FESTIVALS:
1962 Venice
2003 Moscow
As the not-exactly-PC title suggests, Tod Browning’s film – the tale of a ‘beautiful’ circus trapeze artist who conspires with her strongman lover to marry a dwarf for his money – is entirely concerned with ‘weird beings’: a travelling troupe of conjoined twins, bearded ladies, ‘half-boys’, microcephalics and gender-bending outsiders. Freaks may feature an audience-pleasing, able-bodied romantic pairing upfront, but Browning’s lack of interest in them is made plain in a series of beautiful, empathetic slice-of-life sequences as the ‘freaks’ surmount the challenges of everyday life. The result is cinema’s boldest statement on the dichotomy between outer appearance and inner life: no wonder the beauty-obsessed Hollywood studio system had no idea what to do with it. It’s one of the most powerful films ever made about the need for humanity and solidarity in the face of cruelty and oppression. Just be thankful the world has — mostly — moved on.
– Tom Huddleston, Time Out.
Films sung but more or less unseen for decades as often as not turn out to be a disappointment, but Tod Browning’s Freaks — made in 1932, never released in this country, and celebrated as the Grand Guignol to end all Grand Guignol in its use of real freaks in a horror setting—actually enriches its prefabricated image. If the last scenes are horrific enough to satisfy most ghoulish tastes, the revelation of the film is its warmth and humanity. Browning manages to evoke the closed world of freaks, the intensely human emotions contained in inhuman exteriors, in such a way that fascinated revulsion turns into tender comprehension.
His first introduction of the freaks — not the pretty little midgets, who are easy enough to accept, but the mutilated fragments and cruel distortions — is characteristic. As a local squire walks through a forest, his gamekeeper babbles wildly about having seen grotesque creatures in the wood, and the camera focuses on a clearing in which things crawl, dance and hop obscenely. The squire angrily protests, and Madame Petralini, the motherly body in charge of the freaks, explains that they are merely playing in the sun on a day off from the circus. An instinctive huddling of the terrified freaks against Madame Petralini, a gesture from a pin-headed woman who lovingly touches her face, and the scene suddenly turns from a Walpurgisnacht revel into a charming idyll.
The story itself, apart from the fact that pin-headed women, living torso, half-man, frog-man, armless women dwarfs, are all played by real freaks, is fairly conventional horror stuff. Two circus midgets, Hans and Frieda, are engaged to be married, but Hans is attracted to Cleopatra, the beautiful, normal-sized trapeze artiste. As a joke, Cleopatra encourages him. Then, discovering that he is rich, she inveigles him into marriage, planning to poison him with the help of her strong-man lover, Hercules. At the wedding banquet, the assembled freaks conduct a ritual ceremony, accepting Cleopatra as one of their clan, but she recoils in disgust. Their suspicions aroused, the freaks band together, rescue Hans, hunt Cleopatra and Hercules down, and exact revenge by horribly mutilating the guilty pair.
The brilliance of the film lies in the care with which the context of this story is evoked. On the one hand, the “normal” circus folk, their cruel, unthinking mockery of the freaks; on the other, the freaks themselves, joyous, eager to accept anybody who will meet them halfway. Frozo the clown and his girl Venus, who take the freaks as they are, link these worlds in two wholly charming scenes: teasing Slitzy, one of the pin-headed women, about her new dress, and joking with the bearded lady about the birth of her baby. These scenes, and more particularly the sequence of the wedding banquet, provide an emotional basis for the horror of the climax.
The wedding banquet is a brilliant piece of mise en scene, with all the freaks assembled round a long table in joyous and raucous celebration of the marriage, culminating in the wild progress of a dwarf down the centre of the table, clutching a loving-cup of wine, and accompanied by a mounting chant of “We Accept Her, We Accept Her, One of Us”. The intensity, the idiot laughter, the terrifying ritual of the chant, make Cleopatra’s revulsion perfectly natural. But at the same time, she is still unable to consider the freaks as other than unfeeling monsters, and inflicts the final insult on her tiny husband by carrying him piggy-back round the room in front of all his friends. After this, and the subsequent slow poisoning of Hans, there is no doubt whose side one is on.
The macabre finale, lit in chiaroscuro, is again beautifully done. As Hercules and Cleopatra go about their business of poisoning Hans, eyes watch constantly, peering in at windows, from beneath caravans. The freaks gather their forces; the storm breaks, the rain comes pouring down, knives appear; nothing on the sound-track but the storm, the caravans rolling, a melancholy tune played by a dwarf on a pipe; the streaming rain, the thick mud full of crawling shapes in the darkness, and Cleopatra and Hercules running screaming in terror.
Except for key scenes, like the banquet and the final hunt, the film is fairly rough and ready, and the acting of the “normal” characters (Wallace Ford as Frozo, Leila Hyams as Venus, Olga Baclanova as Cleopatra) is not much better. Paradoxically, though, this seems to work in the film’s favour. Against the stiltedness, the freaks come over even more strongly. The real world is that of the freaks: of Johnny, perfect from the waist up but cut off below, who can enjoy and try to improve on Frozo’s clowning; of the living torso, who lights his own cigarette, and calmly meditates on what is going on around him; of the frog-man, married to the bearded lady, proudly offering cigars to celebrate the birth of his baby; of Slitzy, who can conduct a flirtation as well as anybody; and above all, of the formal, gentle Hans and Frieda, with their grave concern for each other’s welfare. And we, the audience, have been accepted; we are “one of them”.
– Tom Milne, Sight & Sound, Summer 1963.
RESTORATION
Sourced from a very beautiful and convincing new 2K master. The new presentation of Freaks is superior in every way possible, so the overall quality of the visuals is quite the dramatic improvement. The density levels are now a lot better and there is simply more information available. Naturally, clarity and depth benefit as well. Also, the grayscale is improved, which is something that further strengthens clarity and depth. There are proper shadow nuances, decent or good depth, etc. Image stability is improved, too. There are no traces of problematic degraining corrections. However, there are grain fluctuations, with the bigger ones appearing toward the end. The entire film looks very healthy. All in all, given the age of the film and how it was preserved over the years, this new presentation is quite the revelation.
The audio reveals even more inherited limitations than the visuals. For example, there is quite a bit of unevenness. In some areas, the audio becomes very thin, too. But this is the type of audio quality that was possible with existing recording equipment in the early 1930s. Also, during some exchanges, you will even notice some extremely light background hiss and crackle.
– adapted from Dr Svet Atanasov, blu-ray,com, 1 October 2023.