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.

NFR Project: 'Flowers and Trees' (1932)

NFR Project: ‘Flowers and Trees’

Dir: Burt Gillett

Scr: N/A

Pho: Ray Rennahan

Ed: N/A

Premiere: July 30, 1932

7:50

Walt Disney was smart. He was always looking for innovations, looking to be first. He did so with the first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, in 1928. He did so again here with the first three-strip Technicolor cartoon, Flowers and Trees.

The three-strip color system was a huge advance on the older two-strip process, which read only in the red and green range. Disney signed an exclusive deal with Technicolor to use their new process for three years. He switched Flowers and Trees from black-and-white to color, markedly increasing his budget. Fortunately, the cartoon was a commercial and critical success, earning an Oscar for Best Cartoon Short Subject.

The film is relatively simple. The trees and flowers awaken. A young male tree courts a young female tree, incurring the wrath of an old, stumpy tree. The old tree starts a fire in spite, which every creature save the old tree itself escapes. Then the boy tree and the girl tree get engaged.

Now, depending on your attitude toward life you will either find this to be either enchanting or nightmare fuel. Disney films consistently take a light, sunny tone, and this one is no exception. Charming, anthropomorphic plants and animals would become Disney’s stock in trade.

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

NFR Project: 'Tabu: A Story of the South Seas' (1931)

NFR Project: ‘Tabu’

Dir: F.W. Murnau

Scr: F.W. Murnau, Robert Flaherty

Pho: Floyd Crosby

Ed: Arthur A. Brooks

Premiere: March 18, 1931

84 min.

Tabu is one of a small number of films that have been dubbed “docufiction”. This designation represents films that incorporate documentary observation and fictional narrative. It’s a slippery slope – many feel that such dramas are fundamentally dishonest, in that they impose a preconceived narrative onto a natural situation. Such was the dispute between the creators of Tabu.

F.W. Murnau was one of the silent era’s great directors, and he wanted to make a film set in Tahiti. He knew the great documentarian Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North was a primary example of docufiction (Flaherty was criticized for staging some sequences of that movie), was familiar with the region. The two decided to collaborate.

They went to the South Pacific. Flaherty filmed the first few scenes, but then he found himself by Murnau’s arrogance and insistence on having his own way. Flaherty spent most of the shoot processing film. Meanwhile, due to Flaherty’s difficulties with his cameras, Murnau brought out the cinematographer Floyd Crosby to film the rest of the picture.

Flaherty thought Murnau’s conception of the film was short on ethnography and long on implausibility. Murnau overruled him, and Flaherty eventually sold his share of the film to Murnau.

The film is set on the island of Bora-Bora, and we are treated first to a look at the idyllic existence of its natives. We are introduced to the protagonists, the young man Matahi and the girl Rehi. This is interrupted by the arrival of the aged warrior Hitu, who decrees that Rehi is to become sacred to the gods and as such is untouchable -- tabu.

This frightens the young lovers and they escape together, looking to avoid the curse that follows upon disobeying the tabu. Matahi finds works as a pearl diver in a French colony, and the two fit in awkwardly to the decidedly more complex and uncaring modern reality (Matahi has no sense of money, to begin with.) Onto this scene comes Hitu, who swears to kill Matahi if Rehi does not return to Bora-Bora with him.

She submits, and a distressed Matahi swims after the two of them, but the struggle is too great and he drowns. The last image is the little boat, sailing off to the horizon.

The film was shot silent, but the creation of the film soundtrack while Tabu was being made means that it was released with a musical soundtrack and select sound effects. (The film was originally made in color). It was not a box-office success. Tragically, a week before the movie opened, Murnau was killed as the result of a car wreck.

It’s a beautiful film, and it captures a culture now long vanished. It failed to make back its investment, but it did win Floyd Crosby an Oscar for his cinematography.

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