Movie-A-Day #36: Chained for Life (1951).

Today marks the birthday of conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, who became vaudeville sensations as a song-and-dance team starting as teenagers in the 1920s. They made two film appearances, as part of the lurid sideshow cast of Tod Browning’s “Freaks” (1932) and as the stars of the exploitation cheapie “Chained for Life.” In the latter film, the plot involves one of the twins murdering the husband of the other, but it was essentially just an excuse to let the audience leer at their “freakishness.” Sadly, their lives featured a lot of this sort of exploitative spectacle, and they eventually died alone and forgotten in 1969.