made in heaven however as murder, madness, and several shocking twists ensue. THE UNKNOWN costars Norman Kerry as Malabar, a lovelorn strongman, and John George as Cojo, Alonzo’s sinister dwarf sidekick. It will be screened in 35mm and accompanied by The Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra. THE UNKNOWN is a precursor to Browning’s more famous FREAKS, also set in a circus, and the two movies will be shown together as a Tribute to Tod Browning.

FREAKS:

Director Tod Browning’s controversial 1932 film FREAKS is a twisted tale of betrayal and revenge. Browning had worked in a circus as a young man and FREAKS features actual sideshow professionals: a living torso, Siamese twins, a legless man, dwarves, a bearded lady, a human skeleton, and microcephalics (called “pinheads” in the film). It tells the haunting story of a midget (Harry Earles) who falls in love with a trapeze artist (Olga Baclanova) who cruelly humiliates and mocks him behind his back. The community of ‘freaks’ eventually turns on the “normal” woman and ensures that she will experience life in their midst forever FREAKS was greeted with revulsion in 1932 and was such a commercial and critical flop that it derailed Browning’s career. Just as the normal world shunned the freaks Browning knew growing up, so did his audience when he put them on-screen. Only decades later did FREAKS become recognized as a cult item and a quality film, one which can safely be said to have been far ahead of its time. FREAKS will show double feature with Browning’s silent 1927 circus-set movie THE UNKNOWN starring Lon Chaney as a Tribute to Tod Browning.

A Facebook invite for the event can be found HERE

https://www.facebook.com/events/701490399983853/