NFR Project: 'Freaks" (1932)

 NFR Project: ‘Freaks’

Dir: Tod Browning

Scr: Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon

Pho: Merritt B. Gerstad

Ed: Basil Wrangell

Premiere: February 12, 1932

64 min.

This is not a film you should watch at night, or alone.

It’s at once a compassionate and a horrifying film. It ruined its creator’s career. It became a myth slowly, over decades of being classed as exploitation cinema. Finally, it is being seen as the unique, disturbing classic that Tod Browning was meant to make.

Director Tod Browning started off his career with 13 years of work in the circus and in sideshows. He was intimately familiar with this kind of life, and it gave him a special insight into and respect for the rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can “low-class” entertainers.

Browning’s work as a film director led to many team-ups onscreen during the silent era with “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” actor Lon Chaney. Together they explored the macabre underside of life, indulging in spectacular scenarios of revenge and degradation. Browning was tapped to direct Dracula in 1931, which became a big success and the real launch point of Universal horror franchises. Then came Freaks.

Freaks deals with carnival freaks; or, as we might say today, people with disabilities. Browning combed the sideshows of the land for performers for the film. Siamese twins, the bearded lady, the skeleton man, the half-man half-woman, a man with no legs, a man with no arms OR legs, and a smattering of pinheads and dwarves are the central characters of the story. They perform their disabilities, essentially, for the gratification of a rubbernecking public. Exploitation is the fate they are consigned to by society. They are strongly clannish. One of the characters states, “To offend one is to offend all.”

It is off-putting to see these figures plainly, in the light of day, and not pity them or sentimentalize them. Browning is absolutely unflinching in his commitment to film these people and make them appear much like “normal” people, to see them as three-dimensional characters with lives and souls, not simply as “freaks.” This subversive message, which goes against all societal conceptions of normalcy, comes through loud and clear.

The movie is set in a traveling circus. A young dwarf, Hans, is enamored of a “normal” trapeze artist, the cynical and manipulative yet beautiful Cleopatra. When she learns that Hans has money, she schemes with the brutal and contemptuous Strong Man, who she is sleeping with, to marry Hans and then poison him.

The two are married. At the lavish banquet afterward, everyone shares a loving cup. “Gooble-gobble, gooble, gobble, we accept her, one of us!” they chant. They try to make Cleopatra drink, too, but she throws the liquor in their faces and cries out, “You dirty, slimy FREAKS! FREAKS! FREAKS! FREAKS!”

The freaks, now watchful and alert, discover the conspiracy and tell Hans. He confronts Cleopatra, who escapes when the caravan overturns in a driving rainstorm at night. All of the freaks band together and attack. The Strong Man is castrated (this is cut out of the final print) and Cleopatra is mutilated, turned into a terrifying "chicken woman’' – one eye gouged out, legless, squawking like an insane thing.

The message is clear. The “freaks” are the sympathetic humans; it’s the beautiful and strong who are the real, oppressive freaks. This defiant assertion, combined with the sheer difficulty of watching these performers on screen, doomed the film. Its original 90-minute cut sent people scurrying out of the theater in previews. The studio took it and, cutting out everything objectionable, pared it down to an hour.

After massive protests, from critics and the general public, the film was pulled from distribution. The studio licensed it to exploitation-film magnate Dwain Esper (he of Sex Maniac and Marihuana: the Devil’s Weedl). It was only in the 1960s that the film was rediscovered by mainstream audiences and treated as a cult film.

Looking at it 90 years after its creation, it’s easy to see that it is a well-made film, despite its horrifying content. Browning moves the camera more than he has previously, and we weave in and out of the circus wagons and tents as the story unfolds. The final sequence, the freaks’ attack in the rainstorm, is as powerful and frightening as anything in film. As they crawl through the mud after the villains, their eyes glisten in the wet darkness, their knives flash in the lightning’s blast.

The violent reaction to the film meant that Browning was washed up. After making another handful of inferior films, he retired. He died in 1962, before the film that ruined him was given another chance by the viewing public.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Grand Hotel.