Of course this involves a certain amount of speculation. There probably never was a "Browning cut". And nobody is saying they know exactly how Browning would have cut the film if he were doing it himself, but that's not the point. We do know how the movie was intended to be structured according to the script and the assumption is that browning was filming it as scripted. The incomplete scenes and some production stills show that Browning followed the script closely during filming, just as Melford did. But, unlike the Spanish language version, what Browning filmed was later put together with parts of scenes missing or in a different order. In the factory-like studio system of that time, most directors didn't have "final cut" on their films and Browning probably had little or no say in the final editing of the movie. There would not have been much reason for that since the fairly stage-bound movie had little in the way of tricky action scenes or other things requiring much in the way of creative decisions by the editor. He simply had to splice the scenes together in the correct order.

It seems more likely to assume that someone higher up at Universal didn't like movie as shot and got their fingers in the pie. MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE is another early '30s example of Universal tampering with a movie after filming. In that case the director was also one of the writers so it's highly unlikely he was the one who chose to arrange sequences in a different order than originally intended when he shot them. It seems perfectly legitimate to use the shooting script and the simultaneous Spanish language production as a guide to recreate the film as it was almost certainly originally intended to be at the time it was in production.

Kerry Gammill
www.monsterkid.com