TCM Greatest Classic Films: Horror (House of Wax, The Haunting, Freaks, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (DVD)

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Warner Bros. own what is probably the most extensive back catalogue of great older films on the planet, and they never tire of devising new ways to repackage them. In 2009 they began a series of sets they call the "TCM (Turner Classic Movies) Greatest Classic Films Collection," which package four classic movies per set. Although the studio has released all of the films separately, the collections are a relatively inexpensive way for fans to acquire a large number of great motion pictures for a mere pittance. Indeed, these sets are among the best values in the history of DVDs.

The set reviewed here, "Horror," is in WB's third wave of collections and offers four top-notch Warner Bros. and MGM horror classics. (For the other collections in WB's third wave, see the closing paragraph.) Each set contains two double-sided DVDs, one movie per side, enclosed in a double slim-line keep case, with a slipcover and unique bonus materials. Let's look at the movies chronologically.

FREAKS
Among the most controversial movies ever made, Tod Browning's 1932 production "Freaks" found itself edited almost everywhere it played, then outright banned by censors in some cities, states, and countries, finally forcing the studio, MGM, to withdraw it from circulation before a year was out. The public didn't rediscover it until the 1960s, but it continues to this day to remain a subject for debate.

Is it a compassionate plea for love and understanding among all people, or is it merely an exploitation of human abnormality? The movie's optional prologue attempts to persuade us along the former lines, but it's not hard to see why even some of the performers in the picture later disowned it.

Screenwriters Willis Goldbeck and Leon Gordon based their script on a short story by Tod Robbins called "Spurs." Director Browning had been a successful silent filmmaker, directing Lon Chaney, Sr., in things like "The Unholy Three" and "London After Midnight," making a successful transition into talkies directing Bela Lugosi in the original, 1931 "Dracula." But after "Freaks" Browning's career went downhill fast, nobody wanting to hire him anymore, and he stepped aside in 1936 to spend the next quarter of a century in quiet retirement until his death in 1962.

The story of "Freaks" follows the affairs of a group of traveling European circus sideshow performers around the turn of the century. I say "affairs" because it appears that almost everyone in the show is sleeping with one another. This was not, however, an uncommon occurrence amongst circus people in those days, as they often dated and married within their own company. However, in this case one of the participants in a love triangle is a little person, Hans (Harry Earles), who falls in love with a normal-sized trapeze artist, Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova). At first Cleo and her boyfriend, the strong man Hercules (Henry Victor), simply laugh at the little fellow, but when they find out he has inherited a fortune, they plot to take it away from him. Cleo marries Hans and then attempts to poison him to get his money. But Hans foils the plot, and he and his buddies exact a terrible revenge.

The appeal, or repulsion, of "Freaks" resides in three areas: It's characters, its theme, and its ending.

The circus personnel fall into three camps: The normal-sized performers, the abnormal-sized performers, and the workers. It's mainly the first two groups we want to look at. Among the normal-sized performers are Phrosa, the clown, played by a wisecracking Wallace Ford, a handsome leading man who played a lot of happy-go-lucky types in early movies. He is among the few normal-sized performers in the circus who treats everyone else in the troupe, normal or odd in appearance, as equals. Then there's Venus, the beautiful young animal trainer played by Leila Hyams, who has a subplot romance with Phrosa. They're the good guys among the normal-sized folk. On the other side of the normal-sized fence are Cleopatra and her boyfriend Hercules, who are greedy, intolerant bigots. They and many of the normal-appearing circus stagehands and roustabouts are not above constantly laughing at and ridiculing the more-different show people around them.

Most important, however, and the cause for so much concern about the movie, are the "freaks" as circus parlance calls them. The word "freak" conjures up for most of us negative feelings with prejudicial connotations, a politically incorrect term to say the least. We prefer today to think of people out of the ordinary in size or shape as simply being "different" but in no way inferior. Not so with old-fashioned circuses. According to the documentary accompanying the disc, the abnormal performers themselves freely used the term "freaks." Most of these unusual people willingly joined circuses and made profitable livings from their physical limitations. Still and all, in a movie, up there on the big screen, the public didn't buy it. Moviegoers and critics alike called the film exploitative and condemned it as scandalous. Somehow, it was all right to view freaks in a carnival sideshow but not in a movie house where audiences could go beyond their physical appearance and into their personal lives. Hypocrisy never dies.

Anyway, Browning wanted his film to be as authentic as possible and demanded the studio hire the best possible freaks from the best sideshows in the world to be in his movie. Among the stars of the film we find Harry and Daisy Earles, a brother and sister from a celebrated family of little people; the famous Hilton sisters, Violet and Daisy, conjoined, or Siamese, twins; Zip and Pip and Schlitze, microcephalics or "pinheads" as people in the trade called them; plus various others, like the human skeleton; the human worm; armless, legless people; little people; people with deformed heads; a hermaphrodite; a bearded lady; a bird lady; anything that would attract attention.

The movie's theme: That all people, no matter their size or mental condition, are equals as human beings and worthy of equivalent dignity and respect. The "freaks," poses Browning, are not the abnormally sized people in the movie but the evil people of the world who commit wicked deeds against their fellows. Cleopatra and Hercules are the freaks, not the dwarfs or pinheads or bearded ladies, whom the movie depicts as loving, caring, and kind, a part of a well-knit family. When Cleo marries Hans, his family of fellow abnormally sized persons welcomes her with open arms as one their own, a thought that repulses and infuriates her. Cleo screams at them at the wedding feast, "Freaks! Get out!"

When the studio reissued "Freaks," they preceded it with the following words of apology and warning: "With humility for the many injustices done to such people (they have no power to control their lot), we present the most startling horror story of the abnormal and the unwanted." Yet movie audiences ignored the film's plea for tolerance and its message of equality because could not get over the appearance of so many unusual, misshapen beings. Audiences also could not overcome the movie's ending, because the story shows these loving, caring people as subject to the same angers and temptations as everyone else, and moviegoers could hardly forget the vengeance they inflict. The movie's climax continues to shock, even by modern standards.

Despite the film's prologue warning that "Freaks" was a "startling horror story," Browning never meant the movie as a horror film; he meant it as a character study and morality play. The "horror" lay in the behavior of the normal people toward their unusual and unfortunate brethren, but most audiences saw the movie as a traditional horror film, and these audiences felt that the studio, MGM, and director Browning had clearly overstepped the bounds of decency by portraying such "horrible" sights on the screen. Studio censors cut over a half an hour of the film before its first release, and they made further cuts for showing in various places around the world.

The Warner Bros. studios, now the owner of the film, have restored most of what they could find, even providing three alternate endings among the disc's extras. Still, the movie is barely over an hour long, hardly enough time to develop much more than a cursory look at any of the story's many characters. And the acting of the day is rather stilted, much of it from players who had never been in any movie before, let alone a talking movie. So as pure filmmaking, "Freaks" is perhaps deficient in story, character, and design. But love it or hate it, it is the kind of film that will definitely make an impression on you.

Film rating: 7/10

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
MGM decided to remake "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in 1941 as a prestige production and lavished a good deal of money on it. They hired Victor Fleming, hot off "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," to direct, and they signed prominent actor Spencer Tracy, relative newcomer to American films Ingrid Bergman, and screen siren Lana Turner to star. The film is less an outright horror film and more a straightforward psychological study, which may not please all viewers.

Tracy himself insisted that this "Jekyll and Hyde" be no mere fright flick and that his character be fleshed out as a sadly disturbing human being. Oddly, the studio cast Ms. Turner as Jekyll's sweet, prudish fiancée, Beatrix Emery, and Bergman as the coy, temperamental barmaid, Ivy Peterson. You'd have thought it would have been the other way around, but the results are fine, even if Bergman seems a bit too cultured for the street snipe she plays. Just as oddly, the studio allowed Tracy and Turner to retain their American accents while encouraging Bergman to effect a British Cockney dialect (to emphasize her character's lower class). This circumstance requires a dedicated suspension of disbelief on the viewer's part as Bergman slips back and forth between her own pronounced Swedish intonations and the Cockney inflections she's attempting to emulate.

In this version of the story, the studio also altered the emphasis. Jekyll wants more than to release the evil in his soul; he wants to find the good in the most wicked of men. It is a noble ambition, but it doesn't always make for an interesting movie. Even Tracy's makeup is less intense than we've come to expect, not a fanged monster, for instance, but merely a sinister brute. It's realistic, to be sure, but less intriguing and a whole lot less fun than outright monster.

Film rating: 7/10

HOUSE OF WAX
When I first saw "House of Wax" as a child, it terrified me, and I couldn't go into a wax museum for years without wondering if there weren't dead bodies under the wax. In fact, I wouldn't go into a wax museum at all for the next decade. Even today the thought of a wax museum conjures up memories of that movie.

After years of playing straight dramatic roles in Hollywood, in 1953 Vincent Price started on his way to becoming a full-fledged horror-movie legend with "House of Wax." Of course, it would still be a few more years until "The Fly," but "House of Wax" was his real start. In it, he plays a genius sculptor in wax, Professor Henry Jarrod, driven insane when his partner burns down their gallery of wax creations for the insurance money. Horribly disfigured in the blaze and mad for revenge, the professor sets up a new wax museum, this time using the dead bodies of his murder victims beneath the waxy glaze. He exhibits scenes of real-life crime and violence while they are still fresh in the public mind.

Dressed in black with a hat pulled down over his face, it's easy to see where Sam Raimi got his "Darkman" inspiration. Also in the story are Phyllis Kirk as Sue Allen, a young woman who becomes suspicious of the professor when the police find her roommate, Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones), murdered, and then she turns up as a wax figure in Jarrod's exhibition. Allen's boyfriend, a sculptor named Scott Andrews (Paul Picerni) helps with the investigation, as does a policeman, Lt. Tom Brennan (Frank Lovejoy). You'll even find a very young Charles Bronson (listed in the credits as Charles Buchinsky) as Igor, a deaf mute, one of the professor's ominous assistants.

Warner Bros. based the movie on an earlier film of theirs, "Mystery of the Wax Museum" (1933). This time, however, the studio wanted not only to one-up but two-up itself. First, they made the film in the brand-new 3-D process, dubbed "Natural Vision," and, second, they used stereo sound. Although we get only the 2-D version on this DVD, we still see the evidences of 3-D prominently throughout the movie. The most famous example is that of a man advertising the opening of Jarrod's new House of Wax by banging away on elastic-tethered paddle balls in front of the building. Needless to say, the fellow would often aim the balls right at the movie audience, and in 3-D you'd see viewers actually duck their heads. There are also a number of other things flying through the air--falling bodies, kicking and dancing legs, and feet shooting out all over the place--as well as several young ladies in tight corsets whose upper torsos protrude invitingly outward.