carnival barker prepares his audience for their first sight of one of the most horrifying human
oddities of all time: a woman who was once a great trapeze artist but who suffered a hideous fate when she used her charms against a popular performer of the freak show.
A flashback brings us back to happier times. We meet the inhabitants of an exceptionally
well-populated circus sideshow, many of them essentially playing themselves. Just a few: the
armless girls Frances O'Connor and Martha Morris, the diminutive Angelino (Rossito), the legless man Johnny Eck, the grinning microcephalic Schlitze and an entirely limbless man whose name is spelled "Rardian" in the credits, and who was actually named Randian.
The "normal" performers include a brutal thug of a strong man named Hercules (Victor), the beautiful animal trainer Venus (Leila Hyams) who used to be involved with him and the likable clown Phroso (Ford), who is about to take Herc's place in her life.
There are also romantic entanglements among the so-called freaks. The conjoined twins are both courted by nice guys (one of whom tells his future brother-in-law, "You must come to see us sometime"). When one sister is kissed, the other shudders in pleasure. And the bearded lady has just given birth to a lovely little girl.
But not all the backstage romances are working out as happily. One of the midgets, Hans (Earles) is engaged to Frieda (his real-life sister, Daisy Earles, the "Midget Mae West"), a beautiful and devoted woman his own size. But Hans is also helplessly smitten with the cruel, statuesque trapeze artist Cleopatra (Baclanova), who takes cruel sport in baiting him with
false affection, and thereby encouraging him to shower her with more and more expensive gifts. When she discovers that Hans is heir to a small fortune, Cleopatra decides to con him into marriage, poison him and claim a widow's inheritance.
At a raucous wedding feast, the various sideshow performers horrify the venal Cleopatra by serenading her with their acceptance chant, "One of us, one of us, gooble gobble." She spits in their faces, while Hercules laughs uproariously. Soon after that, her murderous plans for Hans proceed in earnest ... while the freaks, who are always protective of their own, watch in growing rage.
It all comes down to Hercules and Cleopatra fleeing for their lives during a thunderous rainstorm, with the angry freaks in vengeful pursuit.
Real people rescue a flawed film
There are any number of intelligent, discerning people who profess Freaks a masterpiece. If so, it's a seriously flawed one. The dramatics creak, its message that "freaks are people too" is framed in strained and pedantic terms, and its mixed cast of able-bodied and
physically challenged performers sometimes seem to be pummeling each other in a bad-acting competition. (The able-bodied enjoy little advantage there.)
There's also its famous but problematic climax. It is pretty powerful when the freaks slither and stumble and bounce along through the storm, in righteous pursuit of the villains, but it also dances with ludicrousness, especially in shots of the limbless Prince Randian rolling around on his belly with a dagger clutched between his teeth. Granted that this was a guy whose ability to light his own cigarette seems miraculous, and whose success at living a full life on his own terms deserved serious admiration, but it's impossible to watch that scene
and not wonder just what on earth his character intends to do with that knife if and when he catches up with the bad guy—spit it at him?
The payoff is even more questionable. Cleopatra sees the freaks pursuing her and screams. We cut to a future where she's been transformed into a squawking, disfigured, feathered "duck woman." Just how the freaks manage this miraculous vengeance is never explained. As the film stands, her fate is the stuff of fantasy.
The original cut, removed by censors and no longer extant, sounds clearer: It seems that
Cleopatra's legs are crushed by a falling tree, just before the freaks swarm over her with their knives. When we cut to her future existence in a sideshow, the feathers become easy to buy as part of a costume, "gaffing" the existing injuries of a woman whose legs have been amputated. It's still a horrific fate, but at least it makes some kind of logical sense. And it's too bad that the cut in existence also omits a shot of Hercules, also confined to the sideshow, singing along with the duck woman in falsetto. But the clear implication that he's been emasculated was never going to be allowed to pass muster in 1932 movie theaters—any more than this almost-as-emasculated final version was. Because Freaks was considered so horrifying, at
its time, that it was banned in many countries and in some sections of the United States for more than 30 years.
A lengthy opening crawl, added after its initial release, assured contemporary audiences that medical science was in the process of rendering abnormal births a thing of the past. Cowardly disclaimers of this kind were all too common in films of the era, which sometimes attempted to
counteract upsetting story hooks by assuring the people in the 20th row that anything
controversial in the subject matter was no longer an issue worth worrying about. One film set in a '30s chain gang began with a disclaimer to the effect that reformers had made sure the inhuman conditions depicted in the story were all now a thing of the past: not even remotely true. The disclaimer added to Freaks, which treats the performers like living fossils and banishes their troubles to some kind of mythical never-never land, reveals a lot more about the sensibilities of the time than any of the melodramatics of the screenplay.
With all that acknowledged, we're left with the performers themselves. Though they were recruited from all over the world and some have incomprehensible accents (for instance, I still can't decipher Randian's one line), their very presence on screen sometimes reveals a dignity the screenplay does not. The conjoined Hilton sisters may have been terrible actors, but the film provides them the opportunity to acknowledge that they feel sexual desire: a major
statement for audiences who didn't want to think about such things. (In real life, the Hiltons once traveled across the country in vain search of a state willing to issue one of them a wedding license.) Legless Johnny Eck has a charismatic smile and an engaging screen presence: Granted all four limbs, he might have made a name for himself as romantic leading man. The most unlikely movie star of the bunch is the "pinhead" Schlitze, whose warm smile, playful demeanor and palpable sense of fun are key elements in the likability that served him over many decades
of making a living from his disability. The armless Frances O'Connor, human skeleton Peter Robinson and "Bird Girl" Elizabeth Green are all memorable in their own way. As for Angelo Rossitto, who stands atop the wedding table singing the famous "one of us" chant, he enjoyed a movie career of over 60 years, including a key role as "The Master" in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
