Review of Freaks

They were known as “God’s mistakes.” They were an embarrassment to their families and hidden away. The only job they could have is one where people could gawk and laugh at them. They were “Freaks.”

It’s rare to find a movie that becomes more offensive and controversial over the years. Tod Browning’s Freaks shocked audiences across the globe in its honest depiction of the deformed. The United Kingdom even went so far as to ban the film for thirty years.

The ongoing question seventy years later is whether Freaks intended to exploit circus performers or enlighten viewers of their humanity. Regardless, it’s an experiment in filmmaking that no production company would touch with a ten foot pole today.

The film opens with a barker drawing a crowd towards a pen to see the monstrosity that is Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova). The contents of the pen are hidden from the camera. But she wasn’t always this way, the barker continues. Cleo was once one of the most beautiful women in the business. She was known as the peacock of the air.

A woman screams. The film fades to the past where Cleo is seen swinging through the air on her trapeze.

A dwarf named Hans (Harry Earles) stares at her through an opening in the curtain. He’s about three feet tall and has child-like features. Hans’s fiancé, Frieda (Daisy Earles, Harry’s sister), catches him peeping at Cleo and accuses him of wanting Cleo more than her. He denies it, but as we soon see, Frieda is a perceptive woman.

Cleo, knowing full well that Hans is infatuated with her, plays him like a violin. She has Hans buy her expensive fineries from Berlin while she sleeps with the carnival’s strongman, Hercules (Henry Victor). When Cleo and Hercules find out that Hans can afford all these gifts because he has inherited a large sum of money, Cleo plots to marry the dwarf and poison him.

Frieda pleads with Hans to break off his new engagement not out of jealousy, but knowing fully well that Cleo is simply using him. Hans brushes her off and goes through with the wedding. In a famous scene, Cleo and Hans sit at the head of a large table surrounded by the sideshow performers: “pinheads,” the man without legs, the “living torso,” and others. Cleo forces more and more alcohol on Hans. When he isn’t looking, she slips poison into a wine bottle. In the final ceremony, the performers pass around a giant goblet, each one drinking from it and chanting “We accept her – one of us – gooble, gobble – we accept her – one of us…”

Cleo, drunk and disgusted that the performers would call her, one of the most beautiful women in the circus, one of their own, berates them and calls them “dirty, slimy freaks” and chases them out.

When Hans’s friends find out that Cleo and Hercules are poisoning him, it is the final straw for them. As the barker in the beginning said: “Their code is a law unto themselves. Offend one, and you offend them all.”

The scenes that follow are still unsettling to this day. In lost footage, we find out that Hercules performs in a new circus, now only able to sing soprano after the loss of some essential equipment. As for Cleo, well…

Freaks is perhaps one of the earliest films to cast deformed, non-actors in lead rolls. On one hand, the quality of the dialog clearly suffered; but there was no way these individuals could be mimicked. The physical handicaps that they lived through ended up also making them irreplaceable to MGM.

Also, being pre-Code, the film made little effort to be subtle. In one scene, Cleo invites Hercules into her wagon and offers to cook him some eggs. She turns around and asks him, “How do you like them?” while jutting her breasts out. “Not bad,” Hercules responds.

The moral of the story is fairly blunt: the “freaks” showed humanity and kindness while the beautiful, “normal” performers were rotten to the core. There was a balance with the characters of Venus (Leila Hyams) and Phroso (Wallace Ford), two decent folk looking for love. Ford and Hyams, both attractive and talented actors, were no doubt included to draw average moviegoers in with familiar faces.

There were quite a few subplots involving performers other than Hans and Frieda. Most of them were included for their shock or humor value. There is the living torso (Prince Randian): a man without arms or legs that could move on his by sliding on his belly. In the movie, he makes a remarkable performance of rolling his own cigarette, striking a match, and lighting it with only his mouth. There are the Siamese Twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton): one was married to a stuttering man who can’t stand his sister-in-law. In a surprising scene, we see him kissing his wife only for us to see her sister receiving sexual gratification from it. A half-woman/half-man (Josephine Joseph) walks past a pair of men. The male half glares at one of the men. After a few steps, the female half turns around seductively and gives him a come-hither look. The other performer looks at his coworker and comments, “I think she likes you, but he don’t.”

Despite being the film’s main draw, the circus performers were certainly not treated fairly. Many of the other actors in the studio were uncomfortable with eating with the them, so the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer, removed the performers to another part of the studio to eat. Perhaps to make a point, one of the scriptwriters under MGM, a little-known writer by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald, opted to dine with the deformed rather than Hollywood’s elite.

A good deal of the controversy surrounding Freaks lies in how it was treated after it was withdrawn from theaters due to protests. Hoping to recoup production costs, MGM sold redistribution rights to Dwain Esper, an “entrepreneur” that specialized in exploitation shows. He renamed the film with suggestive titles such as Forbidden Love and Nature’s Mistakes. He added nudist camp footage after the film to increase viewership. Olga Roderick, the bearded lady, later publicly denounced the film and her involvement of it due to this.

A somewhat ironic state of affairs: when being distributed, a number of states banned the film. To this day, no one has bothered to repeal the law. It is still technically illegal to view Freaks in some American states.

Hopefully, that doesn’t stop anyone.