Never seeing it before, I found the film “Freaks” from Tod
Browning to be an excellent movie. Being a TCM-er, I have never seen this film
and felt that the casting of actual people such as the “Human Torso”, made the
film connect a lot more and put accented more on the idea. Aside from others
who have posted about the film, I felt there to be some sense of community
amongst the performers even before the wedding scene. We see the woman who took
care of the smaller ones and took them out to the forest to play during the
day. Even though a few of the men had laughed at her in spending her time with
them, she never cared. There was seriously no shame taken with Phroso or Venus
in conversing with the “freaks” with the sameness as they would with others.
This brings me to what I saw with this film is that most of the people in this
small circus community, had a sense of righteousness regardless of the nasty
terrible schemes of Cleopatra and Hercules, which is noticed much more toward
the end of the film.
Another aspect of the film that we had time to talk about
was the “humanization” of the “freaks” and how they lived their lives through
the movie. From many examples derived from the film, one could be the
conversation about relationships between Frieda and Venus. The fact that they
were both in the conversation talking about Frieda’s worries about Hans, it was
conversation that I didn’t expect to see that early on in the film. While
looking around for some clips, I came across these pieces of commentary on the
“Freaks” film. I’m not too fond with what one of them described the “Half Man”,
Johnny Eck, as “very articulate”. Other than that, it’s interesting to learn
more about his life. I found a clip from the same film about Prince Randian who
played the “Living Torso”. Both had long amazing careers in sideshows. PS: Apparently, there is a Johnny Eck Museum?
The website is pretty unclear about parts of their collections, but it was
interesting to look at.
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