Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

After the studio compromises of the previous year's Dracula, Tod Browning went full Tod Browning and then some for 1932's Freaks, returning to his favorite subject, the backstage lives of damaged people on the lower rungs of show business (carnivals, circuses, magic shows, off-off-off-Broadway theater, etc.). Browning, who worked in both vaudeville and the circus for years before making films, has a real affinity and empathy for performers and the backstage life, but he's equally clear-eyed about the darkness, cruelty, and inhumanity that's also a big part of the business and some of the people who work in it.

Freaks is a film that could only have existed in the pre-Code early 1930s in its specific mixture of sincerity, exploitation, shock, empathy, and prejudice, but it had to wait a while for an audience. It's a film that is very much a product of its time as well as a giant boot to the face of the Hollywood status quo. Any attempt to make something like it now would be too self-aware, simultaneously watered-down and deliberately tasteless in ways this film could never be, in the case of the former, and only occurring by accident or convention, in the case of the latter. Browning walks a strange tightrope in Freaks, presenting his cast as complicated human beings with inner lives while also benefiting from the same gawking sensationalism that is the circus freak show. Browning's film is both sophisticated and naive and a film experience unlike any other. No wonder people in 1932 didn't know what the hell to make of it.

Freaks was a critical and commercial failure upon initial release (except in a handful of cities, especially San Diego, where there were lines around the block for weeks and where it broke box office records; the other cities that loved it were Cincinnati, Cleveland, Boston, Houston, and Omaha), suffering condemnation from both prudish, moral majority types and prejudiced people disgusted by the physical disabilities of most of the cast members. Many cities and states banned the film, and it was also banned in the UK and Australia. Myrna Loy turned down the role of Olga, horrified by the script, and Victor McLaglen and Jean Harlow also turned down offered roles. Many cast members weren't allowed to eat in the studio cafeteria. MGM head Louis B. Mayer tried to shut the film down shortly after production, but production chief Irving Thalberg talked him down. Thalberg was one of the film's only champions during production, but he expected a big hit after Dracula did so well, and he'd promised Browning creative freedom on Freaks.

After the first few weeks of release, a handful of scenes were cut, shortening the movie from 90 minutes to the 64 minutes that survive today. A few scenes were trimmed for their disturbing or violent content, but several scenes that humanized the "freaks" and criticized their exploitation by circus owners were also removed. The box office didn't improve with the new cut, and the criticism only increased, so MGM withdrew Freaks from circulation and sold the distribution rights to Dwain Esper, infamous for his traveling roadshows of lurid film reels, including nudist camp footage. Esper traveled the country with the film for years, retitling it Forbidden Love and Nature's Mistakes to drum up new business.

Freaks finally started finding an appreciative cult audience in the '60s, as the film found a home at drive-ins and grindhouse theaters and on late-night TV. The counterculture was growing, and misfits all over the world discovered Freaks. Its cult popularity only increased with the rise of the midnight movie in the '70s (El Topo, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Eraserhead, and revivals of Reefer Madness and Freaks becoming belated midnight hits) and home video in the '80s. The movie resonated with horror fans, punk rockers, metalheads, underground comic book lovers, college film societies, RE/Search and Feral House and Church of the Sub-Genius types, and many other pockets of subculture weirdness. Some of this interest was sensational, of course, but a lot of it was sincere appreciation for Browning's filmmaking and his depiction of societal outcasts forming their own tightly knit community, which resonated with misfit kids everywhere. I'm not sure what today's youth would make of it, as online culture fragments into tiny subdivisions and everyone becomes a lonely community of one trapped in their own personal algorithm.

So, anyway, do I even need to give a little synopsis? You've probably seen Freaks if you're reading this, but if you haven't, SEE IT! It's Browning's sound-film masterpiece (his best silent films are also mind-blowing). It's life-affirming, funny, creepy, and sad. It will make you feel many conflicting things. It will disturb you. It's exciting, it's short, it's weird, it's visceral, it's both loosely plotted and tightly constructed, it's full of powerful images, it's not like other movies. See it and become one of us! One of us! We accept you, one of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble!

Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

Kathryn Bigelow hasn't lost a step in terms of filmmaking technique, visual style, and visceral intensity in her more recent political-historical films (though I am ambivalent at best about white people telling black people's stories in Detroit and I can't decide whether Zero Dark Thirty is an admittedly exciting and skillful piece of jingoistic CIA propaganda or a complex critique of American foreign policy or some unsettling mixture of the two), but I miss the weirder, wilder genre filmmaking of her pre-Hurt Locker career despite my continued admiration of her talent.

Aside from the soggy The Weight of Water, her mostly disastrous attempt at a self-conscious art film, Bigelow made a string of good to great films in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s that shared with Walter Hill an ability to take the American action movie and make it personal, strange, and beautiful without sacrificing any of the excitement and fun. After the cult success of her debut, rockabilly biker movie The Loveless (co-directed and co-written with film school buddy Monty Montgomery, who later became a producer and starred as the creepy cowboy in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive), Bigelow knocked it out of the park with Near Dark, a horror/western/road movie about a traveling group of vampires, and Point Break, a one-of-a-kind blend of crime thriller/action/police procedural/Zen surfer-dude movie and kept the momentum with the slightly lesser but still pretty damn good dystopic sci-fi epic Strange Days and Das Boot-esque wartime submarine movie K-19: The Widowmaker.

In between Near Dark and Point Break, Bigelow made one of her most neglected films, Blue Steel. A highly stylized blend of cop thriller and horror, Blue Steel under-performed at the box office and hasn't received as much recognition as most of her other work, but it's pretty damn interesting and sadly has a lot of contemporary political resonance.
Jamie Lee Curtis stars as Megan Turner, a policewoman in New York City who has just graduated from the academy. Her first day on the job, she shoots and kills an erratic and disturbed man robbing a grocery store after he points his gun at her (the robber is played by Tom Sizemore in an early role), but his gun is never found and Megan is demoted to an office job for using excessive force. The reason no one found the gun is because a man shopping in the store at the time of the attempted robbery, Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), steals it and sneaks out amidst the confusion. Eugene is a gold futures trader on the New York Stock Exchange by day and a crazed serial killer by night. He immediately falls in love with Megan and scratches her name on the bullets he uses, which gets Megan's colleagues all kinds of suspicious. Eugene then ingratiates himself into Megan's life and causes all kinds of trouble for everyone.

Blue Steel almost works as a horror movie and almost works as a cop movie, but there's something a little discombobulating about its rhythms and structure and interactions between characters. Something is a little off. This uneasy tone could be a weakness in a straightforward genre film, but Blue Steel is going for something different. Bigelow has made a film about how the default setting in our society is a disbelief and mistrust of women. Megan is not believed when she says the robber had a gun, and she is not believed when she says Eugene is a dangerous man who is responsible for the killings. Eugene is believed when he lies and manipulates the truth and gaslights Megan in front of her fellow cops. Megan is not believed until the only man who believes her, a detective named Nick Mann (Clancy Brown), finally has enough evidence to make Eugene a suspect and brings this evidence to other men.

Bigelow does something quietly radical stylistically to express this anger and frustration, which causes an uneasy tension in the viewer that could be misread as tonal confusion on the part of the filmmaker. Bigelow creates a central character who is subtle, believable, and real and surrounds her with exaggerated types. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Megan with a relaxed, lived-in, naturalness (this role is further proof that Curtis is an underrated and excellent actor) while her world is populated with the deranged psycho killer (Silver giving it the balls-to-the-wall treatment), the tough, jaded New Yawk detective (Clancy Brown), the beleagured, exasperated police chief (Kevin Dunn), the high-powered asshole lawyer (Richard Jenkins), the abusive, angry father and mousy, intimidated mother (Philip Bosco and Louise Fletcher), and the supportive, matchmaking, and kindhearted best friend (Elizabeth Pena).

These are all reliable movie types we've seen before, and the talented actors give them their stylized best, but Curtis's Megan is someone we don't usually see in the movies, a unique individual with her own non-mannered quirks, inner life, and mysterious motivations, and the interplay between her and the other characters makes the film strange, powerful, and uncomfortable. Bigelow also uses and subverts the weight of Curtis's former status as Scream Queen as Megan battles Eugene, who just keeps coming at her like some kind of stockbroker Michael Myers. Framing all this is a visual style that incorporates influences from German Expressionism, '40s film noir, '70s paranoid thrillers, and '80s slasher horror into a subjective whole about a woman continually running into doors shut by men. Blue Steel should be better known.