Sideshow shocker… The Show (1927), Tod Browning

 

"… one of the most bizarre productions to emerge from silent cinema."

Alfred Eaker, Tod Browning Retrospective (2016)

The recent release of Criterion’s Tod Browning's Sideshow Shockers set spurred me into finally catching up with this feature which reunites the winning team from The Big Parade, Renée Adorée and John Gilbert. The Show is not on the set and was released just before The Unknown (1927) which is featured in the restored version, along with The Mystic (1925) and Freaks (1932), arguably his most famous film after Dracula (1931).

 

All three are delicious treats on their own but The Show could easily have been the fourth film on the set, meeting, as it does, some of the key criteria for classic Browning films. It’s set in a circus, has a set of unusual characters and performers and an evil bad man who will stop at no extreme to a) win the girl and b) eliminate the opposition in as contrived a way as possible. On top of this there is the usual exotica and elements of the uncanny which may or may not be true.

 

Why was Browning so obsessed with these outsider tales? Well, he did run away to join the circus leaving his comfortable middle-class family before completing high school aged just 16 in 1896. Wikipedia has Browning’s birth year as 1889 but it was 1880 according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, not to mention Wiki’s own maths which has him working 13 years in the circus as a roustabout, a sideshow "spieler", clown and a live burial act which he was billed as "The Living Hypnotic Corpse" before moving to films aged 29 in 1909.

Renée Adorée and John Gilbert

So many early filmmakers represented the American, and British, theatrical tradition but here was a man steeped in Carny Culture and whom was used to the milling crowds and on-site appeals for attention of the “barker”, the finest salesman at the greatest show on earth which as he worked through the 1910s was undoubtedly film. He made a number of gritty films with Lon Chaney and Priscilla Dean as the twenties progressed and then, with Chaney otherwise engaged with Eleanor Boardman and Billy Haines in Tell it to the Marines (1927), he made The Show with the ultimate leading man, John Gilbert with Adorée on board for the heavy dramatic lifting and Lionel Barrymore for the pure spite and evil. It’s a very odd film that does indeed anticipate the subsequent Browning/Cheney classic, The Unknown and so, consider this an aperitif if you are in any doubt about purchasing the box set!

 

Our story begins in exotic Budapest, at The Palace of Illusions carnival run by a ruthless man known as The Greek (Lionel Barrymore) who has a side line in murder and extortion. He’s not the only one as handsome Cock Robin (Gilbert) is busy trying to romance Lena (Gertrude Short) the daughter of Driskai, a wealthy sheep merchant, in order to erm, fleece her. Robin is indeed the cock of the walk and is friendly with many of the women in the circus and in the general location.

 

You’re hired as freaks… not vampires!

 

He has an emotional connection to Salome (Renée Adorée) but she is involved with The Greek and therefore out of bounds. This doesn’t stop her shoeing off female interest in Robin and, as above, inadvertently foreshadowing two of Tod Browning’s best known future successes in the process, although the vampires in question are of the Theda Bara kind and not Bela Lugosi. Salome doesn’t like Robin’s womanising but she can’t do much about it: these circus folk are edgy and he's a cad.

Madame Web: Edna Tichenor unblinking.

But they're also darned strange as we meet some Browning surrealist sideshow treats including The Living Hand of Cleopatra!, ZELA the half lady! - "Believe me, boys... there's no cold feet here to bother you!" - and NEPTUNA, the Queen of the Mermaids!. Then there's ARACHNIDA! The Human Spider played by the striking Edna Tichenor (who also featured in Browning's lost classic, London After Midnight (1927)) who "...eats flies on week days... and butterflies on Sundays!" What influence the director had on popular culture you can only guess but these ideas, drawn from the carnival tradition would fuel horror and fantasy media for decades to come: film, pulp fiction and, of course, comic books.

They do, however, put on a heck of a show, the highlight of which is a re-enactment of the biblical story of Salome, complete with the dance of the seven veils (clearly not performed by Renée Adorée, the dancer having her back to camera?) with Robin playing John the Baptist and some complex trickery involved to give the impression of his head being sliced off by sword and then handed on a plate to Salome. I don’t know about you, but this looks dangerous to me… but that’s the circus and not even the audience are safe after a man is bitten by a poisonous lizard.

 

You little fool! He’s only after your money, get out of here!

 

Renée Adorée, the silent era's Olivia Coleman?

That’s not the evening’s only death though as Driskai gets murdered leaving Robin’s little deception becomes crueller than he ever intended, culminating in Salome disabusing his young target of his sincerity. She runs off sobbing in great distress leaving him with her money… making him look potentially guilty, is there anything that can make him realise the error of his ways? But finding a conscience is the least of his worries as The Greek decides it’s time to stop Cock Robin stealing Salome and devises a cunning plan that could see him losing his head… 

 

Barrymore is evil and Gilbert convincingly laddish but it’s Adorée who takes the plaudits for her emotional warmth and eyes forever on the brink of welling over. She’s like a silent Olivia Coleman and who knows what she could have gone on to achieve in the talkies had she not died at just 35 in 1933 after contracting tuberculosis a few years earlier. She came from circus stock herself and performed as an acrobat, dancer and bareback rider throughout Europe before her big break into acting.

Based on Charles Tenney Jackson's novel The Day of Souls (1910), The Show is every bit as offbeat as The Unknown. It has plenty of Browning weirdness including a lizard supposedly more poisonous than a snake and which kills one of the customers. Such things happen at the circus and there’ll be worse to come for visitors to Tod’s Extraordinary World of Adventures!

 

Jack the lad...

There’s a new Blu-ray due out from Redwood Creek – a 4k transfer from a 16mm copy - and also a nice crisp Warner Archives DVD which you can still pick up from eBay. Essential items for your Tod shelf alongside that new Criterion set!

Sideshow Note: One notable sidenote in a life full of them was Browning crashing his car into a train whilst inebriated in 1915. He suffered serious injury but another passenger, the great Elmer Booth – star of Griffith’s famously close-up Musketeer of Pig Alley, was killed instantly. What Booth might have gone on to achieve we can only guess but Tod survived to film another day and who knows how this brush with mortality and the guilt he carried, impacted his creative choices going forward. His films always look at the more uncomfortable aspects of our lives… even amongst the freakery and showmanship.