• Freaks

10/20/23 (Fri)

Tod Browning’s 1932 film is usually described as a horror flick, but that doesn’t feel quite right. It deals with a deformed cast – Siamese twins, a man without a torso, another without arms or legs, pinheads, dwarfs – but they are not monsters: they are real people with normal feelings and emotions. The title is deceptive, as it’s not clear at the end just who the real freaks are.

The story is well worn: a beautiful woman in cahoots with her lover seduces an unattractive man for his money, resulting in tragedy when her true colors are revealed. In outline, that’s a similar setup to Scarlet Street and many other films. The difference here is that the woman, Cleopatra, is a beautiful trapeze artist in the Hollywood mold, while her target, Hans, is a dwarf who is engaged to another dwarf (his real-life sibling). Cleo initially toys with him for fun, enjoying the heartache that she gives to his fiancée, who is helpless in competing with the “big person”. Hans is naturally drawn to the glamorous woman, partly for his own ego, not recognizing that he is simply being laughed at.

Cleo becomes more serious when she learns that Hans stands to inherit a fortune. She conspires to marry him, all the while planning to poison him to death and run off with her lover Hercules, another performer. In a Boschian wedding celebration, the film’s most celebrated scene, a pinhead performs a Bacchanalian dance as the crowd chants to Cleo, “We accept you! You are one of us!” The inebriated Cleo reacts in shock, disgusted to be put in the same category. She lashes out and flaunts her normality, passionately kissing the “normal” Hercules and running around the room with the little Hans on her shoulders to humiliate him.

She apologizes the next day after coming to her senses and seems to have calmed the situation. However, she has aroused the crowd’s suspicions. When Hans discovers her murderous intentions, he gathers his friends, whose motto is, “If you offend one of us, you offend all of us.” They take their revenge on the couple in a truly disturbing scene where they creep and crawl through the mud toward Cleo and Hercules with vengeance in their eyes.

The disappointing ending shows Cleo, whose limbs have been hacked off, displayed at a freak show as a human duck. It is less tragic than comical, a letdown after the grotesquerie that has proceeded it. The studio reportedly chopped half an hour out of the film due to unfavorable reactions at test screenings, including graphic footage of Hercules’ castration (and a subsequent scene with him singing in a high-pitched voice) and the butchering of Cleo. That version, now lost, apparently did well in the few theaters where it was released and sounds like it would have better preserved the scalding tone of the film. I guess we’ll never know.

Even so, Browning, who himself had experience as a carnival performer, treats his cast with dignity. He’s been accused of exhibitionism, and it’s true that the entire premise of the film centers inevitably around the abnormality of its players. But that’s the reality of their lives. The movie never laughs at them; scenes like the woman eating with her feet, the bearded lady giving birth, or the limbless man lighting a cigarette with his mouth are quite matter of fact, not sensationalized. The dwarf fiancée, watching helplessly as her lover is played on by the trapeze artist, seeks love advice from another female performer in a scene that manages to be moving for its sheer normality. The film, based on a short story, was proposed in the first place by Harry Earles, the actor who played Hans, who knew the director from their previous film. Hans’ dumping of his dwarf fiancée for a normal woman sends a mixed message, but given that men are always looking to “trade up” – Hollywood is the epicenter for that – he’s in fact treated no differently from the “big people”. Similarly, the troubles of the dwarf couple are paralleled by problems among a normal male-female couple, again putting both sides on the same level. (That wasn’t true of the performers, by the way, most of whom who had to eat in a separate commissary at the studio because of complaints from other actors.)

The acting is pretty atrocious all around. The studio had originally planned to cast Myrna Loy and Jean Harlow among others but in the end decided cautiously to keep its big stars out. The “freaks” were drawn mainly from circus performers (the director insisted on using the real thing rather than prosthetics) and fell largely back into obscurity, though the entwined Hilton Sisters had their moment and the dwarf Earles siblings were munchkins in The Wizard of Oz (Harry was a Lollipop Kid). Still, we’re not there for the acting, and given that the film could never be made today in these enlightened times, it is a valuable document of its day. The direction is solid and unflashy, never flinching from its uncomfortable subject. The wedding celebration and especially the hair-raising revenge sequence couldn’t be bettered. Browning had hit the big time a year earlier with Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, but the widespread critical lashing and commercial failure of this film effectively ended his career. The film was reappraised in the early 1960s after a successful screening at the Venice Film Festival, but that was too late for the director, who died the same year. Not an easy watch, but a classic in its own category.