Freaks (1932)

  First off, it is astonishing how our language styles and usage have changed since the 30's.  You absolutely could not have a poster with that kind of tagline today.  I am not bemoaning that fact at all.  I cringed a little when I pasted that picture here since I hope I would never be the kind of blogger that would deliberately slight any group of people.  But that is the official poster for the film.  Refusing to look at it won't make it retroactively disappear.

Hans (Harry Earles) is a little person with a traveling circus.  He and his fiancee, Frieda (Daisy Earles), are the leaders of the circus' sideshow performers.  But Hans also has an eye for trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) and begins to woo her.  She responds to his flirtations but secretly has a plan with strongman Hercules (Henry Victor) to poison Hans and steal his inheritance.  It's up to the rest of the sideshow to stop the evil duo.

Despite the poster, this is an extremely sympathetic movie.  Tod Browning based most of it around his own experiences working in a circus and employed actual sideshow performers in the film.  These are some of the most famous acts of the time, including conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, Johnny Eck the "half man", and Prince Randian "the living torso".  The film is also very clear about portraying the performers as regular people just trying to earn a living while the "normal" ones are the villains, out to exploit them.

On a personal note, when I was in high school my mother gave me a book called Very Special People, which was a series of biographies of human oddities and sideshow performers.  I must have read that thing a hundred times, to the point where I could have recited biographies from memory.  I never fit in with the majority of my classmates and I was bullied quite a bit.  Reading about these individuals helped me so much and not in a "well, it could be worse, at least I don't have a third leg" kind of way.  These people were born in a time where they were barely considered human beings, they were exploited for profit, and kept barely better than animals in some cases.  The Hilton twins had to sue their own mother for control of their money in order to have any sense of autonomy.  None of them ever lost hope.  They dealt with horrible shit day after day and they persevered.  They worked as hard as they could for their slice of happiness while people pointed and prodded and used them as punchlines.

So if any of you out there feel hopeless or dejected, I encourage you to find that book.  May it help you realize that the people who belittle others are the true freaks and that there is so much joy waiting for you that no one can take away.