Otto Penzler ranks, analyzes, & celebrates the 106 greatest crime films of all-time. Catch up on the series and find new installments daily here.
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Freaks (1932)
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TYPE OF FILM: Noir
STUDIO: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
PRODUCER (uncredited): Irving Thalberg and Harry Sharrock
DIRECTOR: Tod Browning
SCREENWRITERS: Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon; additional dialogue by Edgar Allan Woolf and Al Boasberg
SOURCE: “Spurs,” a short story by Tod Robbins
RUNNING TIME: 64 minutes
PRINCIPAL PLAYERS:
Wallace Ford … Phroso
Leila Hyams … Venus
Olga Baclanova … Cleopatra
Roscoe Ates … Roscoe
Henry Victor … Hercules
Harry Earles … Hans
Daisy Earles … Frieda
Rose Dione … Madame Tetrallini
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DID YOU KNOW?
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M-G-M challenged Tod Browning, the director of the highly successful Dracula with Bela Lugosi, to come up with a film that would be even more terrifying—that would be the greatest horror movie of all time. Drawing on his own experiences as a runaway to a circus when he was eighteen years old, Browning produced Freaks, which was a box office flop in the United States and wasn’t even released in the United Kingdom for thirty years.
A written prologue (attributed to Irving Thalberg and Dwain Esper, who acquired distribution rights) was reportedly added when the title was changed to Nature’s Mistakes, but the early print screened from M-G-M’s library has the prologue titled Freaks.
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THE STORY
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The happy engagement of Hans and Frieda, two of the carnival’s dwarves, is broken up when Cleopatra, the beautiful but wicked aerialist, flirts successfully with the wealthy Hans. Laughing at Hans behind his back, Cleopatra is having an affair with the equally hard-hearted strongman, Hercules, who has thrown over the sweet Venus. Knowing that Hans has a fortune, Cleopatra weds him, then cruelly tells him that their marriage is nothing more than a joke. Later, one of the other dwarves overhears Cleopatra and Hercules plotting to kill Hans by poisoning him. Hans recovers from the poisoning, but the trapeze star plans to do it again—until the freaks plot their own revenge on her and Hercules. They attack Hercules with knives and kill him, and put the curse of the freaks on Cleopatra, who is mysteriously transformed into a “duck woman” and is now the most horrific of all the freaks in the carnival.
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Generally grouped with horror films, Freaks in fact has only one brief event that is beyond the rational: the transmogrification of the aerialist beauty into a half-duck, half-woman. The rest of the horror has to do with the appearance of people born with defects, such as Siamese twins, the living torso (who has no lower half of his body), the half-man, half-woman, a bearded lady, pinheads, the bird girl, the armless girl, the human skeleton, and others—and the behavior of some of the “normal” people, which is far more “freakish” than that of those with far greater reason, perhaps, to behave poorly.
The film was admired by some reviewers on release but was found overly disagreeable to others. Audiences, too, had mixed reactions, and it was reported that it was not uncommon for woman to run screaming out of the theater. Today, of course, it is regarded as one of the great cult films.
There are reports of a different ending, in which Hercules is seen performing in a music hall in a falsetto voice, suggesting that the freaks emasculated him rather than killed him, but it does not appear to have been released.
Jean Harlow, then Myrna Loy, was considered for the part of Cleopatra before it was given to Olga Baclanova.
In the prologue, the statement is made that “Never again will such a story be filmed, as modern science and teratology is rapidly eliminating such blunders of nature from the world.”
Some years after its initial release, it was distributed under the various titles Nature’s Mistakes, The Monster Show, and Forbidden Love.
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BEST LINE
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Barker at a sideshow: “But for the accident of birth, you might be even as they are.”
