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Freaks (1933)

Form IMDB:
A carnival barker displays a sideshow freak called the Feathered Hen and tells her story. Cleopatra, a trapeze artist with the carnival, is adored by a midget named Hans. Frieda, Hans' fiancée (also a midget), warns Hans that Cleopatra is only interested in him so that he will give her money. Cleopatra has an affair with Hercules, and when Frieda lets it slip that Hans is to come into an inheritance, Cleopatra and Hercules plan to get the money be having Cleopatra marry Hans. During the wedding reception, Cleopatra, although openly romantic with Hercules, is accepted by the freaks, but is revolted and mocks them. The freaks decide that they no longer need Hercules in their carnival and have a new career for Cleopatra all lined up, and make sure she doesn't "chicken" out.


This movie is part of the collection: Feature Films

Audio/Visual: sound, color
Keywords: Tod Browning; Dwain Esper; Exploitation; Horror; Drama; Freakshow; cult; culthit

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: JodyValyou - - August 23, 2008
Subject: PUBLIC DOMAIN OR NOT, WHO CARES, DO NOT MISS THIS MOVIE!!!! A TRUE HISTORIC CINEMATIC TREASURE, THAT, WE WILL NEVER SEE REPEATED, EVER AGAIN!!!!
This film was based on Tod Robbins' short story Spurs. Director Tod Browning took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow "freaks," rather than using costumes and makeup. Browning had been a member of a traveling circus in his early years, and much of the film was drawn from his personal experiences. He intended to portray the classic moral of how outer beauty does not necessarily equate to inner beauty. In the film, the physically deformed "freaks" are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the "normal" members of the circus who conspire to murder one of the performers to obtain his large inheritance.

Reaction to the film was so intense that the studio was forced to cut it from a length of approximately ninety minutes to just over an hour. Today, the parts that were removed from it are considered lost. Browning, famed at the time for his collaborations with Lon Chaney and for directing Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) had trouble finding work afterwards, and this in effect brought his career to an early close. Because its deformed cast was shocking to moviegoers of the time, the film was banned in the United Kingdom for thirty years. Beginning in the early 1960s, Freaks was rediscovered as a counterculture cult film; throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the film was regularly shown at midnight movie screenings at several movie theaters in the United States.

MGM had purchased the rights to Robbins' short story Spurs in the 1920s at Browning's urging. In June 1932, MGM production supervisor Irving Thalberg offered Browning the opportunity to direct Arsène Lupin with John Barrymore. Browning declined, preferring to develop Freaks, a process he had started as early as 1927. Screenwriters Willis Goldbeck and Elliott Clawson were assigned to the project at Browning's request. Leon Gordon, Edgar Allen Woolf, Al Boasberg and an uncredited Charles MacArthur would also contribute to the script. The script was shaped over five months. Little of the original story was retained beyond the marriage between midget and average sized person and the wedding feast.

Myrna Loy was initially slated to star as Cleopatra, with Jean Harlow as Venus. Ultimately Thalberg decided not to cast any major stars in the picture.

Freaks began filming in October 1931 and was completed in December. Following disastrous test screenings in January 1932 (one woman threatened to sue MGM, claiming the film had caused her to suffer a miscarriage), the studio cut the picture down from its original 90 minute running time to just over an hour. Much of the sequence of the freaks attacking Cleopatra as she lay under a tree was removed, as were a number of comedy sequences and most of the film's original epilogue. A new prologue featuring a carnival barker was added, as was the new epilogue featuring the reconciliation of the tiny lovers.

The central story is of a self-serving trapeze artist named Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) who seduces and eventually marries a sideshow midget, Hans (Harry Earles), after learning of his large inheritance.

At their wedding reception, the other "freaks" resolve that they will accept Cleopatra in spite of her being a "normal" outsider, and hold an initiation ceremony, wherein they pass a massive goblet of wine around the table while chanting, "We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble! One of us! One of us!" The ceremony frightens the drunken Cleopatra, who accidentally reveals that she has been having an affair with Hercules (Henry Victor), the strong man; she mocks the freaks, tosses the wine in their faces and drives them away. Despite being humiliated, Hans remains with Cleopatra.

Shortly thereafter, Hans is taken ill (presumably from having too much to drink at the wedding feast, but actually from poison that Cleopatra slipped him) and Cleopatra begins slipping poison into Hans' medicine to kill him so that she can inherit his money and run away with Hercules. One of the circus performers overhears Cleopatra talking to Hercules about the murder plot, and tells the other freaks and Hans; in the film's climax, the freaks attack Cleopatra and Hercules with guns, knives, and various edged weapons, hideously mutilating them. Though Hercules is never seen again, the original ending of the film had the freaks castrating him - the audience sees him later singing in falsetto. The film concludes with a revelation of Cleopatra's fate: her tongue cut out, one eye gouged and legs hacked off, she has been reduced to performing in a sideshow as the imbecile squawking "human chicken".

Spliced throughout the main narrative are a variety of "slice of life" segments detailing the lives of the sideshow performers. The vignettes, while not advancing the main narrative, drive home the point that the physically malformed freaks are just as human as the other "normal" performers.

Among the characters featured as "freaks" were Peter Robinson ("the living skeleton"); Olga Roderick ("the bearded lady"); Frances O'Connor and Martha Morris ("armless wonders"); and the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Among the microcephalics who appear in the film (and are referred to as "pinheads") were Zip and Pip (Elvira and Jenny Lee Snow) and Schlitzie, a male named Simon Metz who wore a dress mainly due to incontinence. Also featured were the intersexual Josephine Joseph, with her left/right divided gender; Johnny Eck, the legless man; the completely limbless Prince Randian (also known as The Human Torso, and mis-credited as "Rardion"); Elizabeth Green the Stork Woman; and Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, who suffered from Virchow-Seckel syndrome or bird-headed dwarfism, and is most remembered for the scene where she dances on the table).

Reviewer: k-otic - - August 21, 2008
Subject: NOT in the Public Domain
This Film is NOT in the Public Domain!
Please remove it ....

afaik.. MGM still owns all rights on this movie!
you can read the WHOLE story of the film here
http://hjem.get2net.dk/jack_stevenson/freaks.htm


THERE IS ONLY ... ONE ... SOURCE THAT CLAIMED FREAKS TO BE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN!!!
and this site links to an Google Video stream! ...
come on guys get real... what kind of a prove is that?
Besides, not a single major pd distrebuter have this title in their online catalogue

Reviewer: Greg K - - August 21, 2008
Subject: COPYRIGHTED by MGM/Warner Bros!
Good point....if it is truly in public domain, why haven't ANY of the numerous PD companies out there released it?

....because it is NOT truly in the public domain is obviously why.

Reviewer: NoiseCollector - - August 21, 2008
Subject: Potent Erotica
But difficult to finish off to.

Reviewer: sam1am - - August 20, 2008
Subject: Public Domain
The right to this movie were purchased in the 1980's by Anton LaVey, a former carnival worker and the founder of the church of satan. He re-released it as public domain.

See what 10 seconds on Google can do?

Reviewer: johnnytattoo - - August 10, 2008
Subject: great flick
the movie is well over60 years old, as far as i'm concerned public domaine or not...it should be avalible for free, as an historical motion picture, crew, cast,and producers are dead..i am living, i am sure they wont haunt me looking for thier 15 cents of residuals...kimpunkrock rocks and is a great movie fan,

Reviewer: wilbrifar - - August 9, 2008
Subject: missed the point
"All you people shouting-get this out of here, it isn't public domain! What are you the movie police?!?!? Are YOU PERSONALLY losing money because of this?!?!?! I doubt it, so shut your collective faces! Busy bodies like you make me sick. With all the craptastic films that MGM makes today-they can suck it! Got a problem with it. Feel free to email me jerks!"
------------------
The point you seem to be missing, simpleton, is that this is a LEGAL site for downloading public domain material only. Copyrighted material breaks the law, which puts the owners of this site at risk. This isn't some bittorrent site on a server in China that can't be touched by police, where you can go to steal a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean 3. This is a legal site for PD only, and those of us who appreciate this site don't want it threatened by copyrighted material. Has that sunken in?
------------------------------------
to sprout: Yes, I can read. Whether or not THIS film is public domain had nothing to do with my post. I was responding to the hostile attitude of the poster who feels no one on the site should be concerned with whether or not movies are public domain, and explaining to him why it matters.

Reviewer: _sprout - - August 8, 2008
Subject: Uhh, can you read?
This film is Public Domain, read the link provided by SpaceFan. Great movie, BTW.

Reviewer: bearpuf - - August 6, 2008
Subject: Keeps Me Thinking
Ever since seeing this movie about 25 years ago on a PBS station one late night I've remembered it for the sadness it conveyed, partially from the storyline, but also from the ingenuousness of the impaired and mis-shapen people recruited as actors for the film. It is haunting, and if anything, left me with an appreciation for what I was physically and mentally capable.
The movie has its faults in the simplistic manner it portrays such victims of nature and could be critiqued for hours, to the amorality and exploitation of even putting these folks on the screen for others to gawk, but emotionally it struck, at least me. Considering the time this the film was made makes it stand out for achievement in pulling some of one's most basic emotions to the surface.
The website http://hjem.get2net.dk/jack_stevenson/freaks.htm is a fascinating read of Tod Browning, the making of 'FREAKS' and the actors who played in it. Thanks to the fellow who supplied it.

Reviewer: kimpunkrock - - August 5, 2008
Subject: Shut your mouths!
All you people shouting-get this out of here, it isn't public domain! What are you the movie police?!?!? Are YOU PERSONALLY losing money because of this?!?!?! I doubt it, so shut your collective faces! Busy bodies like you make me sick. With all the craptastic films that MGM makes today-they can suck it! Got a problem with it. Feel free to email me jerks!

kimpunkrock@yahoo.com

Reviewer: SpaceFan - - August 3, 2008
Subject: isn't it?
Anton LaVey purchased the rights to Freaks, in the 1980’s and re-released it as public domain.
http://www.thehumanmarvels.com/2006/07/freaks-motion-picture.html

Reviewer: RobboMills - - August 2, 2008
Subject: Astonishing Twisted Gem
I first heard of the legendary "Freaks" through Forrest J. Ackerman's magazine "Famous Monsters Of Film Land" it was tainted with sordid myth and that made it all the more mysterious and desirable to see. I finally saw it at the New Yorker, a now defunct art house cinema in Toronto and was astonished to find not an exploitive side show but rather a disturbing examination of human nature.

If "Freaks" had been realized as a novel the out cry at the time would have been decidedly different - but cinema creates far more visceral responses and the reaction to the initial release of "Freaks" was swift and judgmental. Universal Studios pulled it, hacked out large chunks in an effort to wring some revenue from the project (including the ending which was later restored but other portions are now gone forever) and eventually shelved the film completely. It pretty much destroyed director Tod Browning's career.

"Freaks" didn't resurface again to the wider public until the late '60's when 16 mm prints started making the rounds of the art houses and colleges and a more sophisticated audience was able to reexamine the film on its merits instead of viewing it through the filters of hype and ignorance from thirty years before.

A more incisive review for "Freaks" can be found in Julie Ng's article for 11th Hour:

http://www.the11thhour.com/archives/102000/videoreviews/freaks.html

This film isn't just arcane cinema history - as dated as some of the writing, performances and cinematic technique may be it is an unflinching look into the darker corners of the human heart and forces us to reevaluate the notion of "normal".

Cheers.