Freaks ***** (1932, Wallace Ford, Olga Baclanova, Leila Hyams, Roscoe Ates, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Henry Victor) – Classic Movie Review 2462

‘Gooba-gobble, gooba-gobble. We accept her. One of us, one of us.’ MGM production supervisor Irving Thalberg, a man of discernment who produced immaculately tasteful films like Romeo and Juliet, ordered something that ‘out-horrors Frankenstein’. And director Tod Browning’s 1932 movie is what he got – a unique film that his studio disowned and the British censor banned for over 30 years, held to be overly exploitative.

It was rejected for UK cinema showing in 1932 and again in 1952 but was finally passed for cinema with an uncut X rating in May 1963, one of the longest bans in UK film history.

The original 90-minute version was considered too shocking to be released, and no longer exists. All we have left is this 64-minute fragment, including a new start and ending. After decades of revulsion, in the changed climate of the 1960s Freaks was rediscovered as a counter-culture cult movie. It stars Wallace Ford, Olga Baclanova, Leila Hyams, Roscoe Ates, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles and Henry Victor.

Olga Baclanova plays a circus trapeze artist called Cleopatra, who takes a supposedly romantic interest in the trusting Hans (Harry Earles), a midget who works in the circus sideshow, though she is having an affair with another circus performer, Hercules (Henry Victor). Hans’s fiancée Frieda (Daisy Earles) is devastated and tries to convince him that he is being used. She is right.

[Spoiler alert] Cleopatra marries Hans for his upcoming inheritance and then poisons him to get it. But she makes the mistake of getting drunk and insulting him and his friends at the wedding banquet, telling the sideshow freaks just what she thinks of them. The freaks decide to take revenge and make her a freak too.

Browning directs with great passion, conviction and verve, especially in the climactic revenge of the ‘freaks’, the other circus performers, played, hauntingly but arguably perhaps exploitatively, by real-life maimed and deformed people who worked as carnival sideshow performers.

Some scenes are awkwardly melodramatic and the film sometimes feels uncomfortably like watching a road accident, with the audience leering at the disadvantaged. And, if there are artistic concerns, technically there are difficulties, too, for as this is an early sound film, there are problems with the sound recording and dialogue, which are sometimes hard to hear.

But it’s an eerie, important cult movie that retains its power to thrill, excite and bring admiration, as well as offend and upset the sensitive and squeamish. It certainly looks stylish, in Merrit B Gerstad’s cinematography and Cedric Gibbons’s production designs.

After disastrous test screenings in January 1932, MGM hacked the film to an hour, and filmed a new prologue featuring a carnival barker and epilogue featuring the reconciliation of the midgets. These are the weakest features of the film as we now have it. Out went most of the sequence of the freaks attacking Cleopatra, as she lays under a tree, a gruesome sequence showing Hercules being castrated, some comedy sequences, and most of the original epilogue. These are now lost.

The uncut version of Freaks played for one time only at the world premiere on January 28, 1932 at the 3,000-seat Fox Theatre in San Diego. It was a major box-office success. The rehashed film flopped, with a $164,000 loss, about half its cost.

MGM bought the rights to Tod Robbins’s source short story, Spurs, in the 1920s at Browning’s urging. The screenplay is written by Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Woolf and Al Boasberg.

Also in the cast are Rose Dione, Edward Brophy, Matt McHugh, Albert Conti, Michael Visaroff and Ernie Adams.

The ‘freaks’ include Peter Robinson (The Human Skeleton); Olga Roderick (The Bearded Lady); Frances O’Connor and Martha Morris (Armless Wonders); and the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Among the microcephalics who appear  (referred to as pinheads) are Zip and Pip (Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow) and Schlitzie, a male named Simon Metz who wore a dress mainly due to incontinence.

Also featured are the intersex Josephine Joseph, with her left-right divided gender; Johnny Eck, the legless man; the completely limbless Prince Randian (The Human Torso), Elizabeth Green the Stork Woman; and Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, who had Virchow-Seckel syndrome or bird-headed dwarfism, remembered for the wedding scene where she dances on the table.

The well-off Browning drew on his personal experiences of join a travelling circus at the age of 16. After his hit with Dracula, MGM gave him much artistic freedom for their first horror film, and he took advantage of this as well as the freedoms of  working in Pre-Code Hollywood. His career was permanently damaged by the debacle of it.

Freaks is to receive a big screen re-release in the UK, with the film set to open in cinemas in June 2015.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2462

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