The LaserDisc of Freaks has been done twice by MGM/UA Home Video. This is the "remastered" version. Picture okay, sound: near terrible, but it cannot be improved on.

If you have looked over my list of "favorite films" you may notice that it’s pretty scattered. A picture here, a picture there. Aside from Billy Wilder’s pictures, there doesn’t seem to be any genre that dominates the list. I don’t have a lot of horror and science fiction films on the list. Just because a film deals with a macabre subject doesn’t automatically mean that I am interested.

So what accounts for the interest in Freaks, Tod Browning’s notorious flop from 1932? There is something that is so "other" about this movie. I don’t care who you are, or where you are from, but looking at this film is like opening a window and getting a view on a world long ago and forgotten. As poetic in its own way as Cocteau’s Le Belle et le Bete.

It is, of course, miraculous that a film such as this got made at all. A picture about the code that exists between circus sideshow freaks was not exactly what the public was clamoring for in the depression year of 1932. But the momentum of the genre of horror/mystery films was fitfully lurching along; there was something about Grand Guignol that "showmen" smelled money in.

© 1932 by Turner Entertainment Company

And Browning was the leader of this genre. Born in Kentucky in 1882, Browning "ran away to join the circus" at the ripe old age of 16, becoming a performer by developing sideshow acts. He had been doing this for almost 15 years before being introduced to fellow Kentuckian D.W. Griffith, who gave him some parts in his films. When Griffith moved to California, Browning followed along.

As you might imagine, Browning became pragmatic regarding what people considered "entertainment." But there was something of the storyteller in Browning’s nature. In the circus, one of his more popular acts was to be "buried alive." Patrons would have a return ticket stub allowing them to see the "outcome" when he was exhumed several days later. In films, Browning drifted into directing. Before long, he was working with Lon Chaney and was producing and directing the actor in a string of films at M-G-M. Chaney was the biggest star in the genre as well as one of the biggest stars in pictures. He and Browning seemed to respect each other in such a manner that they quickly formed a "unit" at M-G-M. Ads for their collaborations said, "A Tod Browning Production" above the title.

Chaney seemed to respond to Browning’s instincts regarding story and atmosphere. Browning liked the fact that Chaney could perform with relatively little input from his director. Wind Chaney up, and off he went.

The fact that all the Chaney/Browning silents were all hits was not lost on M-G-M management, including Irving Thalberg. There was a problem, however. Louis B. Mayer didn’t care for Browning, or the kinds of films he was making, preferring instead to make "wholesome" films with "uplift." When Lon Chaney died of throat cancer in 1930, Browning lost his parking pass at M-G-M. He had to learn the delicacies of sound film production over the hill in the Valley at Universal.

Browning got the assignment from Uncle Carl to direct Dracula (1930), which became a mega-hit, and this was what brought him back to M-G-M and Freaks.

It is said that the midget actor Harry Earles (who plays Hans in Freaks) introduced Browning to a story called Spurs, written by Tod Robbins, which had been serialized in magazines. Earles knew Browning from having played a crook disguised as a baby in the silent version of Chaney’s The Unholy Three (1925), which was also based on a Tod Robbins story.

This is how pictures come about. Somebody knows somebody who read a story that . . . Earles must have struck up a good working relationship with Browning. Browning didn’t get to direct Chaney and Earles in the sound remake of The Unholy Three (1930), but the director who did, Jack Conway, was to provide key support at a crucial moment during the filming of Freaks.

The film was put on the schedule and they were filming virtually the entire thing on the M-G-M lot in Culver City. Browning and Co. had rounded up the grouping of circus performers you see in the film. When these people wanted to eat at the studio commissary, the employees there (backed up by Louis B.) refused to serve them. Conway stepped in and negotiated a truce between the Freaks company and the commissary. The truce allowed Harry Earles, his wife Daisy (who plays Hans’ wife Frieda), and the Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet Hilton to eat in the studio commissary, but the others had to eat their lunches on the soundstage.

So the atmosphere surrounding the shooting of the picture had a rather cloistered effect on the unit, and this has something to do with the atmosphere of the film as a whole. Films from the early sound period share a certain awkwardness that stems from the colliding aesthetics of the silent film technique with the still developing process of the sound film. The desire to show and the need to tell is constantly tugging Freaks in two different directions.

The visual is where Freaks is strong. The visual interest of observing some of the more seriously deformed characters is something that Browning goes with. The character of "The Human Torso" of Randion is not given a great deal of screen time, but the fascination of watching footage of him light a cigarette is something that Browning takes full advantage of.

At the beginning of the film, there is a sideshow Barker whose speech is punctuated by cuts and shifts of camera (occasioned by editorial cuts made in his opening speech). He wanders over to a pen where we "see" the most horrible freak of them all (or rather, the crowd on screen does). Here is the dichotomy between film styles right away. The Barker tells us what we are about to experience, while in fact, Freaks is at its best when it is working in visual terms. Much of the picture is structured just like a silent film.

© 1932 by Turner Entertainment Company

The freakish characters are all introduced in as "normal" and off-handed manner as possible. The heroine, Venus (Lelia Hyams) is standing next to a stair leading up to her wagon. Johnny the Half Boy (the incredible Johnny Eck), who is missing everything from the bottom of his ribcage on down and walks on his hands, clambers up to the top step to be at Venus’ eye level. Venus says, "Hi, Johnny." This goes a long way to allow us a way to accept these characters and to look at them as something more than circus performers. We never see them perform. All the action takes place away from the midway.

When we are introduced to the "normal" characters, it is the strongman Hercules (Henry Victor), who is watching his lover, Venus, move out. His reaction is strictly crummy early sound film stuff, "Aww, gowone, beat it!"

As Venus crosses the soundstage (oh, the circus yard, sorry) with her things, she pauses to yell at Phroso the clown (Wallace Ford), who just stands there soaking it all in. She wants to know what Phroso is looking at. Phroso is not a freak, but he is sympathetic to them, so it is not surprising that as Venus moves away from the evil represented by Hercules, she stops to ask Phroso what he’s looking at. In the rest of the film, as the plot against Hans unfolds, the freaks are looking out for one another, constantly looking in on at what is happening to one of their members.

The midget Hans has developed an obsession with full-sized Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), which throws his fiancée Frieda (Daisy Earles) into confusion. Baclanova is simply the most repulsive person in this universe. She is beautiful, yes (Baclanova had been making films in her native Russia since before the revolution there), but she is an awful person none the less. When Frieda comes to Cleopatra’s room to ask her to stop leading Hans on, she is the perfect personification of the Euro-bitch.

Her performance is just on this side of awful, however. Same with Henry Victor’s Hercules. But they are professional actors who had been in pictures for some time. The acting performances are at the same level among the circus performers too. The Siamese Twins Daisy and Violet are charming indeed, but there are times when you have to admire their agreeing to be in the film, given the limited acting skills they possess.

I chalk all of this up to Browning. He had the vision to make the picture, but didn’t have the chops to make a clean break with silent technique and to give the actors what they needed to give stellar performances. I have read that Browning wanted to have Jean Harlow play the part of Venus originally, with Victor McLaglen for Hercules. Can you imagine? The picture works better with the unknowns. As it is, all the characters have an equal claim on your attention. This is important, considering that Johnny Eck could "walk away" with any scene.

So the picture previewed horribly, it was cut by a third, a happy ending between Hans and Frieda was shot and stuck on, and it still backfired. All the circus people went back to whatever fate had in store for them, and the rest of the cast went on to curiously maudlin careers in pictures (I was totally surprised to find that the last picture that Wallace Ford made in 1966, was A Patch of Blue, another of my favorites; he played the drunken old man "Old Pa").

Freaks was going to be thrown into the proverbial M-G-M salt mine when the theatrical rights were leased by Dwain Esper in the late 1930s. The burlesque houses needed exploitation films, and after Esper inserted some footage of human oddities from other sources to bring the running time back up to 75 minutes, he rented it out under the title Nature’s Mistakes.

Somehow, just slightly after the death of Tod Browning in 1962, some bright person at the Venice Film Festival decided to run the original 64 minute version of Freaks during the festival. It was a sensation. It played all throughout Europe, finally landing in the United States by the mid-60s where the counter-culture was in tune with its message. "Oh wow. I get it. See, the normal people are the freaks, man." And hippies liked being called freaks.

And so the film has finally found an audience. It is a curious experience to view this film and to watch the performances of these human beings who knew that they were being put in a picture to be looked at and puzzled over. Many times, at the conclusion of this film, one enters into conversations regarding the confinement of people such as these in this day and age. Did the deformed people of days gone by have more freedom and independence and dignity by working in the circus sideshow?

We never see the on screen freaks being subjected to any of this. But it is implicit in the act of watching this film. This is what these people did to make a living. To make appearances and to have people stare at them. Of course, they were segregated. Cleopatra’s refusal to become "One of us" mirrors the way many felt and still feel about anyone with too severe a physical deformity. By segregating people who have these conditions, the public at large never gets a chance to see and get to know any of these people. And this is perhaps the truest tragedy. Watching Freaks may be as close as some people will ever get.

4.26.01