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!