Freaks (1932) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Tod Browning
Writer: Clarence Aaron 'Tod' Robbins, Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon
Stars: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova

The most transgressive film produced by a major American studio in the 1930s, Tod Browning’s crowning achievement has haunted the margins of cinema for nearly one hundred years. An unforgettable cast of real-life sideshow performers portray the entertainers in a traveling circus who, shunned by mainstream society, live according to their own code—one of radical acceptance for the fellow oppressed and, as the show’s beautiful but cruel trapeze artist learns, of terrifying retribution for those who cross them. Received with revulsion by viewers upon its initial release, Freaks permanently damaged Browning’s career but can now be seen for what it is: an audacious cry for understanding and a singular experience of nightmarish, almost avant-garde power.


Freaks / The Unknown / The Mystic: Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers:
The world is a carnival of criminality, corruption, and psychosexual strangeness in the twisted pre-Code shockers of Tod Browning. Early Hollywood’s edgiest auteur, Browning drew on his experiences as a circus performer to create subversive pulp entertainments set amid the world of traveling sideshows, which, with their air of the exotic and the disreputable, provided a pungent backdrop for his sordid tales of outcasts, cons, villains, and vagabonds. Bringing together two of his defining works (The Unknown and Freaks) and a long-unavailable rarity (The Mystic), this cabinet of curiosities reveals a master of the morbid whose ability to unsettle is matched only by his daring compassion for society’s most downtrodden.

Extras:
- New 2K digital restoration of Freaks, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentaries on Freaks by film scholar David J. Skal
- "Tod Browning's Freaks: The Sideshow Cinema" documentary (63:30) - Archival documentary on Freaks
- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452781/
- Reading by Skal of “Spurs,” the short story by Tod Robbins on which Freaks is based (47:44)
- Episode from 2019 of critic Kristen Lopez’s podcast Ticklish Business about disability representation in Freaks (51:54)
- Prologue to Freaks, which was added to the film in 1947 (2:36)
- Program on the alternate endings to Freaks (6:08)
- Video gallery of portraits from Freaks (10:34)