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"We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us! Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble!"
Once you've heard this chanted by a tableful of "freaks" in Tod Browning's Freaks, it, like many of the images in the film, will be seared into your brain forever. The chant would be vaguely disturbing even if it were sincere, but is doubly so since the person they are singing it to is a circus performer who looks upon the freaks with undisguised contempt.
Browning, who had had such success with similar sordid subject matter in his films with Lon Chaney, set Freaks in a circus sideshow quite like the kind Browning worked in in his youth. Though the film stars typical dependable MGM performers like Leila Hyams and Wallace Ford, the real stars of the film are real side-show performers, the freaks of the title, most of whom lived their lives in circuses quite like this one. In Freaks, the physically distorted are the "heroes"; the villains of the film are "normal" people.
Though it was little-seen in the immediate decades after its initial release, Browning's twisted circus sideshow fable has had such an influence since that it seems downright prototypical. From Stephen King novels to Tales From the Crypt, from David Lynch's The Elephant Man to EC Comics, those images from Freaks have seared the brain of many a creator.
Freaks is the sort of unytpical MGM film which only could have been made while Irving Thalberg was in charge. No later moguls at the company would have had the reckless audacity or inclination to engineer such a film. Not to say Freaks was accepted during its time; the film was so disturbing to MGM brass, test audiences and exhibitors that it was quickly cut by 25 minutes and then taken off the market altogether. Browning's career never really recovered.
Even with much of the most outrageous material cut from the film, its not surprising MGM got cold feet. The EC-like revenge plot is still lucidly told, even with an outageously "happy" ending shot last minute and tagged on.
Freaks is available on DVD.
The Squaw Man...where does one start?
Based on a 1905 play which had four Broadway revivals, the Squaw Man plot now seems archaic: an English aristocrat, Capt. James Wynnegate (Warner Baxter) flees England, honorably taking the blame for stealing funds he did not steal to save the reputation of the woman he loves (Eleanor Boardman) and her husband (right!).
He then does what any English aristocrat would do in that situation: becomes a cowboy in Montana, where he marries an Indian maiden, Naturich (Lupe Velez), he'd rescued from a local thug (Charles Bickford) - they have a son. Seven years later, the law shows up to arrest Naturich for the murder of the thug (she had shot him, to rescue Wynnegate). The very same day, Roland Young as a family friend and Eleanor Boardman show up to take Wynnegate home (her husband's now dead) and Wynnegate is convinced to send the son back back to England and, heartbroken, Naturich kills herself. The (abrupt) end.
Cecil B. DeMille's movies are often best enjoyed as surrealistic alternate versions of D. W. Griffith's movies. Griffith traded almost solely in Victorian-era melodrama. DeMille did, too, but with a sensational, bizarre bent that is best exemplified here by a cut from British high society to a hilarious desolate shot of the forlorn, wild west "Buzzard's Pass".
(Yep, I'm aware the transition is there in the 1905 source material, but DeMille finds a way to make it seem crazier. He was a master at creating absurd, only-in-Hollywood, leaps in logic. In Fool's Paradise (1921), he deliciously lets his hero pursue his dream girl from a Mexican border town to Siam, where she dances for a prince in front of a pit of alligators. Yes!! I wouldn't at all be surprised if David Lynch wasn't thinking of DeMille when he incongruously had his film director, Adam, meeting The Cowboy at a stereotypical ranch in Beechwood Canyon in Mulholland Drive - itself a critique of Hollywood's absurdities.)
The Squaw Man is certainly watchable for those who just want an involving story. DeMille knows how to tell a story that people want to see, even creaky, predictable stories, and he must have loved this one - this is the third time he filmed it. Even when the ending is telegraphed, you want to see what happens next. Lupe Velez gives a genuinely sympathetic performance here, and the ending is sad no matter how you look at it.
All the actors have given better, more expressive performances in other films and the reason is the dialogue is stilted here, old-fashioned for 1931, requiring stilted mannerisms, especially in the beginning scenes in England. The scenes with Velez and Baxter fare better, and Dickie Moore as their son acts with an ease the others aren't allowed. He doesn't care about the lofty source material - he's just havin' a good time!
The Squaw Man has been released on a Warner Archives DVD-R, along with the 1914 version.
Since April, 2002, Mary and I have undertaken an ambitious (some would say foolhardy) agenda of film watching: we are watching every MGM film which still exists (many no longer do), in as close to chronological order as possible. Our agenda encompasses all feature films released by MGM from the studio's creation, in 1924, until 1960, when the classic era of systematic Hollywood filmmaking was, for all intents and purposes, over.
MGM was probably the grandest of the Hollywood studios. It lacked the hard-hitting edge of Warner Bros., but made up for it through sheer spectacle, high, glossy production values and, as their tagline proclaimed, "more stars than there are in heaven". It's also worth noting that proto-EC and proto-Lynchian films such as Tod Browning's Freaks and The Unknown were produced by MGM, as were films of visionary decadence by Erich Von Stroheim, (recommendation: see Stroheim's Greed on a double-bill with P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Only the strong will survive). MGM also destroyed the career of Buster Keaton, another fascinating but depressing spectacle. Last but not least, MGM featured a trinity of top actresses in the '20s and '30s: Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford. Sometimes sublime, sometimes mediocre and sometimes bizarre (or all three in the same movie), their films were always fascinating.
We began by watching The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the first film MGM released (though not the first film made by the new studio). It is also the film which made Rudolph Valentino a star. Since then, we have watched approximately 115 films, and are halfway through 1931. We're using, as a reference guide, The MGM Story, by John Douglas Eames, which lists films MGM released by year. (If you'd like to follow along with our movie watching, buy a copy of The MGM Story and have at it.) As films from years we've already covered have been made available, we've "backtracked", watching that film, then continuing on with the "current" year. I'll be posting here short reviews of the films we watch in the series, and posting reviews of earlier films we've watched when it's possible to go back and review them.
I'll also be posting miscellanious thoughts and lists on our crazy endeavour and we welcome your comments, comparisons, suggestions, or just plain help in tracking down elusive MGM films we've not yet been able to find. If you have a question about MGM or an MGM film,please post it here. I don't claim to be an expert on MGM, merely a guy watching a bunch of MGM movies. Then again, watching 115 MGM movies in a row can fill your head with a lot of near-useless facts. If you spot mistakes or wish to post clarifications or alternate opinions, feel free to post your comments.
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