Freaks
(1932)
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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 |
Radio Times
Still banned in some countries, and suppressed in others for decades, this unique classic from Tod Browning, director of the original Dracula, remains one of the most nightmarish yet compassionate horror movies ever made. Browning cleverly draws the viewer into an enclosed carnival society (featuring real circus anatomical oddities essentially playing themselves) with its attendant bonds, codes and rituals, and then chillingly shows what happens when a “normal” human — conniving trapeze artist Olga Baclanova — breaks them with a swindling scam. A deserved cult masterpiece, this tale of the macabre, with its blood-freezing shock ending, is incredible, disturbing and, once seen, never forgotten.