Freaks

“Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?”

Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), a trapeze artist in a traveling circus, agrees to marry Hans (Harry Earles), the small-statured leader of the sideshow performers, after learning what he stands to inherit. Tod Browning cast real sideshow performers and filmed them eating, quarreling and looking after one another as an ordinary household. The film keeps asking who in the circus gets treated as a person and who as a spectacle.