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Freaks
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Freaks
Current price: $14.99
Barnes and Noble
Freaks
Current price: $14.99
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The genesis of MGM's
was a magazine piece by Ted Robbins titled
. The story involved a terrible revenge enacted by a mean-spirited circus midget upon his normal-sized wife. In adapting
for the screen, writers
,
, and
retained the circus setting and the little man-big woman wedding, all the while de-vilifying the midget and transforming the woman into the true "heavy" of the piece. German "little person"
plays Hans, who falls in love with long-legged trapeze artist Cleopatra (
). Discovering that Hans is heir to a fortune, Cleopatra inveigles him into a marriage, all the while planning to bump off her new husband and run away with brutish strongman Hercules (
). What she doesn't reckon with is the code of honor among circus freaks: "offend one, offend them all." What set this film apart from director
's earlier efforts was the fact that genuine circus and carnival sideshow performers were cast as the freaks: Harry Earles and his equally diminutive sister
, Siamese twins
and
, legless
, armless-legless
(who rolls cigarettes with his teeth), androgynous
, "pinheads"
, and so on. Upon its initial release,
was greeted with such revulsion from movie-house audiences that MGM spent the next 30 years distancing themselves as far from the project as possible. For many years available only in a truncated reissue version titled
was eventually restored to its original release print.