by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I did want to comment
on the strange and beautiful movie TCM showed last night, which for once I
watched “live” as it aired instead of recording it and getting to it later: Freaks, the 1932 film directed by Tod Browning (though his credit
simply reads “Tod Browning’s Production of Freaks” and the only other behind-the-camera credit goes to
writer Tod Robbins, whose story “Spurs” was the inspiration) that became a
Hollywood legend both when it was released and when it was rediscovered in the
1960’s after having been thought lost for decades. Freaks began with MGM production chief Irving Thalberg
noted the grosses on Universal’s pioneering talkie horror films Dracula and Frankenstein and told his most macabre director, Tod Browning, to
give him something “more horrible than Frankenstein.” At least that’s the version Jon Douglas Eames told
in his book The MGM Story, though
there are other sources that have Thalberg green-lighting Freaks before Frankenstein was even released. Browning drew on his background
in the circus to create a story in which carnival freaks would be the heroes
and people of normal size, gender and appearance (except for a couple of
juvenile leads) would be the bad guys. The inspiration was “Spurs,” a story by
Tod Robbins dealing with a little person, Jacques Courbe, who works in a circus
in France until he inherits a large estate. He’s smitten with bareback rider
Jeanne Marie, but she’s only interested in her riding partner, Simon Lafleur.
However, since her boyfriend has no money and Jacques does, Jeanne agrees to
marry her, thinking that he won’t live long, she’ll inherit Jacques’ fortune
and then she’ll be free to have both the money and Simon. The wedding banquet
of Jacques and Jeanne attracts the other freaks in their circus and soon
degenerates into a shambles. Jeanne forces Jacques to get on her back so she
can humiliate him by carrying him piggy-back, joking that she could take him
“from one end of France to the other.” A year later she returns to the circus,
unrecognizably disheveled and haggard, and it turns out that Jacques has put on
a pair of spurs and literally
forced Jeanne to carry him from one end of France to the other. Simon tries to
rescue her but Jacques, aided by the wolfhound he used to ride in the circus in
a parody of Jeanne’s act, kills him. Jacques boasts, “It is truly remarkable
how speedily one can ride the devil out of a woman — with spurs!” Any
misgivings Irving Thalberg may have had about green-lighting a movie with such
a weird plot were cast aside by the fact that one of MGM’s biggest silent-era
hits had been The Unholy Three,
directed by Tod Browning from a story by Tod Robbins, and that along with Lon
Chaney, Sr. the cast of The Unholy Three had included the superb little-person actor Harry Earles, who would be
perfect for the dwarf lead in Freaks
and indeed was eager to play the role. (Earles had a fairly substantial career
in the late 1920’s, repeating his Unholy Three role in Jack Conway’s sound remake — Lon Chaney,
Sr.’s only talkie — and also playing a marvelous part in an early Laurel and
Hardy short called Sailor Beware;
Earles and his vampy girlfriend pose as a mother and baby to rob the other
passengers of an ocean liner, and the film’s highlight is Earles and Stan
Laurel gambling and Earles relieving Laurel of all his money: the irony is
Earles is in baby drag but he’s acting like an adult but Laurel is a full-grown
adult with the intelligence and maturity of a child.)
As the story developed —
and though a plethora of writers were involved in Freaks, including “names” like Charles MacArthur and comedy
specialist Al Boasberg as well as Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon and Edgar Allan
Woolf (who seven years later would work on The Wizard of Oz, which employed some of the little people used in Freaks, including Harry Earles), the story and script were
clearly from Browning’s own demented imagination — Browning expanded the film
to include all sorts of freaks, from pinheads to bearded ladies to
half-men/half-women (there are enough gender-bending characters in Freaks, including one pinhead who was passed off as female
but was in fact male, though he wore a dress both on- and off-stage because he
claimed dresses were more comfortable and easier to clean, that it practically
qualifies as a Transgender movie) to “half-man” Johnny Eckstrom (who performed
as “Johnny Eck” and was essentially missing the lower half of his body) and
“human torso” Prince Randian (who lived only two years after making Freaks, though the most interesting part of his biography
is that he had been born in British Guiana, lived in Paterson, New Jersey —
also the home town of Lou Costello — and had a wife, four daughters and a son;
a director even more twisted than Browning could have got a fascinating, if
bizarre, movie out of Prince Randian’s home life and especially his sex life)
as well as conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton (who 19 years later would
star in another movie that’s more interesting than you’d think, Chained
for Life) and another little person, Angelo
Rossitto, who like Harry Earles would go on to a semi-major career in films,
including playing opposite Bela Lugosi in The Corpse Vanishes and Scared to Death and making something of a comeback in the 1970’s.
The plot of Freaks deals with the
Rollo Bros. circus — a few bits of French on the soundtrack hint that Browning
kept the French setting of Robbins’ tale but didn’t stress it — which, as Variety
noted, is just a one-ring affair but
“carries three times as many high-class freaks as the Ringling show ever trouped
in one season.” The story is a romantic intrigue in which the little-person
stars, Hans and Frieda (Harry Earles and his real-life sister Frieda), are
engaged to be married but are broken up by trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga
Baclanova). Her real love — or at least sex — interest is Hercules the strong
man (Henry Victor). Hercules is a brute who’s just been dumped by nice-girl
Venus (Leila Hyams), who’s taken up with clown Phroso (Wallace Ford, top-billed
— though, unusually for MGM, none
of the actors are credited until the end) on the rebound. Cleopatra sneaks off
to have her ashes hauled in Hercules’ wagon every chance she gets, but
encourages Hans’ attentions because he loans her money and gives her expensive
presents. Frieda pleads with Cleopatra to leave Hans alone, but in the process
she inadvertently lets slip that Hans is the heir to a fortune — something Hans
himself had been smart enough not to tell her. Cleopatra therefore hatches a
plot of her own; she’ll marry Hans, knock him off with poison, grab the money
and marry Hercules — only at the wedding banquet, one of the film’s two big
highlight scenes, the freaks toast her (using the “gabba-gabba” chant later
appropriated by the 1970’s punk band the Ramones) and declare her “one of us.”
Her revulsion gets the better of her greed and she takes the loving cup she’s
offered, spills it over the freaks, and tells them, “You’re just a bunch of
stinking freaks!” — then stalks off.
She goes on with her attempt to poison
Hans, but Angeleno (Angelo Rossitto) —who spends so much of his time peering
through windows spying on the other characters that if he were alive today he’d
probably qualify for a job with the NSA — notices what’s going on, and the
other freaks gang up and, on a dark and stormy night, gang up on Cleopatra and
Hercules and exact their terrible revenge … Freaks is framed by a sequence in which an unseen hand tears
away at the placard containing the film’s title and Browning’s and Robbins’
credits and reveals a carnival barker, promoting the freak show’s latest
attraction and saying she was once a beautiful woman; in what was obviously
supposed to be a big surprise reveal but won’t be to most modern audiences
because virtually every book on the history of horror films in the 1930’s has
reproduced the still of it, Cleopatra has been transformed into a “chicken
woman,” her head mounted on the body of an oversized chicken. (In the film as
it stands, her co-conspirator Hercules is dispatched when a tree falls on him,
but Browning had an even nastier fate in store for him; he’s heard singing in a
high voice as part of the freak show, indicating that the freaks castrated him
as part of their revenge. This isn’t medically accurate — in order for a male
to retain his high voice as a result of castration, the deed has to be done
before puberty — and in any case it was so brutal a twist, even for the
relatively liberal “pre-Code” early 1930’s, that it was cut from the film
almost immediately after release and no copies of that footage are known to
exist.) According to the commentary during last night’s TCM screening,
featuring Robert Osborne and guest programmer Gilbert Gottfried (who picked a
really eclectic list of movies, including the 1940 Of Mice and Men, the 1968 film The Swimmer — with Burt Lancaster in a satire of modern suburbia
— and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation, a tale of a private eye who’s an expert on bugging;
because of when it was released it was read as a metaphor for Watergate, but
Coppola had conceived the story years before the Watergate break-in occurred),
the “chicken” makeup had actually been created by Lon Chaney, Sr. for an
unnamed project that was abandoned after his death of throat cancer in 1930.
I
first saw Freaks as part of a
horror revival showing in San Francisco in the early 1970’s and was blown away
by it, though it’s been controversial since it was made and the debate over it
in critical circles has always been over whether Browning sincerely wanted to
show us the freaks as noble, decent people, morally superior to the movie’s
physically normal characters, or whether he was exploiting them as thoroughly
as their employers in circuses and carnivals from which he’d hired them. “Freaks is guilty of the crime it denounces,” said Surf
Theatre programmer Tom Luddy in his notes on the film, and more recent
commentators have suggested that the film comes off more exploitative than
Browning intended because many of the lines that made the freaks seem more
human were cut out of the final release. Some of the freaks who appeared in the
film later denounced it and expressed their shame at having done it, while
others were proud of it. The freaks were so disconcerting to others on the MGM
lot that — except for the Earleses and the Hiltons — they weren’t allowed in
the studio commissary and had to take their lunches during breaks on the set.
Browning originally wanted an “A”-list cast for his film, but his first choices
for the key non-freak roles — Victor McLaglen as Hercules, Jean Harlow as Venus
and Myrna Loy as Cleopatra — all turned him down because they were revolted by
the subject matter. I’ve personally blown hot and cold on this movie — when I
first saw it in 1971 I loved it, later on I decided Luddy was right and I found
it technically accomplished (it’s the only one of Browning’s talkies that’s
directed with any real verve and flair; Browning, I suspect largely because the
advent of sound coincided with the death of his greatest star and close friend
Lon Chaney, Sr., was one silent director who went downhill when talkies took
over) but exploitative; this time around I liked it all over again, noting the
bits and pieces of dialogue that attempted to humanize the freaks that survived
the extensive re-editing, and being amazed that this film even exists, as much
as it gets to be slow going sometimes when the freaks (which Browning was smart
enough not to give too much screen time to) take center stage — though there
are also sequences in which Browning and cinematographer Merritt Gerstad give
them an almost beautiful, haunting quality that probably influenced
photographer Diane Arbus, who saw this film on one of its earliest revival
screenings in 1962 and was inspired by it to take her own famous photos of
freaks.
