Tod Browning (1932)
Banned for many years in Britain, this is a horror film of a very peculiar kind. Its climax sees justice being done to the villainess of the piece by a circus troupe whose members are played by real-life dwarfs, Siamese twins and the otherwise physically deformed. We’re gradually distracted from fear and incomprehension of freaks of nature by the story of how the heartless (morally stunted) high-wire artiste Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) toys with the affections of the adoring midget ringmaster Hans (Harry Earles), marries him for his money, then tries to bump him off. We very much want Cleo, who’s abetted by her slob strongman boyfriend Hercules (Henry Victor), to get her just desserts – even though we already know from the first scene of the film, in which she’s being presented as the star attraction of a freak show, that she does. Yet when retribution comes you may find that submerged irrational feelings about the malignity of the avengers come to the surface – the freaks, once they have the upper hand, revert to the nightmare creatures that, deep down, you always suspected they were. You may feel uncomfortably on the side of Cleopatra who, although totally lacking in humanity, is more recognisably a human being than her assailants.
You’re therefore left with a guilty conscience – about your own instinctive reaction to ‘freaks’ and about the film’s sly ambivalence. In spite of a pious (and very long) written prologue on the screen, which describes inveterate human fear and rejection of the physically deformed among us and asks, with the help of syrupy music, for greater understanding of and compassion for them, Tod Browning exploits the deformed performers to generate a horror which is in the eye of the beholder. This makes Freaks sound heavier than much of it is. For light relief, there’s plenty of enjoyably bad acting and dialogue (the screenplay is by Tod Robbins). And, rather bizarrely, the supposedly physically normal cast members don’t look that normal: the freak show barker at the start explains that the now monstrous Cleopatra was ‘once a beautiful woman’ but, emoting heftily, Olga Baclanova looks and acts throughout like a man in drag. The best performance is by Daisy Earles as Frieda, the dwarf fiancée of Hans, whom he jilts in favour of Cleo: Daisy Earles gives her lines rhythm and conviction – and thereby truth to the they-have-feelings-just-like-us theme of the story (condescending though that theme is). Browning’s direction is impressive in his orchestration of Cleo and Hans’s wedding feast and shots of the freaks emerging from under circus carts. But if Freaks is a classic, it’s a classic of audience manipulation, of turning the audience against our own prejudice – then using that prejudice to turn us back to our original, indefensible feelings.
[1990s]
