Bound by Flesh

Daisy and Violet Hilton were among the best known names on the sideshow stages of the early twentieth century. Taught to sing and dance as small children, they toured the vaudeville circuit on the same bills as Bob Hope and Charlie Chaplin and appeared memorably in Tod Browning’s Freaks. What brought down both their careers and their lives was the exploitation and mistreatment of the people who managed them; the sisters eventually sued for their freedom, and the right they won came at a heavy price. The twins were born conjoined at the hips in Brighton in 1908, and their mother handed them over to Mary Hilton, who owned the pub where she worked, so childhood turned into an attraction almost before it began. Leslie Zemeckis built her documentary from interviews and rarely seen archival footage.