Review: Tod Browning's Freaks (1932; DVD 2004)

So, MGM has finally acknowledged its deformed son and re-released Tod Browning’s macabre classic Freaks (1932) on DVD. Widely banned until its popular rediscovery during 1960s and heavily cut to appease only the harshest and most influential of the film’s many critics, the mutilated version of Freaks (the original “director’s cut,” as it were, evidentially vanished) has hobbled and waddled its way into American cinematic and cultural history. And high time, too.

Freaks is a true classic, one of those rare films that seems both ahead of its time and very much a product of it. You see, Freaks has the sort of didactic and pedantic feel as, say, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancée, the melodramatic cadences of a Susan Lucci soap opera, and pleas for the same socio-political egalitarianism sought by the American civil rights movement in the sixties. The film was also produced during the Great Depression, between two wars, in an intellectual climate teeming with Darwinian notions of natural selection and crackpot post-Freudian sexual theories, at the tail end of the traveling carnival’s heyday, just before advances in medicine made many “normalizing” operations possible, when physical aberrations often meant death, storage in special “homes,” or exploitation at the hands of the ruthless capitalists running circus sideshows. Indeed, Freaks slithers out of this mess and lets the viewer stew in the discomfort it engenders.

What makes the film all the more striking is the rather ambiguous morality its very existence suggests. Is the film merely another exploitative exhibition of physically-aberrant individuals for the financial benefit of the “normals” behind the scenes? Is Freaks a political manifesto in the guise of popular entertainment? Is the film compassionate to the freaks therein? Is the plot gratuitous? Why did the Janus-faced MGM sensationalize and publicize the visual spectacle of the film’s stars while simultaneously rebuking the social motivations driving such entertainment? And the list of questions goes on, ad infinitum.

In any case, Freaks is a remarkable film well worth watching over and over. Firstly, it must be said, the film does make for an amazing viewing experience precisely because of the assortment of deformed, misshapen people flickering across the screen. Honestly, the limbless “Living Torso” (Prince Randian), the “Half Boy” (Johnny Eck), the microcephalic “Pinheads” (Elvira Snow, Jenny Lee Snow, and Schlitze), and the chiropodic pyrotechnics of the armless girls (Martha Morris and Frances O’Connor) are so visually stunning that viewers might not notice the conjoined twins, the human skeleton, the bearded lady, the hermaphrodite, the bird people, let alone the relatively normal-looking little people in the film.

Article Author: Sobriquet

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