“Can a fully grown woman ever come to love a midget?” asks the tagline of Tod Browning’s 1932 bizarro curio movie called Freaks. Just try to guess the answer. While Browning’s previous film Dracula lived in a world of gothic atmosphere, Freaks has a more fly-on-the-wall characteristic set firmly in reality. The movie unfolds like a soap opera, and very little would seem out of the ordinary if the actors were all, well, normal. But in this soap opera, there is indeed a love triangle of two sweet and naive little people and a regular-sized money-hungry witch of a woman. And those are just the main characters, three of many. The most astonishing question to ask is how this movie ever got made at all.

The film takes place at the background of a sideshow circus, where various kinds of people go on about their lives. The A story concerns trapeze artist Cleopatra, who has an admirer by the name of Hans, a German midget. She agrees to marry him, but it’s soon thought by friends of Hans, especially the jealous Frienda, that Cleopatra is only after his money. She’s clearly flirting with another more normal individual and making fun of side-show performers, like the Bird Lady, the Bearded Lady, the Human Skeleton, and the Half Woman, Half Man (oh my!). The freaks all come together in the end to take matters in their own hands.

The film doesn’t work so well as a whole, with a particularly quick and unsatisfying ending, but there are lot of superb little moments that definitely make the movie worth watching. Many of the sideshow characters, played by mostly non-actors, are a marvel to behold. Freaks is the only movie, at least to my knowledge, to feature an array of actual real abnormal sideshow performers in a purely narrative sense. While some of the storylines are interesting enough, it’s the crudely voyeuristic curiosity in watching these people taking part in a clean narrative 30’s movie that makes for a kind of fascinating experience.

There are parts of the movie that drag, however, especially in bits that involve just Cleopatra and her endlessly laughing friend. Also, Frieda seems to be in the movie more than anyone, and while her unabashed love for Hans is sweet, she gets a little grating at times. The finale, set in the rain, featuring all the freaks going after Cleopatra, is by far the best scene in the movie. Haunting and chilling, it promises the only true “horror” moments in the film. The movie blows it though by cutting away from an awkward scream from Cleopatra to a laughable resolution scene showing what happened to her. The end of the movie just doesn’t feel right. There wasn’t a lot of doubt in preparing for this kind of fault, since Browning’s previous film Dracula ended so terribly.

Freaks isn’t all that great, but it serves as a fascinating piece of history, putting a group of people on film that in most circumstances would never have seen the light of celluloid. At a shocking short running time of 62 minutes, it can be swallowed in a pretty fast gulp, and it’s definitely worth watching for anyone with an interest in the horror films of the early 1930’s. A second tagline for the movie reads, “The strangest, the most startling human story ever screened!” Well, not quite. But strange it certainly is.