The first film I mentioned in this colostomy bag of a column was Robert Powell's mesmerising classic "
Peeping Tom". Powell was a darling of British cinema who had the brass balls enough to piss against the wind and make something that horrified as much as it challenges. This time we cross the Atlantic for an American director who done the same 30 years earlier. The late, great Tod Browning.
Tod Browning's life story is so fucking American, yet darkly sinister, Tim Burton should make a biopic of his life and songs should be written about him by Bruce Springsteen. It's not just a rags to riches tale but it's a proper Mark Twain style tall tale. I almost don't believe it but it's so good I force myself to. He grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and ran away as a teenager to join the circus where he worked with the performing sideshow freaks during his formative years. He then got a break as a comic actor in vaudeville productions before getting a break in the newly emerging film business.
Starting off with bit parts in one-reelers he went behind the camera for stints as well as he learned the tricks of the trade and, eventually, began directing feature length films. He went on to have a great working career with the marvellous Lon Chaney. Chaney died in 1930 and, looking for a leading man for his take on Dracula, turned to the unkown Hungarian Bela Lugosi and the masterpiece that followed made them both stars.
Now he had fame and wealth as well as the critics drooling over what his next feature was to be. He was
the man in Hollywood and had free reign. So he turned to the short story "
Spurs". No doubt influenced by his time working with "freaks" and knowing there was more to them than the common view America had at the time he felt the need to have their story told while, at the same time, scare the audience like he did so well with Chaney and Legosi before. In the film Hans, a sideshow midget, gets himself a wealthy inheritance and the scheming dolly bird, Cleopatra, finds out about this. Knowing fine well a midget would bend over backwards for a go at a hot trapeze artist she figures a way to get the inheritance for herself;
Diagnosis Murder style.
Hans, blinded by love and, most likely, his erection, doesn't see the money grabbing cow that Cleopatra is but his friend and admirer Frieda, herself a midget, sees through this and tries to tell Hans. Hans wants none of it. Cleopatra, meanwhile, is seeing the strong man, Hercules, on the side. They plan to cheat poor Hans out of his money and run away together. Despite all this Hans and Cleo get married. The freaks assembled at the table at the reception (including sideshow stars as Johnny Eck and Prince Radian) decide to accept Cleopatra as one of them despite her being "normal". They chant "
Gobble, gobble, one of us, one of us. We accept her, we accept her one of us, one of us." Cleo gets a bit scared by all of this in her drunken state and shouts abuse at the assembled freaks and also manages to let slip she's been boabing the strong man. Hans looks glum.
The next day Hans is awfy ill. No-one knows if he's upset by his wife's shenanigans or if he's just hung-over. We all know, being the sneaky viewers that we are, that Cleo's been poisoning her half-size husband. But, being the sneaky midget that she is, Frieda overhears this as Cleo tells her lover her plan to kill of Hans. Frieda tells Hans and the assembled circus performers and they set upon a revenge.
The assembled freaks attack the scheming duo and we assume ol' loverboy has been ended but, alas, Cleo is not killed. Her punishment for her crimes is the mutiliated figure the freaks have forced her to become so that she is doomed to spend the rest of her days as another sideshow freak at the travelling carnival. Hans and Frieda also fall in love and have a wee kiss. Hans and Frieda were played by real life brother and sister Harry and Daisy Earles. Imagine two midget siblings kissing. Great aint it?
The version of
Freaks that you, I or anyone will see is a little over an hour long. I managed to catch it on Film4 a few years back but it's also on google video and any decent torrent site if you fancy a wee search around for it. Don't let people fool you, however, that it's a classic. It is good, perhaps a must see, but the studio sliced this up and mutiliated it like those pinheads did to that tart.
The original cut came in at 90 minutes long. The studio, in their always infinite wisdom, cut it down by a third because they feared a backlash. We'll go into the backlash it got anyway but, needless to say, if I'm writing about it here they failed. Some of the scenes that were lost were the actual attack of the freaks on Cleopatra and the epilogue of Hercules singing soprano (so we know where he was mutilated). The most important scenes that were lost, however, were the scenes showing the freaks do mundane things. Part of Johnny Eck's act, as with most freaks of the time, was to do household routines most take for granted but we could never imagine people with such extreme disabilities to do. He was not alone in this and many scenes were lost showing the different sideshow acts going about their daily business. Some remain, such as Prince Radian lighting a cigarette using just his tongue, but some are lost and the sad thing is we don't even know what acts are lost. We can guess from knowing what the different actors done in their real life shows but it still ruins the heart of the movie: that these people were humans after all.
Tod Browning grew up around these people and knew they were just that, and wanted to show us that, despite their handicaps, they had as much joy for life as anyone else but, beyond that, had a camaraderie those outside the group would never have. The scene of the bearded lady giving birth and holding her new baby is as touching as a sight like that should be despite the fact she has a beard Brian Blessed would kill for. The reconcilliation between Hans and Freida at the end is as heartwarming as any other of the time. This was Browning's gift to the people who he grew up with and it was shat on from day one.
For a start no "big star" wanted to work with the freaks. Rumours abound that it was knocked back by Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow for this reason. When shooting began Browning had to make it a closed set after the first day as crews from other films came round to laugh at the freaks. The freaks themselves had to eat outside and weren't allowed to enter the cafeteria at MGM studios incase they put other diners of their food. When he had finished this labour of love, his endoresment of the lives of these people and his attempt to show us that age-old allegory of beauty only being skin deep; all these things this film showed us that were cut incase people were freaked out. It boggles the mind.
Sadly Browning's work to help show that behind these deformities there were real people after all worked against them. MGM, cutting out almost all scenes showing the human side to the freaks instead put the emphasis on the two "normal" people who hung around with them; making them super-human for hanging out with the almost-human. The titles for the poster were sensationalism at it's worst "
Can a fully grown woman fall in love with a midget?", "
Do Siamese twins make love?" and "
What sex is the half-man/half-woman?".
So his bastardized, half aborted child of a movie was to get it's premier. At least it was out. It wasn't what Browning wanted but the message was still there at least: don't judge other people on their looks and so forth. It's an age old tale. What could go wrong?
For a start a woman had a miscarriage at an advanced screening and sued MGM saying it was the horrifying scenes in Freaks that done it. To be honest if a woman is that stupid then the miscarriage was a blessing as she should have been fucking sterilised anyway. The critics savaged it but not for it's shortcomings that were forced upon by the studio but for it's distressing content and it's use of shock tactics. Idiots all. It was banned in the UK for twenty years until it was put up for review again in 1952. When it got rejected again! It remained banned until 1962 before the British censors, in their wisdom, realised there was hee-haw wrong with it. Perhaps they were feeling guilty about the bitching and whining they did over
Peeping Tom two years earlier.
Sadly, for Browning, there was no Scorsese to come in and save the day.
Freaks never got passed around European art-house directors like
Peeping Tom did. Browning died shortly before it was finally released in the UK. Infact it took The Ramones cries of "Gabba Gabba Hey" to introduce this film to a generation of punk fans before it started gaining the cult following it has now. A few years before his death Tod Browning, from runaway circus performer to greatest director in the world and back to nothing again, had his tongue removed as part of a treatment for throat cancer. I assume they only removed what was left of it after MGM had started the job in 1932.
