B00A2JNSWQ

012569519121

1932

1932-02-20

64

1h 4min

Awards, 2 wins & 1 nomination

Tod Browning

Clarence Aaron 'Tod' Robbins, Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon

Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova

Tod Browning, Dwain Esper, Harry Rapf, Hildegarde Stadie, Irving Thalberg

Merritt B. Gerstad

Basil Wrangell

Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye

Harry Sharrock

William Ryan, Will Sheldon, Errol Taggart

G.A. Burns, Douglas Shearer

David S. Horsley, Oliver T. Marsh, Paul Vogel

Will Sheldon

Drama, Horror

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

USA

English, German, French

Not Rated

7.8

46447

80

Freaks (also re-released as The Monster Story, Forbidden Love, and Nature s Mistakes) is a 1932 American pre-Code horror film produced and directed by Tod Browning, starring Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, and Roscoe Ates.

Freaks, originally intended as a vehicle for Lon Chaney, is set amongst the backdrop of a travelling French circus and follows a conniving trapeze artist who joins a group of carnival sideshow performers with a plan to seduce and murder a dwarf in the troupe to gain his inheritance. However, her plot proves to have dangerous consequences. The film is based on elements from the short story Spurs by Tod Robbins, first published in Munsey s Magazine in February 1923, with the rights being purchased by the studio, responsible by MGM art department chief Cedric Gibbons.

Filmed in Los Angeles in the fall of 1931, some employees at MGM were discomfited by the presence of the actors portraying the freaks on set, and, other than the so-called more normal looking freaks , the Siamese twins and the Earles, the performers were not allowed to be on the studio lot, relegated instead to a specially-built tent. The film had test screenings in January 1932, with many members of the audience reacting negatively, finding the film too grotesque. In response to this, MGM executive Irving Thalberg, without consent of director Browning, edited the original 90-minute feature, which was significantly cut, with additional alternate footage incorporated to help increase the running time. The final abridged cut of the film, released in February 1932, was 64 minutes; the original version no longer exists.

Despite the cuts made to the film, Freaks still garnered notice for the portrayal of its eponymous characters by people who worked as sideshow performers and had real disabilities. These cast members included dwarf siblings Harry and Daisy Earles; Johnny Eck, who had sacral agenenis; the conjoined twin sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton; and Schlitzie, a man with microcephaly. Because of its controversial content, the film was banned in the United Kingdom for over 30 years, and was labelled as brutal and grotesque in Canada.

Though it received critical backlash and was a box-office failure upon initial release, Freaks was subject to public and critical reappraisal in the 1960s, as a long forgotten Hollywood classic, particularly in Europe, and was screened at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. In retrospect, numerous film critics have suggested that the film presents a starkly sympathetic portrait of its sideshow characters rather than an exploitative one, with Andrew Sarris declaring Freaks one of the most compassionate films ever made. Nonetheless, critics have continued to take note of the film s horror elements; in 2009, Joe Morgenstern proclaimed that Freaks contains some of the most terrifying scenes in film history. Film scholars have interpreted the film as a metaphor for class conflict, reflecting the Great Depression, and it has been studied for its portrayal of people with disabilities, with theorists arguing that it presents an anti-eugenics message. The film has been highly influential: it is now considered a cult classic and one of the greatest movies of all time. In 1994, it was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry, which seeks to preserve films that are classified culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant .

$310,607 (estimated)

$4,072

Circus,told in flashback,poison,disability,clown