"Halfway through the screening, a lot of people got up and ran out."
This is how artistic director Merrill Pye summed up the bewilderment of the
Freaks
team after its preview, in January 1932. As is the case today, 90 years ago test screenings were common to decide on the final cut of a film.
In the case of
Freaks
, the defection of so many viewers made everything else seem secondary.
Hardly anyone was happy with the result.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
President Louis B. Mayer
He blamed producer Irving Thalberg, who had already been lectured by an angry delegation of executives during filming.
With no voice or vote, the film's director, Tod Browning, had to agree to damage control surgery.
On Thalberg's orders, 30 minutes of the footage was mutilated.
That was the version released on February 12 of the same year, at the Fox Criterion in Los Angeles.
As he had done in
Human Claws
(1927), Tod Browning visited a cloudy world in Freaks, lost in the night, full of discomfort and ambiguity.
What was new about him was that, in this case, his evocation of traveling circuses brought together a cast made up of
actors with disabilities
.
Unkindly, this detail prevents us from enjoying the film through the gothic haze of
Dracula
or
Frankenstein
.
Perhaps the director, as Stephen King argues in
Danse Macabre
, "made the mistake of using real freaks in the movie. Maybe we're only really comfortable with horror as long as we can see the zipper on the monster's back."
There is a very illustrative message that AN Diehl, head of the film committee of the National Association of Women, sent to William H. Hays, president of the all-powerful MPPDA (Movie Producers and Distributors of America) and
promoter of self-censorship in Hollywood
.
She asked Diehl in that letter why the producers of
Freaks
could "lower themselves to the ignominy of financially exploiting human pain, deformity, and suffering."
Therein lies the key, or one of the keys, to the position that was later taken by many other associations and rating committees.
An attitude that was based on precepts of
the Hays Code
, and which, contagiously, also thrived in England, where the film was banned for 30 years.
The background to this conviction is clear.
The censors acted after reading the lobbyists' leaflets
.
Which also explains other similar decisions.
Consider the logical protests by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People after the release of
Song of the South
(1946) for perpetuating "a glorified image of slavery."
Or in the campaign that the National Association of Viewers and Listeners launched in the UK at the beginning of the 1980s against certain extreme horror films,
the so-called video nasties.
What logic links these denunciations with the overwhelming success that
cancellation culture
has today ?
Perhaps the moral typecasting has not changed, but there is a readjustment of its volume that we owe to the
woke
ideology and, of course, to the internet.
As Twitter drums roll, this Orwellian move is beginning to take its toll on classic cinema
.
As hypersensitive as Diehl after the release of
Freaks
, his activists seem delighted with the demolition of cinematic monuments.
For any circustance?
Unclear.
There are especially serious sins.
For example, the presence of a white actor made up to appear black, as in
El cantor de jazz
(1927),
En alas de la danza
(1936) and
Othello
(1965).
The same goes for the whites who pretend to be Asian in
The Mask of Fu Manchu
(1932),
The King and I
(1956) or
Breakfast at Tiffany
's (1961).
Let's not talk about the use of
racist stereotypes
, in the style of the ravens in
Dumbo
(1941).
And even less of the
machismo
, unmistakable in the first
James Bond
.
These taboos, when punished retroactively, show the madness with which historical consciousness is administered.
"What does the moral order consist of today?" writes
Pascal Bruckner
in
The Temptation of Innocence
: "In the conventional cult of despair, the religion of obligatory whining."
And since historical processes are judged from a raging present, the new inquisitors
feel comfortable looking for signs of racism, sexism and colonialism in the old celluloid
.
In short, honoring the point of view of the victims - which is valid for all times - forces us to file charges against the cinema that our grandparents saw.
To square these accusations with the decisive role of the industry, there are only two options: withdraw the most controversial titles from the programming or appease those offended with the introductory video of some unsuspecting academic.
I will not be the one to question the maturity of those who need to be warned from the screen by Professor
Jacqueline Stewart
, head of the
Black Cinema House
organization , before facing
Gone with the Wind
on HBO Max.
For these
neopuritans
, assuming as adults the historical context of any work of art, with its gray scale, is equivalent to consecrating injustice.
But there is still more.
It is shocking to see that some intend to turn classic cinema, despite the distance that separates it from our reality, into another tool
to continue drawing red lines
.
If any lesson can be drawn from this, it is that childishness will always be the worst way to scrutinize the past.
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