Movie Reviews
This is a story told behind the scenes of a sideshow act and the people who put on that show. These people are no where near the standard of “normal”, but that’s okay because by the end of the film Browning has challenged what normality really is. I guess the star would be Hans, a midget who is engaged to Freida (also a midget), but is falling in love with Cleopatra, the sideshow’s star trapeze woman. Cleopatra is only playing Hans because he has inherited a large sum of money. She plans on marrying him, having her real lover Hercules kill Hans, and then running off with the money.
Her treachery upsets the other acts – freaks, as she calls them – more than she expected. What results from this is rather disturbing, mostly because of the deformities of the actors. They take their revenge forcefully, but it is cut off. And that is the biggest flaw of the entire film. We have so much buildup to this climax – the revenge – and then it seems as though the filmmakers lost the guts to finish it off. Of course, censors had something to do with that.
While “Freaks” is shocking, it is also heart-breaking. Their neglect becomes our fault and we feel sorry for them. When something bad happens to one of them, you want something awful to happen to the people who did it to them. I felt mostly for Hans. There’s an unforgettable scene in which Hans and Cleopatra “celebrate” their marriage. As they’re feasting with the other “freaks”, the ceremonial wine drinking comes around the table. When it gets to Cleopatra, the freaks chant, “gooble gobble, gooble gobble, we accept her, we accept her, one of us, one of us.” She throws the wine at them, and Hercules parades Hans around on his back. It’s an extremely cruel and weird scene that becomes on of the most effective of the film.
I think that the point of this film was not to make us sympathetic, but to make us aware of other’s feelings; perhaps a call for those who are treated awful for things they couldn’t help.
“Freaks” is now considered one of the greatest horror films of pre-modern cinema, but I can’t say that I totally agree that it’s a horror film. In fact, to say that it is only a horror film is to demean the reasons for the film in the first place. It dehumanizes the “freaks” to an even greater degree, which is something I hope the filmmakers weren’t trying to achieve. ***