Themes: Treacherous Spouses, Looking For Love, Circuses & Carnivals
Main Cast: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Harry Earles, Henry Victor
Release Year: 1932
Country: US
Run Time: 66 minutes
Plot
The genesis of MGM's Freaks was a magazine piece by Ted Robbins titled Spurs. The story involved a terrible revenge enacted by a mean-spirited circus midget upon his normal-sized wife. In adapting Spurs for the screen, writers Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Wolf, and Al Boasberg retained the circus setting and the little man-big woman wedding, all the while de-vilifying the midget and transforming the woman into the true "heavy" of the piece. German "little person" Harry Earles plays Hans, who falls in love with long-legged trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova). Discovering that Hans is heir to a fortune, Cleopatra inveigles him into a marriage, all the while planning to bump off her new husband and run away with brutish strongman Hercules (Henry Victor). What she doesn't reckon with is the code of honor among circus freaks: "offend one, offend them all." What set this film apart from director Tod Browning's earlier efforts was the fact that genuine circus and carnival sideshow performers were cast as the freaks: Harry Earles and his equally diminutive sister Daisy, Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, legless Johnny Eck, armless-legless Randian (who rolls cigarettes with his teeth), androgynous Josephine-Joseph, "pinheads" Schlitzie, Elvira, Jennie Lee Snow, and so on. Upon its initial release, Freaks was greeted with such revulsion from movie-house audiences that MGM spent the next 30 years distancing themselves as far from the project as possible. For many years available only in a truncated reissue version titled Nature's Mistakes, Freaks was eventually restored to its original release print. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
If you regard audacity as a quality to be admired in filmmaking, it's hard not to be a bit in awe of Tod Browning, who with Freaks made one of the grimmest and most offensive films of its era -- and managed this feat at MGM, the most glamorous studio in Hollywood. A pre-Code tale of love, deceit, and revenge at a carnival midway, with a frank-for-its-day approach to sexual gamesmanship and violent retribution among its characters, Freaks would have raised a few eyebrows under ideal circumstances. But Browning upped the ante by casting real-life human oddities in supporting roles, most of whom would never have appeared in a major studio film otherwise. You can't say that Schlitzie the Pinhead, Randian the Living Torso, or Daisy and Violet Hilton the Siamese twins are great actors, but their flatness merely adds to the film's impact. Incapable of "acting" in the conventional sense, they are what they are, and the blunt realism of their flat onscreen affect takes this film to a place that no other film of the day would dare to go. And while Browning uses the freaks for their shock value, he also allows them to live off-stage lives that aren't played for laughs; if their final revenge is ugly, it shows them seizing power in a way that would be denied them in nearly any other dramatic context. Freaks is generally considered to be the film that killed Tod Browning's career; but what's remarkable isn't that he would make only four more films after this one, but that he was allowed to make any more films at all. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Daisy Earles - Frieda; Rose Dione - Mme. Tetrallini; Daisy Hilton - Siamese Twin; Violet Hilton - Siamese Twin; Matt McHugh - Rollo Brother; Ernie S. Adams - Sideshow Patron; Louise Beavers - Maid; Edward S. Brophy - Rollo Brother; Albert Conti - Landowner; Johnny Eck - Johnny the Half Boy; Elvira Snow - Herself; Elizabeth Green - Bird Girl; Josephine-Joseph - Him/Herself; Tom London; Martha Morris - Armless Girl; Randian - Himself; Olga Roderick - Bearded Lady; Angelo Rossitto - Angeleno; Schlitzie - Herself; Jennie Lee Snow - Herself; Michael Visaroff - Jean the Caretaker; Zip - Themselves; Frank O'Connor - Herself; Peter Robinson - Human Skeleton
Freaks (1932) is a horror film about sideshow performers, directed and produced by Tod Browning and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a cast mostly composed of actual carnival performers. The film was based on Tod Robbins' short story "Spurs". Director Browning took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow "freaks," rather than using costumes and makeup.
Browning had been a member of a traveling circus in his early years, and much of the film was drawn from his personal experiences. In the film, the physically deformed "freaks" are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the "normal" members of the circus who conspire to murder one of the performers to obtain his large inheritance.
The central story is of a self-serving trapeze artist named Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) who seduces and eventually marries a sideshowmidget, Hans (Harry Earles), after learning of his large inheritance. At their wedding reception, the other "freaks" resolve that they will accept Cleopatra in spite of her being a "normal" outsider, and hold an initiation ceremony, wherein they pass a massive goblet of wine around the table while chanting, "We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble! One of us! One of us!" The ceremony frightens the drunken Cleopatra, who accidentally reveals that she has been having an affair with Hercules (Henry Victor), the strong man; she mocks the freaks, tosses the wine in their faces and drives them away. Despite being humiliated, Hans remains with Cleopatra.
Shortly thereafter, Hans is taken ill (presumably from having too much to drink at the wedding feast, but actually from poison that Cleopatra slipped him) and Cleopatra begins slipping poison into Hans' medicine to kill him so that she can inherit his money and run away with Hercules. One of the circus performers overhears Cleopatra talking to Hercules about the murder plot, and tells the other freaks including Hans. In the film's climax, the freaks attack Cleopatra and Hercules with guns, knives, and various edged weapons, hideously mutilating them. Though Hercules is never seen again, the original ending of the film had the freaks castrating him - the audience sees him later singing in falsetto. The film concludes with a revelation of Cleopatra's fate: her tongue cut out, one eye gouged and legs hacked off, she has been reduced to performing in a sideshow as the squawking "human chicken".
Spliced throughout the main narrative are a variety of "slice of life" segments detailing the lives of the sideshow performers.
The bearded woman, who loves the human skeleton, gives birth to their daughter.
Violet, a conjoined twin whose sister Daisy is married to one of the circus clowns, herself becomes engaged to the owner of the circus. (Once, Daisy appears to react with romantic arousal when Violet is kissed by her suitor, implying that each sister can experience the other's physical sensations.)
The Human Torso, played by Prince Randian, in the middle of a conversation, takes his own cigarette and lights it, using only his tongue. (In the original scene, he also rolls the cigarette, but the sequence does not appear in any commercial release.)
Production
MGM had purchased the rights to Robbins' short story Spurs in the 1920s at Browning's urging. In June 1932, MGM production supervisor Irving Thalberg offered Browning the opportunity to direct Arsène Lupin with John Barrymore. Browning declined, preferring to develop Freaks, a project he had started as early as 1927. Screenwriters Willis Goldbeck and Elliott Clawson were assigned to the project at Browning's request. Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Woolf, Al Boasberg and an uncredited Charles MacArthur would also contribute to the script. The script was shaped over five months. Little of the original story was retained beyond the marriage between midget and an averagely sized person and the wedding feast. Myrna Loy was initially slated to star as Cleopatra, with Jean Harlow as Venus. Ultimately Thalberg decided not to cast any major stars in the picture.
Freaks began filming in October 1931 and was completed in December. Following disastrous test screenings in January 1932 (one woman threatened to sue MGM, claiming the film had caused her to suffer a miscarriage), the studio cut the picture down from its original 90 minute running time to just over an hour. Much of the sequence of the freaks attacking Cleopatra as she lay under a tree was removed, as well as a gruesome sequence showing Hercules being castrated, a number of comedy sequences, and most of the film's original epilogue. A new prologue featuring a carnival barker was added, as was the new epilogue featuring the reconciliation of the tiny lovers. This shortened version - now only 64 minutes long - had its premiere at the Fox Criterion in Los Angeles on February 10, 1932.[1]
Reaction
Reaction to the film was so intense that the studio was forced to cut it from a length of approximately ninety minutes to just over an hour.[2] Today, the parts that were removed from it are considered lost. Browning, famed at the time for his collaborations with Lon Chaney and for directing Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) had trouble finding work afterward, and this in effect brought his career to an early close. Because its deformed cast was shocking to moviegoers of the time, the film was banned in the United Kingdom for 30 years. Beginning in the early 1960s, Freaks was rediscovered as a counterculturecult film; throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the film was regularly shown at midnight movie screenings at several movie theaters in the United States.[3] In 1994, Freaks was selected for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It was ranked 15th on Bravo TV's list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments.
Owing to its cult status in the late-20th century, Freaks has been referenced explicitly in popular culture expressions from 1970s onward, from songs by other self-proclaimed "freaks", such as the Ramones ("Pinhead" "Gabba, gabba, we accept you, one of us."), David Bowie ("Diamond Dogs"), and Devo ("Jocko Homo"), to "cult" comic strips like Zippy the Pinhead (a reference to the aforementioned microcephalic), and episodes of many TV series. The chant of "One of us!" is commonly used as a reference to the film.
^ Skal, David J.; Elias Savada (September/October 1995). "Offend One And You Offend Them All: The Making of Tod Browning's Freaks". Filmfax: pp. 42–9, 78–9.
