FREAKS

The official DVD for Freaks that I watched tonight (© Tod Browning/MGM)

On 18 May 2020, I finally viewed on DVD one of the most controversial movies in the entire history of the cinema – Freaks. Directed by Tod Browning and filmed in glorious b/w, it was released by MGM in 1932.

Freaks tells the story of a travelling sideshow circus in the States that specializes in exhibiting what is crudely referred to in the movie's title – i.e. extreme human anomalies, or, to use the insensitive vernacular of that bygone age, freaks. The plot is relatively slight. A normal and very beautiful but wickedly scheming female trapeze artist named Cleopatra and her equally malevolent secret boyfriend Hercules, the sideshow circus's strongman, both of whom openly despise and mock the sideshow's 'freaks', discover that one of the midgets, Hans, has recently come into a fortune. So they use his hopeless infatuation for her to their advantage, Cleo seducing him into marrying her, after which she cold-bloodedly sets out to poison him to death in order (with Hercules) to inherit all of his money. However, Hans's friends, all of whom are 'freaks' too, discover her evil plans and not only thwart them but also exact a terrible yet fitting revenge upon her (Hercules doesn't wholly escape justice either, you'll be pleased to learn!).

However, it is not the storyline that has attracted so much attention to this movie ever since its release. Were it to be filmed today, all of the human anomalies would no doubt be created either via a mixture of traditional special effects and skilful costuming or, more probably, entirely via CGI technology. In Browning's extraordinary production, however, no such techniques were used. Instead, the man with only half a body who moves around using his arms and hands instead of legs is real, the man with no limbs at all, only a head and torso, is real, the bearded lady, the skeleton man, the midgets, the so-called 'pinheads', the Siamese twins – they are all real.

Despite having read quite extensively on the subject of what, to quote the title of one such book, are Very Special People, as someone raised upon special effects, animation, and latterly CGI the stark realization of reality, not cinematographic trickery, acting out before my eyes was startling to say the least, shocking even, its mere 60 minutes of running time having a much more profound impact upon me than many ostensibly contentious movies twice or three times that long that I've seen in the past.

Having said that, it should be noted that this hour-long version is not the original version, which was 90 minutes long. However, when test-screened it was deemed too horrific, too grotesque, for audiences to be subjected to, so Browning had to edit it quite substantially in order for it to be accepted for general release (and even the resulting shorter version, the one that I watched tonight, has a 15 rating, and was banned outright in the UK until the 1960s). Tragically, the original version is now lost, with no-one absolutely sure what was contained in the excised footage, also lost, only the 60-minute edited version still surviving.

However, this is in itself more than sufficient to constitute a truly unique movie, one that could never be made today in the way that it was back in 1932. Nevertheless, the ultimate twist in this extraordinary film is that its characters are portrayed in such an illusive manner that one's eventual perception of who are its real 'monsters' (to quote another epithet used in the movie) is not at all what might be initially expected. As for ongoing arguments about whether it was exploitative or compassionate towards its subjects, my personal feeling is that it utilized the former approach in order to depict the latter. 88 years have passed since it was first released, yet Freaks unquestionably remains a momentous, multi-faceted cinematic experience.

Offering a taster of what to expect, here is a comprehensive trailer presently viewable on YouTube.

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