Director: Tod Browning
Writers: Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins, Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Al Boasberg, Charles MacArthur, Edgar Allan Woolf
Photography: Merritt B. Gerstad
Editor: Basil Wrangell
Cast: Harry Earles, Olga Baclanova, Daisy Earles, Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Roscoe Ates, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Johnny Eck, Rose Dione, Schlitze, Frances O'Connor, Henry Victor, Josephine Joseph, Prince Randian
There's an argument that Hollywood was not racist but helpful to African-Americans in the '30s and '40s, casting them in movies and giving them careers, even if these few lucky ones usually only played demeaning self-humiliations that reinforced racism. A similar argument might apply for the disabled and congenitally disfigured in this strange Hollywood early talkie. The parallel does not entirely bear out but the inherent self-contradictions are similar. In Freaks, the main point seems to be a rejection of stigmatized treatment, with a kind of bleeding-heart case (possibly sincere) about their deserving better than the harrowing life of sleazy traveling carnivals. The de facto case may be that "better" is scraping by instead as grotesques in the movies. In many ways we return to Freaks, which has been perennially popular in midnight-matinee types of venues, to gawk. And in many ways that's exactly what's intended. Director Tod Browning had big success the year before with Dracula, and even if IMDb classifies Freaks merely as "drama," the movie obviously trades in horror as well.
Freaks is here to gawk at and, in the Lumiere tradition looking forward to Diane Arbus, the gawking's not bad around here. The parade of nature's cruel pranks is a steady one. No more than a few minutes at a time go by before we see continuing examples of microcephaly ("pinheads"), conjoined twins ("Siamese twins"), small people ("midgets" and "dwarves"), paraplegics, and quadriplegics. Also a bearded lady, a sword swallower, a fire eater, a stutterer (because why not?), and a "half-man/half-woman" who comes across more like a woman who can't decide how to dress. It's all at least as beguiling and repulsive as a state fair sideshow. I say that as a good thing, but in some ways it's the beginning of all this movie's problems too.
Perhaps the most profound is the one Woody Allen formulated in Annie Hall as "life is divided into the horrible and the miserable." Freaks is explicitly about the horrible—the miserable being "everyone else"—and for better or worse it often works on me that way. As one of the miserable, I may never entirely lose my sense of my own self-pity. Whenever I see the brief but agonizing scene with "The Living Torso" (Prince Randian), a man with no legs or arms, lighting a cigarette by himself, I'm overcome with a sense of the futility of life. How do they even live? I feel claustrophobic just watching it, and thus prey to the stereotypes and stigma this movie is ostensibly against.
After that, the most obvious problem in Freaks is the narrative. There's a deadly wooden pro forma to the dialogue, which is not helped by the amateurish performances. Being realistic, you're never going to strike lightning twice very often with a grotesque who can perform in the movies, and I'm not sure they strike it even once here. The movie is often stagy and slow. But 1932 technology and commercial priorities have at least as much to do with that. Halliwell's says it should have been a silent picture, which is a fair point because, let's admit it, we are mainly here for the visuals, and the stilted story is really beside the point. The story feels in many ways as if it is there only to make the movie a talkie.
On the other hand, the greatest scene in this picture, where the freaks reach out to celebrate the "normal" Cleopatra at a wedding feast—a scene with strange and enduring power—is dependent as much on the audio as anything visual. "We accept you, we accept you, one of us, one of us," they chant in unison. "Gooba-gobble gooba-gobble, gooba-gobble gooba-gobble." Among other things, of course, that's the source of the Ramones' "Gabba-gabba hey." If you think about this scene too much it's ridiculous that it would all be so formal and ritualized like that. But it's a wedding, where things like that can happen, and the effect in the moment is so eerie and moving it's hard to think at all.
Otherwise the story seems to go on forever, a weak point in a movie this short but not atypical for Hollywood fare of the era. It involves a busy love mess between two small people, Hans und Frieda (Harry and Daisy Earles), and the conniving non-freak trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) who wants to kick Frieda to the curb and take Hans for everything he's worth, while carrying on with Hercules (Henry Victor), the carnival strongman. There's also a lame good-guy clown, Phroso (Wallace Ford), and his girlfriend Venus (Leila Hyams), who together are more or less the designated Marilyn figure from The Munsters. Probably they are there for us to identify with and/or as certain models of acceptable behavior. As far as I can tell they don't gawk. But frankly, and I may not be proud of it, I don't know how they don't.
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