The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton by Dean Jensen

Author:Dean Jensen [Jensen, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography & Autobiography
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Published: 2012-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

If Daisy and Violet had traveled to Hollywood in the belief that their roles in Freaks would lead to regular employment in the movies, their expectations may have vaporized the moment the film was given its earliest preview screenings. Merrill Pye, the film’s art director, was present for the first of the previews in early January of 1932. He was left with this painful memory: “Halfway through the previews, a lot of people got up and ran out. They didn’t walk out. They ran out.”23

Another of the film’s architects, production manager J. J. Cohn, said one woman claimed to have been so traumatized by seeing a preview of Freaks that she suffered a miscarriage and, as a result, tried to bring a wrongful death suit against MGM.

Browning was desolated by the test audiences’ responses to his film. He and a team of production employees immediately went to work on re-editing, employing a kind of slash-and-burn technique. When they were finished, they had excised fully a third of the celluloid, reducing the film’s running time from an hour and a half to just over sixty minutes. Hacked from the film were some of its grisliest scenes, including its depiction of the freaks jumping the circus queen Cleopatra during a violent midnight rainstorm and gleefully changing her from a creature of seraphic beauty into a “Duck Lady,” a monstrosity of scrambled facial features who was incapable of emitting any sound other than mallard-like squawks. Also scissored were some of the film’s more twisted sexual content, including a scene in which an amorous seal seems intent on ravishing the Turtle Girl.

After all the excisions were made, Freaks was released for presentation in the commercial houses in February 1932. Just as Irving Thalberg had feared during the early stages of its production, the movie set off a firestorm. A court barred the movie from being screened anywhere in Atlanta, Georgia, when the secretary of the city’s Board of Review condemned the picture as “loathsome, obscene, grotesque, and bizarre.” Several of Browning’s earlier films had been well received in the United Kingdom, but the British were not welcoming this time. While Great Britain had no shortage of carnivals, circuses, and wax museums that still exhibited human freaks, the Commonwealth forbade the showing of the film anywhere in England, Scotland, or Wales, and kept the ban in place for four decades. Surprisingly, perhaps, Freaks wasn’t banned in Boston. It was, however, savaged by the city’s newspaper critics. The Boston Herald said the movie’s “sadistically cruel plot savors nearly of perversion.” The Boston Evening Transcript suggested that it was time to strip Browning of his title as “magician of the macabre” and then posed the question, “Where is that artistry that used to be … part of [Browning’s] trademark?”

Concerned that the negative fallout from Freaks might forever sully the name of MGM and doom its future projects, the studio finally caved in to the citizen’s groups, critics, and politicians who castigated the film as the most glaring example of all that was excremental and pestilential about Hollywood.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.