:
Wallace Ford,
Wallace Ford,
Leila Hyams,
more...
:
Tod Browning,
Tod Browning
see all cast/crew...
: Not Rated
: Warner Home Video
: Classics, Drama, Classic Drama, Classic Drama, Pre-Code, Precode
: 62 min.
: English
: English, Spanish, French
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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, All Movie Guide
Special Features:
- Commentary by David J. Skal, Author of Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre
- All-New Documentary Freaks: Sideshow Cinema
- Special Message Prologue added for Theatrical Reissue
- 3 Alternate Endings
You might also enjoy:
Dracula
Browning's version of the oft-told story might still be the best
The Elephant Man
David Lynch's own unsettling, surreal and heartbreaking story of a "freak of nature"
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