The genesis of MGM's
Freaks was a magazine piece by Ted Robbins titled
Spurs. The story involved a terrible revenge enacted by a mean-spirited circus midget upon his normal-sized wife. In adapting
Spurs for the screen, writers
Willis Goldbeck,
Leon Gordon,
Edgar Allan Wolf, and
Al Boasberg 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"
Harry Earles plays Hans, who falls in love with long-legged trapeze artist Cleopatra (
Olga Baclanova). 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 (
Henry Victor). 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
Tod Browning'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
Daisy, Siamese twins
Violet and
Daisy Hilton, legless
Johnny Eck, armless-legless
Randian (who rolls cigarettes with his teeth), androgynous
Josephine-Joseph, "pinheads"
Schlitzie,
Elvira,
Jennie Lee Snow, and so on. Upon its initial release,
Freaks 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
Nature's Mistakes,
Freaks was eventually restored to its original release print.
![Lawman: The Complete Second Season [5 Discs]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0888574336486_p0_v4_s90x140.jpg "Lawman: The Complete Second Season [5 Discs]")
![Mississippi Masala [Criterion Collection]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0715515272315_p0_v4_s90x140.jpg "Mississippi Masala [Criterion Collection]")