Freaks

At a circus, the trapeze artist Cleopatra marries the dwarf Hans to get at his inheritance and plans with the strongman Hercules to poison him. When the plot is exposed, the rest of the show acts. Tod Browning directed, from Tod Robbins's 1923 story Spurs. The decision at the centre is the casting. Browning used real sideshow performers: the dwarf siblings Harry and Daisy Earles, the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, Johnny Eck, who had sacral agenesis, and Schlitzie, who had microcephaly. The Russian actress Olga Baclanova plays Cleopatra. It was shot in the autumn of 1931. The test screenings were a disaster. MGM cut the 90-minute film to 64 minutes, removing sequences of castration and mutilation, and that footage is lost. It was banned in the UK for over thirty years. In America it was pulled after the summer of 1932, the only MGM film ever withdrawn before completing its domestic engagements. Browning's career effectively ended with it. It was rediscovered in the sixties. It entered the National Film Registry in 1994 and Rotten Tomatoes now sits at 95 percent. Who it is for: anyone interested in film history and in how a film can change sides within a century. Who it is not for: viewers who will find its gaze comfortable. Browning respects his performers, but the camera still presents them as a spectacle, and that contradiction is never resolved.