Film Studies: Freaks? That'll be the audience

Who could get a film called Freaks released today? The emotive title is so flagrantly incorrect, you would have to fall back on something like Disadvantaged People these days – though Monsters is still jolly and promising, as well as one of the dictionary's alternate meanings for "freaks", as in "some strange deviation from nature". The title was passed in 1932 , but Tod Browning's famous film was banned in Britain until 1963. Yet today, as the NFT brings it back (with Browning's later and tamer film, The Devil-Doll), Freaks is rated certificate 12, which hardly fulfils the NFT's trembling promise: "A demonic duo of spine-tingling chillers".

I can't believe that Freaks will terrify you, 70 years after it was made, though I'd be surprised if you weren't intrigued and gently disturbed – as if, holding a girl's hand in the dark, you gradually counted four fingers. Or six. Or holding some other part of the lady, you began to surmise a similar departure from Gray's Anatomy. But how did this subversive and stealthy film come to be made at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio most pledged to wholesomeness and a tidy uniformity in pretty people?

You may be relieved to learn that MGM was prompted simply by greed, not any urge to redefine bodily standards. Production head Irving Thalberg was as responsible as anyone, in that he had been a fond supporter of Lon Chaney, a silent screen star who found great psychic satisfaction in creating desperate images of deformity and pain. In particular, in The Unholy Three (1925), The Road to Mandalay (1926), The Unknown (1927) and West of Zanzibar (1928) – all directed by Tod Browning – Chaney had used his fabulous make-up box and his zest for contortion to play a series of grotesques. And those films had turned out big hits.

But as sound came in, and Chaney died in 1930, so Browning moved to Universal to make the first sound Dracula, with Bela Lugosi taking over a role intended originally for Chaney. That Dracula is neither as beautiful nor as alarming as James Whale's Frankenstein, made the year before. But Thalberg wanted Browning back at Metro and that's why he agreed to Freaks, a project that Browning had nursed into being with his friend, the midget Harry Earles, who had acted in The Unholy Three.

Browning (from Kentucky) was a kid who really ran away to join the circus, before joining D W Griffith in 1915. He loved circus stories: in The Unknown, Chaney had played a criminal on the run who hides out in a circus and pretends he has no arms while wooing Joan Crawford (she is horrified by the thought of being embraced!). So Browning proposed Freaks, another circus melodrama in which a trapeze artist marries a midget (Earles) to steal his money, only to earn the inspired vengeance of the community of "freaks". It was Browning's coup to suggest that real "freaks" (from Barnum & Bailey) would be hired to act in the picture.

There was consternation at Metro. Louis B Mayer was against the picture, but he gave Thalberg his head, if only to prove that the young genius could make mistakes, too. So the picture went ahead and authentic human aberrations had their moment. Of course, Browning endows them with charm, wisdom and every valuable sentiment. Warped to the outward eye, they are fine people. And there is real humour. One twin of a joined pair is kissed, but her sister feels the thrill. It's not going too far to see Freaks having an influence on Buñuel or David Lynch. Though it remains a savage melodrama, the pathos is touching and the creeping reversal of ordinary values teaches us to be wary of smooth skin and flawless design.

The film was a disaster, losing over $150,000 (about half of what it cost), in the same year that Metro made a fortune on the nearly naked Tarzan the Ape Man. Audience weaklings were fainting and in Britain the picture was banned – not so much because it was frightening, as because of the sensational exploitation of "disadvantaged people". But it's well worth seeing now, so long as you don't go determined to be horrified. Freaks is an important picture historically in that it is the first time I can think of when Hollywood questioned its own orthodoxy of beauty. Beyond that, it is fascinating to see the beginning of a bridge between the circus theatrics of Lon Chaney (a pioneer of horror) and the uncanny poetry of misplaced body parts and freaky human energy (as in "sex freak" – where "freak" is not simply pejorative) in David Cronenberg. As ever, of course, the real monsters at the movies are to be found sheltering in the dark – holding hands, or whatever. They are called "the audience".

d.thomson@independent.co.uk