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.

The Hollywood Production Code was once the bane of American filmmakers. Aside from the immediate annoyance of censoring controversial scenes, the Code also had the long-term effect of stifling new trends in film. Most think that the code only dealt with nudity or cursing. Its reach was much more invasive than that. Criminals could never get away with a heist, religion was never criticized, childbirth could not be depicted, and any reference to intimacy were cut out. For almost forty years, no one could even hope to adapt a classic play such Oedipus Rex in Hollywood.

How, then, did Stanley Kubrick ever manage to make a film about a middle-aged professor who only marries a woman in order to seduce her fourteen year old daughter?

Although the American release of Blowup is often seen as the final nail in the coffin of the Code, there is a respectable line of films that helped with the mortuary process: Hitchcock’s Psycho, Nichol’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and most certainly, Kubrick’s Lolita.

The novel Lolita, written by Russian emigrant Vladimir Nabokov, is often cited as one of the finest literary works of the twentieth century–despite its subject matter. This aside is important. As the American public grumbled about its immoral pretext, the novel still sold 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication.

It was this amalgamation of disgust and fascination that gave Kubrick hope that a film adaptation could succeed in America. In retrospect, Kubrick stated that if he know how much grief the Production Code would cause him, he would have given up.

The film opens as an elegantly-dressed man arrives at a mansion and sneaks in through an unlocked front door. The interior is the aftermath of a Bacchanal party. Expensive statues are draped with bawdy items. Endless bottles and crystal glasses litter the floor, clattering as the man accidentally trips over them. He calls for Clare Quilty. Someone plays a harpsichord upstairs. The man hurries upstairs and finds the disheveled master of the house.

The intruder is named Humbert. He has come to kill Quilty. Much to Humbert’s surprise, Quilty doesn’t take him seriously in the least.

He watches in astonishment as Quilty stumbles about, acting like an idiot. Humbert hands his victim his death sentence, which Quilty reads out loud in a mock western drawl. According to Humbert, Quilty is being put to death for defiling and corrupting an innocent.

Tiring of the games, Humbert shoots Quilty, who runs up the stairs and cowers behind a Gainsborough painting. Humbert unloads the pistol; bullets pierce through the painting. Quilty screams.

The narration flashes back four years and opens as Humbert Humbert arrives at a typical suburban New England home. He is seeking boarding and is, at first, unimpressed by the faux sophistication that the middle-class hostess, Charlotte Haze, tries to peddle. Her offer includes a congenital atmosphere, a garden, and her home-baked cherry pies. He’s about about to dismiss Haze when she insists that he at least sees her “flower garden.” Humbert walks out on the patio only to see Charlotte’s daughter, Lolita, sunbathing on the lawn.

He’s sold.

“What was the decisive factor?” Charlotte asks Humbert. “My garden?” Humbert pauses for a moment and replies, “I think it was your cherry pies.”

The censors weren’t known for their perceptiveness.

Humbert and Charlotte wed and it seems to be a happy marriage, provided you are as blind as Mrs. Haze. There is a good deal of humor in the exchanges between the debonair European and an aging American woman more concerned for her own romance than her daughter. There is a telling scene when Humbert, Charlotte, and Lolita are at a drive-in movie and a scary scene is playing. Both Lolita and Charlotte grab Humbert’s hands. Humbert pulls his hand away from Charlotte and places it on Lolita’s.

Circumstances eventually allow for Humbert and Lolita to take a road trip. Pressures from both within and without begin to threaten the delicate illusion that the European has built for himself. One constant, albeit unknown, threat to Humbert is the distinguished Clare Quinty–a writer “friend” of Charlotte and, perhaps, Lolita. He hounds the couple over the miles, appearing in different disguises and landing sly verbal jabs at Humbert. One night, Lolita disappears after being hospitalized with the flu. We know the culprit, but Humbert is left in the dark until two years later, when a typewritten note arrives from Lolita.

When he finds what happens, Humbert becomes intent on killing Quilty.

Much like Nabokov, Kubrick faced the difficult challenge of getting people to see past a morally impious plot and to realize a story that is both tragic and comedic in its overall effect. The characters of Humbert and Lolita are played more innocently and manipulatively than one would think. The moral line becomes more of a haze.

Is Lolita smut? No. Is it a morality tale? In a manner of speaking, yes. It doesn’t attempt to stand aside and ignorantly preach. Its morality is in forcing the viewer to identify with an individual one would dismiss out of hand as a monster, only to then lead both the character and the reader by hand to an unavoidable truth. Who took this girl’s innocence? Humbert would like to think it was Quilty. However, with the conclusion of the story, we now know what the look was in Humbert’s eyes when he stared at an incoherent, sniveling Quilty: recognition.

It’s said that you don’t understand war until you see the eyes of the children whose lives have been ruined by it. Director René Clément takes this further by creating a film from the perspective of two such children during the Nazi assault of Paris in 1940.

Paulette is fleeing Paris with her parents when a dive bomber attacks their refugee line. In the havoc, Paulette’s puppy escapes from her arms. Paulette runs after it while her parents scream and chase her. They manage to push Paulette to the ground just before a plane flies low and riddles their bodies with bullets. The girl looks up and stares into the twisted, pained face of her dead mother. The puppy convulses in her arms, having been crushed in the commotion. After a few moments, it’s dead too.

She’s alone, now.

Paulette wanders off the line of Parisians with her puppy in her arms and eventually comes to a farmstead where she meets a slightly older boy named Michel. He’s fascinated by this immaculately dressed child from the city and brings her home to his family. Even though they struggle to feed themselves, they eventually relent and take on another addition to the family.

A sibling bond develops between Paulette and Michel. He becomes her protector and, in a way, her enabler. Paulette finally decides to bury her puppy in a mill next to a stream. Michel helps her. After creating a makeshift cross and praying for the animal, they take their leave. But Paulette is afraid that her dog will be lonely without friends. So the two children begin to find dead animals to add to their hidden cemetery. When there aren’t any, they kill some.

In order to improve their burial ground, Michel and Paulette begin stealing crosses from the cemetery behind the local church. After all, they’re much nicer crosses than what they had been making. Soon the cemetery is lavishly decorated with trinkets adorning the graves and improvised names scibbled on pieces of paper tacked to the crosses.

During one scene, Paulette looks up to Michel and happily tells him that they’ll continue adding members: a cat, cow, horse, tiger, and eventually, even people.

What was at first a childrens’ game begins to show its disturbing extent.

Social workers are often amazed at just how much horror children can seemingly adapt to. Forbidden Games asks the question: “What exactly do they adapt into?” Paulette loses her parents and dog; Michel loses his brother. Neither fully understands his or her loss. They can only try to put those losses into a context that they’re familiar with. The end result is a game that mimics the adult rituals that must seem so odd to them.

This game also serves to insulate both children from the reality of war. Paulette will never see her home or parents again. Michel has a brother that is dying a slow death in his bed. Yet so long as they can collect the dead for their own secret cemetery, the kids have a purpose and a distraction.

Although morbid, the story also finds its humor in mirroring the actions of the children and adults. Michel and Paulette’s game of creating more dead to bury is no less ridiculous than the war itself. If the cemetery seems gaudy and trite, what does that make of a religion whose words can only ring hollow in the face of so much senseless, wanton death?

Ultimately, the test of a truly great film is whether or not it can end on a note that is honest to its message rather than to the box office. French authorities eventually discover that Paulette is an orphan and she is handed over to be shipped away with other children. Michel rages against his parents to no avail. The little sister he had found was taken away from him. He runs back to the mill by the stream and begins destroying the cemetery. The game can no longer comfort.

Paulette sits in a train station, wide eyed and terrified, as a nun places a name card around her neck. It’s at this moment that she realizes everything that she has lost. She looks frantically into the shuffling crowd and picks out a woman who vaguely resembles her mother. The final scene is the little girl weaving through the throngs of people, screaming for her mom.

There is no happy, Hollywood ending. How can there be with war?

There’s a hint of spring in the air. This is the observation of a grizzled worker in a pub as he watches a young couple meet and agree upon a date. The weather outside is typical of Stockholm during this time of year: cold and overcast. But that eternal cycle of seasons is following its course and it begins with Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (Harriet Andersson).

The two teenagers come from poor, working class families. Monika has a large family with annoying younger siblings. Harry has a father who is rarely seen. Both share a hatred for their jobs.

When Monika suggests that they run off to travel, Harry laughs it off — initially. But as the monotony and distaste for their lives begin to worsen, the idea becomes tempting enough that the two lovers decide to make a run for it on Harry’s boat. They pass through the bleak waterways of the city and escape to the islands of the Stockholm archipelago.

Life is idyllic. Rolling clouds pass over a seemingly endless sea of shimmering water. They pass the time living simply and enjoying the freedom from their former constraints. Their love affair is as innocent as the life they escaped to.

The summer soon comes to an end. As the skies become slate grey and the sea swells and hurls against the beach, Monika discovers that she’s pregnant. Food becomes scarce. They finally decide that it’s time to return and start a life for the child.

In the scene after Monika is nearly caught stealing food from a local family, Harry holds her and tells her that they have been dreaming themselves. The question in both of their eyes is whether their bond can survive the reality that they have to wake up to.

With a harsh winter approaching, the couple must come to terms with a world that they, much like the parents that they left, cannot control. In the end, only one of them is willing to.

Summer with Monika is one of Ingmar Bergman’s earlier films. It’s a stark, contemporary portrayal of idealistic love and the challenges it faces when the pressures of life are too great for the illusion to be kept up. There are few cases of “happily ever after” in life and Bergman’s films often reflect this. The fleeting moments of bliss in a hard, demanding existence can only be sustained in memory. In one of the most powerful fade-ins in film history, Harry stares into the window of a shop with his child in his arms and for a moment relives the summer. As the memory concludes, he watches the ever-shrinking silhouette of their boat cross the sea back to Stockholm and fade into the pupil of his eye.

Bergman’s film predated the French New Wave movement and the era of free love in America by almost a decade. Its honest love scenes between two teenagers was quickly condemned by conservative moralists. In a telling example of the emotional maturity of American studios in the 1950s, Summer with Monika was licensed, cut down to a half-hour, and retitled to Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl to make it more palatable to the American public. Whatever realism and ethics the film had was removed in order to change it into an exploitive B-movie with a title that fit the ignorance of the times.

There was no judgment behind Bergman’s lens. The story illustrates the flaws and mistakes of a couple too young to know the demands of love–a theme that is as old as humanity itself, reflected in the seasons that we are born into and inevitably die from.