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Macleans - Happy Birthday, Violet and Daisy
The most famous Siamese twins of the 20th century were born exactly 100 years ago, by Mark Steyn

What they really felt about life, we can only guess. But Browning’s Freaks remains a compelling glimpse of a lost tradition. The plot’s simple. Cleopatra, a blowsy Teutonic bitch of a trapeze artist, is putting the moves on Hans the midget in order to get his money. Hans disregards the warnings, putting them down to jealousy: “Let them laugh, the swine!” In this community, the regular full-sized circus folk are corrupt and conniving and emotionally stunted, and the genuine human warmth is found among the misfits. Thus, Browning is an early pioneer of the now conventional Hollywood thesis of the self-defined “alternative family.” And his direction is so skilled that, although you never quite lose your awareness of their physical deformity, he does succeed in shifting your point of view to the freaks’ perspective — literally, in fact, since most of the smaller creatures spend much of their time under the circus wagons rather than up inside them — and making Cleopatra and her violent drunken lunk Hercules seem like the real deformations of the human spirit. The wedding-feast scene is one of the best examples in film history of a fully realized, self-contained world existing on its own terms. Freaks starts off feeling like weird, overspecialized porn but, by its closing, is both touching and moral. Violet and Daisy Hilton were born too late for the Chang & Eng big-time, but they had their moment and they made their mark.

He exposed conjoined twins to hatred and contempt by calling them “freaks”!