Tod Browning Movies

This race-themed melodrama is the first two-reeler directed by Tod Browning. Indians kill homesteader Bob West (Otto Lincoln) and capture his little daughter Ida. They sell her to a slave trader named Morgan, who uses her in place of a dead mulatto slave child and sells her to a kindly couple. When Fred Gilbert (W.E. Lawrence), the couple's nephew, visits them a dozen years later, he falls in love with Ida (Teddy Sampson) -- much to the consternation of his aunt and uncle, who believe the girl to be of mixed race. Morgan's mulatto slave Sally (Mary Alden) gives the family a letter written by Bob West shortly before his death, and a fingerprint on the document reveals that Ida is indeed West's daughter and is Caucasian. Morgan is killed by a posse and Fred and Ida marry. Note actor Otto Lincoln, who changed his name to Elmo Lincoln by the following year, when he played The Mighty Man of Valor in the Babylonian sequence of D.W. Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance; in 1918, Lincoln found fame as the screen's first Tarzan. 15/2rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

Having lost his wife and son, Dr. Farrell (Fred A. Turner) focuses all his devotion on his surviving daughter Naida (Billie West). He takes her away with him to an isolated home on the California coast, where she meets their neighbor Tom O'Day (Edward J. Peil). He falls in love with Naida and longs to marry her. The hostile Dr. Farrell attempts to remove him from the picture by deliberately misdiagnosing O'Day's skin rash from poison ivy as leprosy. The distraught O'Day heads for an island leper colony and Naida attempts to drown herself, but she is rescued by O'Day, who takes her into his boat. Dr. Farrell catches up with them, admits his misdeeds, and gives them his permission to marry. 15/2rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

Railroad worker Beppo Puccini (Charles West) seeks to please his young daughter Marie by proposing to Bianca Pastorell (Signe Auen), whom the child adores. Bianca however misunderstands and assumes Puccini is joking with her. The crushed Puccini observes his foreman, Sam Coggini (Tom Wilson), in a close conversation with Bianca, and leaps to the conclusion that he is a rival for her affection. Puccini then attempts to murder Coggini by planting a bomb outside Bianca's house. But when he discovers that Coggini is actually her brother, he ends his lethal plot and is able to win the hand of Bianca, who at last becomes a mother to little Marie. Note actress Signe Auen, who soon thereafter changed her name to Seena Owen; after a noteworthy career acting in silents, she became a successful writer for talkies, including director Edward G. Ulmer's memorable 1947 concert fest Carnegie Hall. 15/2rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

San Francisco's Chinatown is the scene for this two-reel melodrama of crime and miscegenation. The cruel saloonkeeper Pat Gallagher (Walter Long) wants to marry off his daughter Maggie (Billie West) to a gangster, but she runs away and hides in a neighborhood shop. There she is persuaded to marry its Chinese owner Hop Woo (Eugene Pallette), only to be mistreated by him. Two decades later he decides to sell their daughter Ah Woo (Signe Auen) into slavery, but she is rescued by her brother and his friend Jack Donovan (Tom Wilson) who marries Ah Woo. The despairing Maggie takes her own life, and Ah Woo and her brother go to live with Donovan on his ranch. Note actress Signe Auen, who later changed her name to Seena Owen and worked throughout the silent era, capping her career by portraying the monstrous Queen Regina in Erich von Stroheim's final (and unfinished) silent Queen Kelly. 15/2rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

This cautionary tale of drug addiction from director Tod Browning depicts the pianist Manfredi (Eugene Pallette), who performs in a Chinese café and has become addicted to opium. Manfredi swears to marry his common-law wife Zuletta (Lucille Young) after he returns from five years of study abroad. When he comes back he is still an addict, but his performances while in a drugged state are lauded as the work of a musical genius. Breaking his promise to Zuletta, he pursues a society girl who studies with him, and draws her into the spell of the poppy. Her boyfriend John Hale (Joseph Henabery) works for the Secret Service, and Zuletta, seeking revenge on Manfredi, reveals the opium den to Hale. He rescues his girlfriend from the drug dealers in a shoot-out which costs Manfredi his life. ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

This spoof of temperance melodrama is the last two-reeler directed by Tod Browning. The virtuous John (Jack Brammall) learns that he will inherit one million dollars providing that he refrains from drinking beer before he reaches the age of 21. His dastardly cousin Henry (Tully Marshall), knowing that he will receive the inheritance if John should imbibe, goes to extreme lengths to dupe John into drinking beer. When all else fails, he resorts to kidnapping him on the day of he turns 21, but John is rescued in the nick of time by the loyal Nell (Teddy Sampson). 16/2rl ~ Nicole Gagne, All Movie Guide

The late film historian William K. Everson has cited the 1916 De Wolf Hopper vehicle Sunshine Dad as one of the earliest examples of "screwball comedy." Despite a recent serious illness, Hopper was quite virile and athletic in the role of fiftyish man-about-town Alonzo Evergreen. Forced by the conditions of her father's will to marry Evergreen, the young widow Marrimore (Fay Tincher) does not appreciate her husband until he rescues her from a particularly sinister East Indian cult. The film's "maguffin" is a jewelled garter, worn throughout the picture on one of the widow's nether limbs. The climax of Sunshine Dad, in which everyone from the New York police department to the United States Marines comes to the rescue of hero and heroine, was later repeated in the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Silent superstar Douglas Fairbanks lampoons both his dashing onscreen persona and the detective mystery genre in this curious little two-reeler. Detective Coke Ennyday (Fairbanks) wears a drooping mustache, odd clothes, and starts his day with some hootch and a few hypodermics. The police call and ask him to track down a smuggler, which he does with a lot of artificial "help." He also has to save the girl, played by Bessie Love, who is trapped in a Chinese laundry, more opportunity for the wily detective to get high. The finale is a burlesque battle between Ennyday and the villain, followed by a coda showing Fairbanks telling the story to a studio scenario editor. The editor, much to Fairbanks' disgust, tells him to stick to acting. This film was directed by John Emerson and written by his wife Anita Loos (the pair were Fairbanks' frequent collaborators in the mid-'10s). It had a small cult revival in the early '70s because of its brazen displays of drug usage. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Sometime during the shooting of the landmark The Birth of a Nation, filmmaker D.W. Griffith probably wondered how he could top himself. In 1916, he showed how, with the awesome Intolerance. The film began humbly enough as a medium-budget feature entitled The Mother and the Law, wherein the lives of a poor but happily married couple are disrupted by the misguided interference of a "social reform" group. A series of unfortunate circumstances culminates in the husband's being sentenced to the gallows, a fate averted by a nick-of-time rescue engineered by his wife. In the wake of the protests attending the racist content of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith wanted to demonstrate the dangers of intolerance. The Mother and the Law filled the bill to some extent, but it just wasn't "big" enough to suit his purposes. Thus, using The Mother and the Law as merely the base of the film, Griffith added three more plotlines and expanded his cinematic thesis to epic proportions. The four separate stories of Intolerance are symbolically linked by Lillian Gish as the Woman Who Rocks the Cradle ("uniter of the here and hereafter"). The "Modern Story" is essentially The Mother and the Law; the "French Story" details the persecution of the Huguenots by Catherine de Medici (Josephine Crowell); the "Biblical Story" relates the last days of Jesus Christ (Howard Gaye); and the "Babylonian Story" concerns the defeat of King Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) by the hordes of Cyrus the Persian (George Siegmann).

Rather than being related chronologically, the four stories are told in parallel fashion, slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity. The action in the film's final two reels leaps back and forth in time between Babylon, Calvary, 15th century France, and contemporary California. Described by one historian as "the only film fugue," Intolerance baffled many filmgoers of 1916 -- and, indeed, it is still an exhausting, overwhelming experience, even for audiences accustomed to the split-second cutting and multilayered montage sequences popularized by Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Joel Schumacher, and MTV. On a pure entertainment level, the Babylonian sequences are the most effective, played out against one of the largest, most elaborate exterior sets ever built for a single film. The most memorable character in this sequence is "The Mountain Girl," played by star on the rise Constance Talmadge; when the Babylonian scenes were re-released as a separate feature in 1919, Talmadge's tragic death scene was altered to accommodate a happily-ever-after denouement. Other superb performances are delivered by Mae Marsh and Robert Harron in the Modern Story, and by Eugene Pallette and Margery Wilson in the French Story. Remarkably sophisticated in some scenes, appallingly naïve in others, Intolerance is a mixed bag dramatically, but one cannot deny that it is also a work of cinematic genius. The film did poorly upon its first release, not so much because its continuity was difficult to follow as because it preached a gospel of tolerance and pacifism to a nation preparing to enter World War I. Currently available prints of Intolerance run anywhere from 178 to 208 minutes; while it may be rough sledding at times, it remains essential viewing for any serious student of film technique. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Filmed on location at Saranac Lake and the St. Lawrence River in New York State, The Jury of Fate starred Mabel Taliaferro in the dual role of the Labordie twins, Jeanne (a girl) and Jacques (a boy). Jeanne grows up resigned to the fact that Jacques is her father's favorite child. Thus, when Jacques accidentally drowns, Jeanne cuts her hair short and assumes her brother's identity. While this rash act prevents Jeanne's father from suffering a fatal heart attack, it throws the girl's boyfriend Donald (William Sherwood) into despair; after all, if "Jacques" is still alive, then Jeanne would have to be the drowned twin. The hero and heroine are not reunited until the very end of the picture, by which time Jeanne has become the unwitting cause of the deaths of two men -- who, fortunately for the purposes of the plot, are the villains of the piece. The Jury of Fate contained many of the bizarre, surrealistic elements that would soon become de rigueur in the films of director Tod Browning. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Though he was obliged to share directorial credit with Wilfred Lucas, Tod Browning graduated to "prestige" pictures with his 1917 release Jim Bludso. The film was based on a popular ballad, written by former U.S. Secretary of State John Hay. The original ballad ended tragically, as steamboat captain Jim Bludso sacrificed his life for the sake of his passengers. In the film version, however, Bludso (played by Wilfred Lucas) not only saved his ship, but also survived to win the love of the beautiful Gabrielle (Olga Grey). The film was shot on location along the Sacramento River, a familiar movie substitute for the mighty Mississippi. According to Tod Browning's biographers David J. Skal and Elias Savada, Wilfred Lucas' "co-director" credit may have purely been a contractual matter; recently uncovered evidence indicates that Browning was the sole director. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The first film to be produced at Metro's California studios, Tod Browning's The Legion of Death was a rather muddled fictional account of a genuine "women's battalion" fighting the Hun on behalf of Kerensky and his Allied Commission. Edith Storey starred as Princess Marya, an American-educated Russian noblewoman taking a stand against the widespread dissatisfaction among the Russian troops, many of whom had fallen prey to German bribery. Organizing her battalion of women, Marya is send into the trenches by Kerensky (H. L. Swisher), where the battalion is almost wiped out by the enemy. Our heroine, however, is saved in the nick of time by the arrival of American volunteers in general and handsome Captain Rodney Willard (Philo McCullough) in particular. Interestingly, The Legion of Death was released in March of 1918, six months prior to the real-life arrival of American troops in Murmansk. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide