Freaks

"Rien n'est beau que le laid, le laid seul est aimable." Circus of life, a day off on private property, madame's outcasts playing in lyrical long shots swiftly interrupted. "Children? They're monsters!" Sideshow attractions of various sizes and shapes, a jolly and gifted bunch: Johnny Eck "the Half Boy" is quick on his hands, the Armless Girl (Frances O'Connor) brings a chalice to her lips with her toes, Prince Randian the Living Torso lights his own cigarette in a beguiling bit of documentary. The blonde trapeze artist (Olga Baclanova) strings along the moneyed dwarf (Harry Earles), behind his back she cackles derisively with the strongman (Henry Victor). A wedding mocked, "a loving cup" rejected, a carny code enforced. "Offend one, you offend them all." Tod Browning's masterpiece on the compassion and terror and strangeness of being human, it might be Buñuel on the MGM lot except that Buñuel already was filming Las Hurdes. The clown (Wallace Ford) and the seal trainer (Leila Hyams) comprise a Nice Normal Couple to contrast with the Cruel Normal Couple, though the spotlight belongs to the vivid oddities. Conjoined twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton), one gets a kiss and the other tingles, elsewhere the silent gaze of the hermaphroditic muse (Josephine Joseph), cf. Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète. "I think she likes you, but he don't." The camera dollies in on Earles in bed as his face shifts from smiling baby to glowering cuckold, the scheming vixen steps out and notices the cluster of baleful little eyes beneath the wagon, a literal underclass. In the mud with knives they contort themselves into the beasts of nightmares, Beauty is summarily cut down to size. "Funny gag, isn't it?" "Yeah, I'm laughing myself sick." From showbiz to institution, Herzog's Even Dwarfs Started Small. With Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Roscoe Ates, Schlitzie, Peter Robinson, Olga Roderick, Angelo Rossitto, and Edward Brophy. In black and white.