Sobriquet 19.3: Tod Browning's Freaks (1932)

Like most good Ramones fans, I have been known to chant “Gabba Gabba Hey” from time to time. I knew the phrase appeared in Leave Home’s “Pinhead,” and I knew that Monte Melnick, the band’s longtime roadie, used to hop around the stage while donning a grotesquely conical “pinhead” mask and polka-dotted child’s play frock as the band played the song:

What I didn’t know was that Melnick’s attire and the entire song had been inspired by Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, or that the roadie’s costume, frock and all, had been inspired by the microcephalic sideshow performers appearing in the movie.

[Now, lest the highfalutin nomenclature of medical science drives you away (ignoring for the moment the equally pretentious phrase “highfalutin nomenclature.” You see, I just couldn’t resist indulging my taste for irony. Nor, for that matter, could I resist the temptation to ruin the effect of said irony by pointing out my awareness of the gag), let me briefly explain the condition before returning to what I’m really trying to write about. Anyway, microcephaly (literally “small head”) is characterized by an abnormally small head and, as a consequence of the resulting smaller-than-average sized brain, mental retardation. Caretakers would often clothe their microcephalic wards in frocks in order to better deal with the incontinence which often accompanies the disorder.]

In any case, I wasn’t aware of the song’s origins until, I believe, I read Jim Bessman’s Ramones: An American Band. In it, and indeed in nearly every account of the group’s career, we learn that the Ramones were huge B-movie freaks. Johnny, it’s been said, would watch two movies every day during his all-too-brief retirement, for instance, and owned a library of several thousand such films (In fact, you can see three framed posters for Freaks on the wall behind Johnny during his interviews in End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones). Anyway, the band was so fond of Browning’s picture that they modified the quasi-nonsensical “gooble-gobble, we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us!” uttered by the performers during the wedding banquet scene in Freaks into the chant we all know so well.

And that, truth-be-told, is the only reason I sought out the film. I first saw it a few years ago in a dorm in Minnesota a year or so after I graduated and, like all too many things from that period, promptly forgot virtually everything. The film was re-released on DVD last year and I’ve seen it sitting on shelves in stores like Target so frequently that I decided to pick it up. Here’s my review:

Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932; DVD 2004)

So, MGM has finally acknowledged it’s 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.

Oh yeah. There’s a plot to the film, too. And not a bad one, either. Certainly a great deal of the film is devoted to (depending on your disposition) either documenting and preserving or exploiting the unique appearances and abilities of the film’s cast. I mean, seriously, watching Prince Randian open a box of matches, strike a stick, light his cigarette, and extinguish the flame while holding a conversation is not something you see all that often, and the film allows you to stare. Now whether or not the staring is a life-affirming celebration of the “ability” in “disability” is up to the individual, but you better believe Freaks delights in bringing such spectacles to the unsuspecting masses. Still, there is a story, a rather compelling, though simple, plot dealing with a love quadrangle encompassing two little people engaged to be married (Hans and Frieda, played by the real-life siblings, Harry and Daisy Earles); a tall, blonde trapeze artist named Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) who toys with Hans’s heart; and her strongman boy-toy, Hercules (Henry Victor). Basically, Cleopatra notices that Hans has eyes for her and pretends to return his affection to amuse her friends and benefit from the diminutive German’s generosity. When a concerned Frieda confronts Cleopatra, the former accidentally reveals that Hans has recently inherited a fortune and Cleopatra contrives to marry and subsequently poison Hans in order to obtain the fortune for herself (and possibly Hercules, who supports Clio’s efforts). After embarrassing Hans at their wedding ceremony and getting caught trying to poison her husband, Cleopatra finds herself at the mercy of a vengeful mob of freaks in the film’s brilliant climactic sequence. Several sub-plots interweave with the main thread, making for an all-around good movie.

Tod Browning, having earned his fame during the silent film era, never really took to the talking picture form. Partly owing to the director’s inexperience and partly due to the fact that Freaks cast a slew of people with little to no acting experience alongside several heavily-accented thespians, much of the dialogue seems stunted or forced, even for an era often criticized by modern viewers for awkward speech. Yet, the dialogue is at least consistently passable, and occasionally quite good. Still, Browning’s reluctance to abandon the visual tactics he perfected during the silent film era during awkward forays into talking pictures yielded some truly beautiful visual sequences. For instance, as film historian and Browning biographer David J. Skal observes during his commentary on Freaks, the wedding banquet scene is so expertly choreographed that the removal of sound from the film would not prevent the viewer from understanding what occurs or from feeling the range of emotions the director strives to elicit. (The scene was, in fact, largely filmed without sound, with the soundtrack added during production).

Which brings me to the DVD bonus features. Unless I missed an Easter Egg or something, I watched the alternate endings (which were, for the most part, truncated versions of the film’s conclusion), the documentary “Freaks: Sideshow Cinema,” the Prologue tacked onto the film for its revival in the sixties, and listened to the commentary track in its entirety and I can’t say that I was elated.

First of all, the Prologue is merely a preachy curio with marginal historical significance. The alternate endings, even with Skal’s commentary, are not terribly interesting since the film’s real “deleted scenes” were so deleted that they no longer exist in any form. The hour-long documentary, however, has its merits. Despite its occasionally fluffy content, the program does seek to answer many of the questions viewers of the film have. In addition to the decent case made for the film’s significance as a cultural and historical artifact and the occasionally interesting information about the predictably varied public reception of the film, Sideshow Cinema unearths the biographies of many of the cast members before, during, and after the filming of Freaks. Additionally, the documentary reveals the ways in which the film was marketed, recounts the script’s genesis, and gives a good introduction to Hollywood’s milieu in the time preceding the implementation of the censorious Production Code.

Likewise, Skal’s commentary provides a wealth of interesting information about the cast of the film and highlights some of Browning’s best directorial decisions. You know, standard fare for DVD commentary. The commentary track’s greatest virtue, however, is Skal’s occasional explication of some of the more baffling parts of Freaks. Since nearly one-third of the film was lopped off Freaks in order to appease nervous studio executives, several key scenes contain peculiar, unexplained dialogue or footage. Skal does his best to fill in the blanks, which is a considerable task given the fact that so much of the film was swept off of the cutting room floor and into cinematic oblivion. That said, the commentary is difficult to listen to at times. Whereas the best DVD commentaries tend to be the extemporaneous musings and anecdotal remembrances of cast and crew members, Skal’s commentary was clearly written on paper and read aloud. On several occasions, Skal misreads or awkwardly emphasizes his speech. In other words, the pitfalls of high school oratory abound in Skal’s commentary. What irks me most is how forced and unnatural the commentary sounds as a result. Rather than resemble a conversation or a good lecture, Skal’s commentary reminds me of the sort of person who reads aloud from a tourist guidebook when his or her companions are trying to look at something and resent the distraction. Still, the information is often quite helpful in building a better appreciation of the film. It would just work better as liner notes. After all, if you can’t read your own words to make them sound natural, you should stick to good-old black-and-white print. That way, at least, you won’t ruin anything for anyone. To Skal’s credit, though, he does mention the Ramones, whose “Pinhead” brought the film to my attention in the first place.

All-in-all, Freaks is an excellent, thought-provoking film well worth owning. Given the quality of the digital transfer, the MGM DVD is worth picking up for the fifteen dollars or so I’ve seen it selling for. As long as you view the special features as a bonus and not a big reason for picking up the film on DVD instead of VHS, you shouldn’t be disappointed.