Editing Tod Browning (section)

=== ''Where East Is East'' (1929) ===
[[File:Where East is East (1929 film). M-G-M studios. Publicity still. L to R, Henry Sharp (standing), Tod Browning (center), Actors Lon Chaney and Lupe Velez.jpg|thumb|Where East is East (1929). L to R, [[Henry Sharp (cinematographer)| Henry Sharp]], Tod Browning (center), Actors Lon Chaney and Lupe Velez on couch.]]
Adapted by [[Waldemar Young]] from a story by Browning and [[Harry Sinclair Drago]], ''[[Where East Is East]]'' borrows its title from the opening and closing verses of [[Rudyard Kipling]]'s 1889 poem "[[The Ballad of East and West]]": "Oh! East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet..."<ref>Brandt, 2006 p. 129: Brandt quotes entire quatrain.</ref> Browning's appropriation of the term "Where East Is East" is both ironic and subversive with regard to his simultaneous cinematic presentation of Eurocentric cliches of the "East" (common in early 20th century advertising, literature and film), and his exposure of these memes as myths.<ref>Brandt, 2006 pp. 133–134: See Brand's section "Browning's Economy of Stereotyping"<br />Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 15: "...By situating the narrative in the borderland of Western civilization and Eastern tradition...the movie alludes to 'sexual and racial Otherness' which have been described in postcolonial theory as the pivotal features of Western colonial discourse."</ref> Film historian Stefan Brandt writes that this verse was commonly invoked by Western observers to reinforce conceptions stressing "the homogeneity and internal consistency of 'The East'" and points out that Kipling (born and raised in [[Mumbai|Bombay]], India) was "far from being one-dimensional" when his literary work "dismantles the myth of ethnic essentiality":<ref>Brandt, 2006 p. 147: See footnote #2. Brandt refers to Kipling's novel ''Kim'' (1901) as evidence for this outlook.</ref>

{{blockquote|Browning's ''Where East Is East''...playfully reenacts the symbolic dimension contained in Kipling's phrase. The expression not only emerges in the movie's title; the vision of the East that is negotiated and shown in all its absurdity here is very much akin to that associated with Kipling.<ref>Brandt, 2006 p. 147</ref>}}

Biographer Bernd Herzogenrath adds that "paradoxically, the film both essentializes the East as a universal and homogeneous entity ("Where East Is East") and deconstructs it as a Western myth consisting of nothing but colorful [male] fantasies." [brackets and parentheses in original]<ref>Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 15<br />Brandt, 2006 pp. 130, 131: "As a highly ambivalent work of art, Browning's Where East Is East is caught in a strange predicament. While replicating some dominant images of the East and thus validating the [Eurocentric] ideology connected to them, the film also seeks to subvert and destabilize the authority of these myths....''Where East Is East'' is marked by a complicated strategy of reinvention and deconstruction of ethnic stereotypes [in which] the binary logic of whiteness is symbolically suspended." Composite quote.</ref>

The last of Browning-Chaney collaborations with an "outrageous premise"<ref>Robinson, 1968 p. 125: "...Where East Is East (1929)...The premises of the films were outrageous."<br />Eaker, 2016: Where East Is East does not subscribe to any sort of orthodox realism..."<br /> Diekmann and Knörer, 2006 p. 73: "...the sadistic cruelty and bestial brutality intermingled with the orientalizing ''chinoiserie'' of Where East Is East (1929)..."</ref> and their final silent era film, ''Where East Is East'' was marketed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer "as a colonial drama in the mold of British imperialist fiction."<ref>Eaker, 2016: "Where East Is East (1929) was the last of the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney collaborations, it was the last of Browning's silent films, and it contained many themes from their previous efforts together."<br />Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 11: "...their final collaboration Where East Is East, 1929..." And p. 15 "...last co-production of Tod Browning with Lon Chaney..."<br />Brandt, 2006 p. 130</ref>

''Where East Is East'', set in the "picturesque [[French Indo-China]] of the 1920s"<ref>Brandt, 2006 pp. 129–130: Brief synopsis of film.</ref> concerns the efforts of [[Big-game hunting|big game]] trapper "Tiger" Haynes (Chaney) intervention to stop his beloved half-Chinese daughter Toyo ([[Lupe Velez]]) from marrying Bobby "white boy" Bailey, a Western suitor and son of a circus owner. He relents when Bobby rescues Toyo from an escaped tiger. The Asian seductress, Madame de Sylva ([[Estelle Taylor]]), Tiger's former wife and mother to Toyo—who abandoned her infant to be raised by Tiger—returns to lure Bobby from Toyo and ruin the couple's plans for conjugal bliss.<ref>Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 15: "...the film's dilemma is epitomized by the figure of Bobby Bailey (Floyd Hughes), the 'white boy' who finds himself torn between his fiance (accent) Toyo Haynes (Lupe Velez) and her mother Madame de Sylva (Estelle Taylor), an oriental beauty whose scheming nature threatens to tear the whole family apart."</ref><ref>Eaker, 2016: "Tiger and Bobby run into Tiger's ex-wife and Toya's mother, Mme. de Sylva (Estelle Taylor, the real-life one time wife of Jack Dempsey)."</ref> Tiger takes drastic action, unleashing a gorilla which dispatches Madame de Sylva but mortally wounds Tiger. He lives long enough witness the marriage of Toyo and Bobby.<ref>Rosenthal, 1975 p. 28: "Tiger, in Where East Is East, has his entire life tied up with his daughter, Toyo, and is very ill at ease over her proposed marriage to Bobby Bailey until Bobby demonstrates his manliness in fending off an escaped tiger." And p. 64: Rosenthal provides short synopsis.</ref><ref>Sobchack, 2006 p. 23: "...one frequent minor theme worth noting in the exotic melodramas is that of sacrifice...Tiger Haynes is mauled to death for love of his daughter in Where East Is East."</ref>

{{quote box|width=30em|bgcolor=cornsilk | fontsize=100%|salign=center | quote=At first glance, Browning's ''Where East Is East'' seems to deploy many of the well-known stereotypes concerning the Orient that were familiar from [Hollywood] productions of the 1910s and 1920s.— above all, in the notion of the East as fundamentally different and unique. At the same time the concept that 'East is East' is satirized through the staging of the Orient as an assortment of costumes and gestures. The conjunction 'where' [in the movie's title] hints at the fictional dimension that the East accrued through Hollywood films. In Browning's ironic use of Kipling's phrase, it is, above all, this constructed world of cinematic fiction that harbors the myth of the East... it is only ''there'' that 'East is East.' — Film historian Stefan Brandt in ''White Bo[d]y in Wonderland: Cultural Alterity and Sexual Desire in'' Where East Is East (2006)<ref>Brandt, 2006 p. 134: Italics for "there" in original.</ref>}}

In a key sequence in which the American Bobby Bailey ([[Lloyd Hughes (actor)|Lloyd Hughes]]), nicknamed "white boy", is briefly seduced by the Asian Madame de Sylva (mother to Bobby's fiancee Toya), Browning offers a cliche-ridden intertitle exchange that is belied by his cinematic treatment. Film historian Stefan Brandt writes: "Browning here plays with the ambiguities involved in the common misreading of Kipling's poem, encouraging his American audience to question the existing patterns of colonial discourse and come to conclusions that go beyond that mode of thinking. The romantic version of the Orient as a land of eternal mysticism is exposed here as a Eurocentric illusion that we must not fall prey to."<ref>Brandt, 2006 p. 135 and see p. 136 for on this subject.</ref>

Browning's presentation of the alluring Madame de Sylva -whose French title diverges from her Asian origins- introduces one of Browning's primary themes: ''Reality vs. Appearance''. Rosenthal notes that "physical beauty masking perversity is identical to the usual Browning premise of respectability covering corruption. This is the formula used in ''Where East Is East''. Tiger's thorny face masks a wealth of kindness, sensitively and abiding paternal love. But behind the exotic beauty of Madame de Silva lies an unctuous, sinister manner and callous spitefulness."<ref name=":2">Rosenthal, 1975 pp. 24–25</ref>

The animal imagery with which Browning invests ''Where East Is East'' informed Lon Chaney's characterization of Tiger Haynes, the name alone identifying him as both "tiger hunter and the tiger himself."<ref>Brandt, 2006 p. 139</ref> Biographer Stuart Rosenthal comments on the Browning-Chaney characterization of Tiger Haynes:

{{blockquote|Tiger's bitterness in ''Where East is East'' is the result of disgust for Madame de Silva's past and present treachery. [Tiger Haynes] is striving desperately to overcome [his] inner embarrassment and, by revenging himself, re-establish his personal feelings of sexual dominance.<ref>Rosenthal, 1975 p. 31<br />Herzogenrath, 2006 p. 15: "Where East Is East...illustrates Browning's life-long tendency to interweave images of sex and race, creating an ambivalent narrative of sensual fulfillment and frantic dissillusionment."</ref>}}

As in Browning's ''The Unknown'' (1927) in which protagonist Alonzo is trampled to death by a horse, "animals become the agents of destruction for Tiger [Haynes] in ''Where East Is East''."<ref>Rosenthal, 1975 p. 12: "Similarly, animals become the agents of destruction for Tiger in Where East Is East ..."</ref>