These films I’ve each seen only
once, but they contain elements that allow you to blog on them with only a
single—if quite eye-opening—viewing.
Quick Vu: Freaks, a “horror”
film in strikingly questionable taste, yet a curio today
On the night of Saturday, April
20, Turner Classic Movies ran—in its “The Essentials” series, hosted by Robert
Osborne and actress Drew Barrymore—the short film Freaks (1932). I originally wasn’t going to watch it all, then did,
though it was a bit punishing to do so; what helped was that the film was only
about an hour long.
I’ve heard of this film before,
and in fact it has been referred to in early film-studies venues such as Robert
Sklar’s Movie-Made America: A Cultural
History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). I think it more
broadly gets mentioned as a notoriously bad or anomalous film, but—according to
Osborne last Saturday—its unexpected producing studio, MGM, became embarrassed
enough by it after its release to disown it, or such; and according to Leonard
Maltin’s yearly review compendium (as well as the Wikipedia bio on its director,
Tod Browning), it was banned in Britain for decades.
Apparently, in the early trough
of the Great Depression, the movie studios—which over the longer term were
rather new to what they could or dared do, just a few years after talkies had
started—saw that if horror films were a lucrative genre, just milk the genre
for what it was worth. Tod Browning had directed the now-classic Dracula (1931) for Universal, which was
the main studio turning out horror at that time. Dracula was a success, so Tod Browning was seen as the man to tap
when Irving Thalberg of MGM, according to Sklar (p. 179), opted to depart from
MGM’s usual “upper-bourgeois tone and taste” and had Freaks made. The film was such a box-office disaster that,
according to Osborne last Saturday (and according to Browning’s Wikipedia bio),
it destroyed Browning’s directorial career.
Yet as Drew Barrymore noted last
Saturday, the film became a cult hit in the 1970s and ’80s. I’ll return to her
reactions to it in a moment.
Freaks is in very strange taste for a number of reasons, yet
it isn’t completely unwatchable. In fact, it has redeeming features that allow
Barrymore to enthuse over it, though I should note that a viewer new to it
should be aware what he or she is in for. It features a number of people who
either suffer the results of genetic anomalies or are missing limbs, or are
Siamese (conjoined) twins, who in fact were actual performers in the “freaks”
exhibits of circuses in that day. (There is also a character depicted as a
“half-man, half woman,” though this may have been purely a matter of makeup—the
physical appearance, literally a male–female divided down the middle, looks
ludicrously fantastic; and there is a supposed bearded woman…and there is even one man
who stutters badly, though how much this is an act for the film is unclear.)
The film, in fact, depicts the
groups of them as a community in a traveling circus. There are some plot
elements that “shape” this set of people and situation into a supposed “horror
story.” One aspect of this may have been, for audiences of the time, the sheer
awe of seeing some of the “freaks,” some of whom we would call disabled or the results
of genetic anomaly today. But there is a soap opera-ish plot involving a couple
of dwarfs, a male and female who seem to be a couple, the male of whom strays
into being lulled into forming a relationship with a full-sized female circus
performer who, after a while, only wants to marry him then kill him because he
has inherited a lot of money. All the while, the man’s former female-dwarf
girlfriend looks on sadly and in dismay.
The full-sized woman, in cahoots
with a loutish male and, I think, some other full-sized male, goes about her
attempt to poison the male dwarf, and other members of the disabled community
catch wise…and eventually, in a stock-horror moment, on a rainy night, when the
circus has gotten on the move, a group of them, creeping menacingly into
position, weapons at the ready, go after the guilty conspirators and give them
the business, so to speak. This aspect of making the “climactic horror moment”
be some vengefulness on the part of the disabled circus performers, including
some quadriplegic male barely able to move along the ground with a weapon in
his mouth (I think), seems like an especially appalling way to make a horror
film—suggesting (or symbolizing), by their very, obvious physical anomalies,
that these disabled people are, or capable of being, monsters. [Clarification: I think the film handled this on two levels: the freaks were not meant, within the story, to be monsters on a par with Frankenstein's monster, but in some low-level sense were presented in their superficial strangeness; but when the time came for them to seek justice against the conniving woman, they had a temporary appearance as monsters. Still, the way this was combined with the unapologetic appearance of the more genetically unfortunate performers was pretty exploitative at best.]
Then what happens to the
conniving full-sized female, played by an Olga Baclanova, of being given her
comeuppance by being made into a disabled half-bird woman, seems too farcical
as a plot element. The whole story suggests the screenwriter(s) was/were
“disabled” in terms of human decency to spin such a story around these people
as a means to capitalize on the early-’30s horror craze.
The fact that these people were,
in real life, “circus freaks” shows the lowbrow-show-biz slot they were
consigned to in life, which is not favorably reflective on some of the paying
public of the time. This aspect you could write off to being a superseded social
matter of 81 years ago; but in one regard, while we may be horrified of this
use of disabled people today, it seems the film strayed beyond the bounds of
decency even then, for it to bomb at the box office and then to be an
embarrassment to MGM for some years.
Another layer of the alarming
quality of this work is in how various individuals are photo’d—fairly enough,
often showing them laughing in watching something or someone—as if we are just
gawking at these people (yet from another angle we can say these shots are
inadvertently clinical). I recall from psychology classes in the area of
developmental psychology (as well as maybe abnormal psych) some of the names of
genetic anomalies: “fragile X [-chromosome] syndrome,” Klinefelter’s syndrome,
and others; there is also microcephaly, which means having an abnormally
small head (and mental retardation). Down’s syndrome is the most famous
birth-defect condition (and this doesn't appear to be represented in the film), and we can often see Down’s sufferers working as
grocery baggers or otherwise out in the community; they are known for generally
being of good disposition, along with appearing innocuously childlike, so their
being in public is not normally shocking to others. Some of these other
conditions not only render the sufferers disabled but quite odd in appearance.
I forget which name may go with which of the actors who were arrayed in this
movie, but I generally knew there was a category some fell into.
So what was rather shocking to
me in viewing the film was that these people—often displayed with a smile as he or
she looked at something off-camera—were enlisted to be “monsters” of sorts in a
horror film.
Added to this were the lame
attempts at humor in the film—such as with a set of conjoined female twins,
with one of whom a man with a bad stutter has a sort of romantic relationship.
As if it wasn’t bad enough to hear it once, a joke is worked out twice where
the twins have to beg off and go somewhere else—by the one saying she had to
go, hence her sister, who was the man’s girl, had to leave too—and this when he
was wearing on their patience, or such. The man responded, “Oh, that’s always
your exc—exc—exc—alibi.” This is a cleaned-up version of his stuttering way to
criticize her for making excuses or using an “alibi.”
Also rather strange to see are a
couple men missing limbs. One man, missing his body below his waste, moves
around very adeptly on his hands, either wearing odd shoes on his hands, or
having unusually large hands. He walks around nimbly, or climbs stairs without
a hitch. A little more appalling is a Black man with no limbs at all, whose
torso almost looks like a big worm, and we see him on a table at one point,
going the entire distance in lighting a cigarette with match and cigarette in
his mouth. When he speaks, he has a normal voice.
We can look at this today, and
know what (technically) we are looking at with these people. We can be moved by
their dignity, while being (on a different level) rather in awe of how they are
used in a film whose story is childishly simple and whose overall premise, as
exploiting them, seems beyond bad taste.
What help redeem this film are the sense of community and caring
relationships between the “freaks,” which are on ample display. Barrymore
remarks on this as a big plus that makes the film worth a slot in the
“Essentials” series, though I thought her application of her usually intuitive,
enthusiastic talk and Osborne’s employment of his more encyclopedic comments
seemed a little shy of what was needed to help “buffer” this film for average
viewers. I would say the “Essentials” series didn’t engage in exploitation of this film nearly as much
as did the studio when originally making it, though I thought helpful
commentary in the TCM showing could have been added, such as to give the names
of some of the conditions, or to maybe give some further background on the
individual disabled performers shown. (Maybe a lot of their bios are lost
today.)
Driving home how almost-morbidly
juvenile this film is in a way is the dwarf couple at the center of the story.
They seem at least in their thirties, and have Germanic accents, while they
have childlike high-pitched voices. They rather remind you of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz (1939). You almost
might think they are kids playing dwarfs, but then something about the dignity
and nuances of the voices and faces tells you they are older. There is
something rather cute, sadly so, about them. An added layer of maudlin-ness is
added with the goofy story, where the male is taken in by the overture-making
normal-sized woman, and he tries to reassure his dwarf female friend, who seems
unable to do anything but helplessly look on, including at a cacophonous
wedding party.
If the film sounds like a
garishly amateurish Ed Wood mess, actually Freaks’
costumes, scenes, and cinematography all seem first-rate for its time. The
print TCM used has jump-cuts (as from frames lost); and a “coda” sequence at
the end, where the dwarf couple seem “home” and reconciled in some way, is such
bad condition that it seems to have been developed from a deteriorated negative.
(Supposedly, according to Maltin, prints of this film have circulated without
the coda; so for this one, maybe a coda-less print was appended with a new
print of the coda made from a crappy old negative.) If the total print TCM
showed is the best that can be managed, it goes to show that, efforts such as
Martin Scorsese’s aside, some old films are lost to full preservation; but this film is enough of a historical
curio that, if you want to view it, there is still a flea-market-cruddy version
you can view. The sound, also, makes some of the talk a little hard to
follow—but the script is dumb, so that doesn’t really matter.
As Barrymore says, the positive
relationships among the “freaks’” subculture are what make this film worth
viewing (and these displays of love aren’t only a function of the pedestrian
script, but also apparently a function of the real affection the actors had for
one another, plus maybe a result of the director’s instructions to “smile a
lot” to add some sugar for the “great unwashed,” who were seeking value for
their dollars on going to view this film).
But Freaks also is interesting to ponder, with a bit of
keep-your-patience awe at what seems on some levels to be the epitome of poor
taste. It also shows how people years ago felt about their fellows who had birth
defects—the sufferers weren’t cut out for much else than the “freak show” at a
circus. But this didn’t stop these people from living with some level of
dignity.
Quick Vu: John Waters’ comic-sensationalism products, reaching their
height in Pink Flamingos
John Waters gets notice in
the media now and then. There was something about him in a long interview-type
piece in New Jersey’s
Star-Ledger two or three months back.
Now he looks old, and with his thin moutache and dapper clothing, he seems like
an “elder statesman” of a fairly-obvious homosexual cultural pillar, but then
you might ask, “What is he a pillar of? Must be something, but what?”
He was the king of what might be
called shock cinema, with his defining films released in the late 1960s and
through the 1970s. He started with self-financed, really-cheapo films that were
as scrounged together as they were “affronting” in subject matter. He very
slowly inched toward his version of “respectability” so that, by 1988, he
released his most commercial film, Hairspray.
Now you might hear a bell ringing.
Hairspray had the same weird “odyssey of dramatic properties” that
also befell another edgy-comedy work, Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968). That latter film, a classic in its own right
(and made by the same studio that made the much more mainstream The Graduate [1967]), about two sleazy
Broadway producers-cum-losers who concoct a scheme to mount a show they feel
will be sure to fail, leaving them with the money, anchored Mel Brooks as a
director, and has been considered by some to be his best film, or if not, up
there with another great by him, Young
Frankenstein (1974). Years later, The
Producers was famously made into a Broadway production that became a huge
hit, featuring the defining performances of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Then a
film was made of the Broadway show, directed by Susan Stroman (who had directed the
Broadway show previously), with Mel Brooks advising behind the scenes.
The same basic thing happened
with Hairspray. Many years after its 1988
film release, it was made into a Broadway play, seemingly on the same premise
as The Producers—make a play out of
an old, black-humorous movie, and cash in. Hairspray
also did well on Broadway, though I think not nearly as well as The Producers—and it, too, was made, following
at least some of the play’s particular parameters, into a movie-of-the-play.
The movie featured John Travolta in drag playing the mother of the girl
who wants to win a dance contest, a centerpiece of the plot.
I remember, when out on one of
my jaunts, hearing someone—maybe in her thirties—asking quite innocently, at a
movie-DVD kiosk or such, why was John Travolta playing the mother?
Well, now you’re bumping
unknowingly into a key feature of the John Waters approach to filmmaking.
One of Waters’ key collaborators
through many of his films was Divine, a transvestite who played roles in
many of his films. It’s hard to say how this came to define this film auteur’s
body of work, but that’s about what John Waters was about, and I don’t mean
this dismissively: films rich in poor-taste, if not deeply shocking, humor,
with a transvestite playing a lead role. Divine played the mother in Waters’
film of Hairspray. Hence Harvey Fierstein played the mother on Broadway. And John Travolta donned the
fake breasts and so on for the movie-of-the-play.
Does this all seem to say, “Only
in America”?
In the early 1980s, there was a
Waters film retrospective, probably at the Circle Theater on 21st Street just outside the
GWU campus in Washington, D.C. I saw a few of his films there (in
1983, if not also some other year). He even appeared at an event in a theater
on one end of Georgetown.
I had never heard of him before, but I guess it was after I saw one or more of
his works that I wondered what this man was like. He was slight of build,
fastidiously dressed, with a pencil-thin moustache—he seemed too effete or
frail to be a fount of shockingly bad taste. And I remember that when someone
asked him what his upcoming film (not Hairspray,
I think) was about, he said that his Roman Catholic faith made him
superstitious about talking about something like that, as if he would be
counting his chickens before they hatched, and he didn’t want to jinx the
project, or such. In short, he was an understandable kind of sensitive artist.
I saw Pink Flamingos (1972) in summer 1983, my first big summer in D.C.,
and I’ve always recalled it as I noted it in my journal—as being in amazingly
shocking taste. (Not my exact words.) I probably laughed with it several times
then, and some images are so memorable, you don’t need to see it again. I mean,
one feature is a body part singing that doesn’t ordinarily sing. ’Nough said.
The film is about two trashy
families (these words aren’t out of place, I think) who are vying for the
“title” (wherever that may come from) of the trashiest family around.
