Tod Browning's FREAKS!

FILM (part 1)                   FILM (part 2) 

 Watch These two parts on Thursday, February 24.

Freaks, Tod Browning's peek behind the curtains of a circus sideshow, was greeted with disgust and outrage on its initial release due to its unflinching portrayal of disability, as well as its gruesome ending, (and was not helped by the lurid title and marketing campaign – "Can a full grown woman truly love a MIDGET?"). Freaks is a 1932 American Pre-Code horror film about sideshow performers, with a cast mostly composed of actual carnival (funfair) performers. The film was based on Tod Robbins' 1923 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 forgoes elaborate make-up and special effects, and instead draws on his own background working in circuses to cast real life sideshow performers with a wide variety of physical conditions.

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.MGM quickly disowned the film, letting it sink into semi-mythical obscurity, but the last 40 years or so have seen a massive upswing in both the popularity and reputation of Freaks. If you can look past its notoriety, it paints a largely compassionate picture of the title characters, and has an amazing and inflammatory message of the downtrodden and mocked violently getting one up over the beautiful people, a group of people banding together against a society that only wants to deride and reject them.

The first half of the film is taken up with scenes of the characters and their day to day life; we see them eating, drinking, doing the washing, showing off their new born children, and in an amazing scene with the armless and legless "Human Slug" Prince Randian, lighting and smoking a cigarette. All rather normal, and not always totally scintillating to watch, but it does make the point that "they" are deep down no different from "us". However, other themes and events in the film show that the Freaks definitely do at least think of themselves as being different and isolated from the rest of the world and its morality.

In the film's climax, the freaks attack Cleopatra and Hercules with guns, knives, and various sharp-edged weapons, hideously mutilating them during a bad storm. 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; she has become a grotesque, squawking "human duck". The flesh of her hands has been melted and deformed to look like duck feet and her lower half has been permanently tarred and feathered.

In an ending MGM threw in later for a "happier ending", Hans is living a millionaire's life in a huge house. Venus and her clown boyfriend Phroso (Wallace Ford) come with Frieda to visit, and Frieda comforts Hans when he begins to cry.

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 20, 1932.

Journeyman screenwriter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was nursing a hangover in the studio commissary and looked up from his meal to behold the Siamese twin sisters walking in to order lunch. "What shall we have today?" one asked the other. Fitzgerald ran to the bathroom and vomited.

Despite the extensive cuts, the film was still negatively received by audiences, and remained an object of extreme controversy. Today, the parts that were removed 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 effectually 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 counterculture cult film, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the film was regularly shown at midnight movie screenings at several movie theaters in the United States. In 1994, Freaks was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It was ranked 15th on Bravo TV's list of the 100 Scariest Movie Moments.

Both the "normal" people and the Freaks themselves constantly reinforce this separateness. Animal references abound in the script, sometimes as insults (at various points Hans is called a bug, an ape, and a polliwog), or as one of the performers many creature related monikers (Bird Women, Turtle Girl). This all serves to emphasize the idea that, in society's view, whatever the Freaks are, they are not human. The Freaks' language at the wedding party, with their chant of "We accept you, one of us" also underlines the way they see themselves as a distinct and separate group of people. An interesting footnote to this are the real life tales of the cast getting sucked into the Hollywood dream, thinking they would be rubbing shoulders with the stars, only to find themselves barred from the main studio canteen. Instead, they were made to eat on picnic tables far away from the rest of the MGM workforce, in a direct mirror of the isolation suffered by the characters they were playing in the film.

This sense of difference is also apparent in some of the sexual behavior in the film, which, while never explicit, hints at things that certainly breach the Hays Code, the censorship guidelines of the day. For a start, the dwarf Hans is lusting after a "normal" woman like Cleopatra. Although he wants to do the "decent" thing and marry her, he will presumably want to consummate the wedding at some point. At the wedding party, he is publicly humiliated, and symbolically castrated by his new wife kissing her lover Hercules right in front of him and the other guests. It is also worth noting that in the original script, instead of being murdered, Hercules was castrated, a much more appropriate punishment, given his cuckolding of Hans.

There is also the clown, Roscoe, who is married to one of the Siamese Twins, and is presumably sharing his marital bed with his sister-in-law. There is a further kinky twist to this with the suggestion (without any scientific basis) that physical sensations felt by one twin can also be felt by the other, with the obvious implications this has for the bedroom. The real point to all of this, beyond titillating the audience, is the fact that none of the performers think anything strange of any of this, which seems to emphasize their complete rejection of "normal" society as it was then, along with its rules and ethics.

The climax of the film is audacious, thought provoking and chilling, as, after all the effort expended to get us to think of the Freaks as being human and sympathetic, they are now portrayed as utterly inhuman. You can see this both in their appearance, silently slithering through the mud and rain, illuminated mostly by flashes of lightning, and in the horrifying violence they inflict on Cleopatra. We don't actually see the attack, only the end result, with their victim left covered in feathers, her hands mutilated so that they resemble chicken feet, and her vocal chords wrecked so she can only squawk like a bird. The message from the Freaks is that if she sees "us" as animals, then making her "one of us" will be the ultimate revenge.

How far are we prepared to take that sympathy? Do we think they are in any way justified in their behavior? Can we identify with their thoughts of murderous revenge? There are no scenes of anybody being brought to justice or paying any kind of price for the act of violence, so with the director refusing to make any moral judgments, we have to provide the answers ourselves.

Freaks was a critical and box office disaster for MGM, and they couldn't wait to get rid of it, selling the rights to exploitation producer Dwain Esper (of Maniac and Reefer Madness fame), who took it round his roadshows under various titles such as Nature's Mistakes and Forbidden Love. It soon sank into obscurity until the sixties, when college campuses and art house cinemas began to revive it, and this may have some connection to the fact that, by then, the word Freak had acquired new connotations for a generation feeling alienated from mainstream society.

ALTERNATE ENDING VIDEO http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ5ZxlqOou8