[Despite] its moments of deliberate, grotesque shock, [Freaks] is shot through with—not just compassion, but something higher; respect. Tod Browning shows us a dwarf couple first—and for a few seconds the first 'big person' whom we see seems the deformed one.

The film has sufficient humanity to permit itself a tragicomic tone, about the emotional conflicts of the half-man, half-woman, resembling some anatomical apotheosis of the transvestite theme in Psycho. There is even some comic relief—it's true that at the press-show on one actually laughed, but the mood is there. When one Siamese twin gets pinched her sister feels it too, which raises interesting speculations as to the in-law's responses to her yokefellow's wedding-night.

Let's make no mistake: an uncompromising film in a censor-free society would have gone nearer the knuckle in evoking, warmly, the psychological consequences of this double-menage, and, in principle, the same...