‘Freaks/The Unknown/The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers’
The Criterion Collection

“Any seventh daughter of any seventh daughter can answer this question”: So reads the introductory title card for “The Mystic” (1925), a film included in “Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers,” a new two-disc set from The Criterion Collection. The scene shifts to a banner above an illustrated sign hyping the exotic Zara Josno and her extra-sensory powers. On its face are these words: “Visszajonnek-e a halottak?“

My knowledge of Hungarian being what it is, I cast my lot with Google Translate, which offered: “Do the dead come back?” This question haunts and, at one curious point, bedevils the plot of “The Mystic,” but it also serves as a precis for the career of Tod Browning (1880-1962). The director who gave us the most iconic of Dracula films — yes, the 1931 version starring Bela Lugosi — also fell from Hollywood’s good graces a year later with “Freaks” (1932), a movie whose notoriety has endured more than anyone involved with it could have predicted.

Lincoln Center feted Browning with a retrospective last spring. This season, Criterion is being selective in focus. The new Blu-ray and DVD package includes not only “The Mystic” and “Freaks,” but “The Unknown” (1927) starring Lon Chaney. The Man of a Thousand Faces was Browning’s go-to: the two worked together on 10 films, including the fabled, long lost “London After Midnight” (1927). Browning’s predilection for the scurrilous, the marginal, and the offbeat suited Chaney’s knack for the grotesque.

Browning’s world, the Criterion’s advance copy  states, “is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness.” It’s no wonder: The good director came of age by living a peripatetic life on the underbelly of society. He left home at 16, joined the circus, and worked, alternately, as a riverboat song-and-dance man, contortionist, sideshow barker, blackface comedian, and clown for Ringling Brothers Circus. His travels led him to Hollywood, initially as an actor and then as director.

Browning hit pay dirt with “The Virgin of Stamboul” (1920), a vehicle starring a largely forgotten ingénue, Priscilla Dean. Subsequent ventures with Dean resulted in Browning bumping into Chaney on the lot of Universal Studios. When the whiz-kid producer who would pair the two like-minds, Irving Thalberg, left for MGM, Browning and Chaney followed. It was under MGM’s auspices that Browning would make the films included in “Sideshow Shockers.”

The Criterion set is centered on carnies, fortune tellers, hucksters, gamblers, men who are strong, and women who have beards. Browning cast actual circus performers in “Freaks” — characters with noms de plume like The Human Skeleton, Koo Koo the Bird Girl, and The Armless Wonder — and set them within a morality tale whose upshot would’ve made the Brothers Grimm blanch. The film continues to provoke contradictory reactions. Sometimes the line between exploitation and empathy is not easily discerned.

The weakest of the three features is “The Mystic,” a precursor of “Nightmare Alley” in which a troupe of entertainers attempt to hoodwink gullible Manhattanites. After a stunning opening scene in which we descend into a Breughel-esque Hungarian village, the picture devolves into a fairly conventional gangster movie with spiritualist overtones and some not altogether sensible plot twists. 

The most distinctive aspect of the picture is the silky figure cut by Aileen Pringle, yet another silent screen starlet lost to history, who is clad in eye-popping costumes designed by art deco kitschmeister Erté. 

“The Unknown” is the best of the bunch and likely Browning’s finest picture, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy to recommend. This story of thwarted love and the extremities undergone in order to gain it back is among the cruelest of melodramas; kinky, too. Chaney plays Alonzo the Armless, a circus entertainer with a mysterious past who falls in love with Nanon (a startlingly young Joan Crawford), a woman who’s been rendered phobic, not so much of men, but of their hands. From the flimsiest of conceits a movie is made. 

The peculiar brand of masochism that was Chaney’s forte is in full evidence here, as is his physical dexterity. Couple that with Browning’s emphasis on the body as a site for both pleasure and trauma, and you have a film that is as raw as it is over the top. A saving grace is how adroitly Browning employs the camera — a surprise given that this is a director whose macabre vision is often more distinctive than his cinematic know-how. “Dracula,” for one, is a crawl; so, too, is “Freaks,” though it does pick up steam during its scarifying denouement. 

Fans of Browning will relish the special features included in “Sideshow Features” — among them, new scores for “The Mystic” and “The Unknown,” as well as a handful of documentary supplements relating to “Freaks.” For those seeking to dip their toes into this seamy, sawdust-strewn universe, the treat, so to speak, is yours.