Freaks Summary
Director: Tod Browning
Genres: Drama, Thriller
Rating:
The genesis of MGM's Freaks was a magazine piece by Ted_Robbins titled -Spurs. The story involved a terrible revenge enacted by a mean-spirited circus midget upon his normal-sized wife. In adapting -Spurs for the screen, writers Willis_Goldbeck, Leon_Gordon, Edgar_Allan_Wolf, and Al_Boasberg retained the circus setting and the little man-big woman wedding, all the while de-vilifying the midget and transforming the woman into the true "heavy" of the piece. German "little person" Harry_Earles plays Hans, who falls in love with long-legged trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga_Baclanova). Discovering that Hans is heir to a fortune, Cleopatra inveigles him into a marriage, all the while planning to bump off her new husband and run away with brutish strongman Hercules (Henry_Victor). What she doesn't reckon with is the code of honor among circus freaks: "offend one, offend them all." What set this film apart from director Tod_Browning's earlier efforts was the fact that genuine circus and carnival sideshow performers were cast as the freaks: Harry_Earles and his equally diminutive sister Daisy, Siamese twins Violet and Daisy_Hilton, legless Johnny_Eck, armless-legless Randian (who rolls cigarettes with his teeth), androgynous Josephine-Joseph, "pinheads" Schlitzie, Elvira, Jennie_Lee_Snow, and so on. Upon its initial release, Freaks was greeted with such revulsion from movie-house audiences that MGM spent the next 30 years distancing themselves as far from the project as possible. For many years available only in a truncated reissue version titled Nature's Mistakes, Freaks was eventually restored to its original release print. Hal Erickson, Rovi
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