The Man Who Laughs

The Man Who Laughs is a 1928 picture, made during the final, decadent flowering of silent films.  (The picture was releases with a synchronized musical soundtrack featuring sound effects as well as the picture'symphonic score.)   Motion pictures have always been big business and The Man who Laughs is a lavish production intended to appeal to all audiences and devised to plaster a big grin of satisfaction on the faces of all those emerging from the spectacle.  The ghastly rictus carved into the hero's face is indicative of the film's intent to paralyze its viewers into some sort of hapless scotophilic response -- the movie is a sharp instrument intended to assuage our desire to look and behold:  the tormented grin on Gwynplaine's face is the oral equivalent of the horrible devices that prop open Malcolm McDowell's eyes in A Clockwork Orange.  

About 2/3rds of The Man Who Laughs is very good.  But the film's last third sags horribly and its incoherent story-line is implausible, even, baffling on all levels.  Presumably, the director Paul Leni, a an alumnus of the great age of German Expressionism, found himself trapped into adapting for the screen aspects of Victor Hugo's source material that either didn't lend themselves to the movies or that were suspect and dubious in the first place.  In any event, the movie's last twenty-five minutes is a complete catastrophe, a mishmash of various elements so egregious, that it casts retrospective doubt on the very good things in the earlier parts of the film.  The picture's desperation seems manifest -- it throws the whole kitchen-sink of swashbuckling melodramatic devices in the audience's face, serves up hordes of agitated extras, and even, features a heroic German Shepherd like a more plump version of Rin Tin Tin, who saves the day.

The beginning of the film has a genuine pathos and horror that is deeply affecting.  James II is a waxen mummy dozing his great bed in a room full of scary-looking life-size carved saints.  His evil jester, the hook-nosed and smirking Baskilphedro, slinks into the room through a hidden door in one of the wooden saints and announces that Clancharlie, apparently a Scottish rebel has been captured.  Clancharlie defiant in chains demands to know the whereabouts of his son, and, taunted by the iniquitous Baskilphedro drops to his knees to beg for information.  He is advised that Clancharlie's son has been sold to the Comparichos, gypsies who surgically mutilate children to transform them into monsters for freak shows.  The monarch has Clancharlie shoved into a spiked Iron Maiden ending his performance in the movie decisively.  The film then cuts to a barren seacoast where a ghost-ship rigged in icy sails is gliding through a dark, snow-draped channel.  A little boy with a scarf drawn over his jaw is abandoned as the gypsies lurch through the drifts and clamber on board the vessel.  The Comparichos are fleeing England under the leadership of their chief surgeon, Hardquannone (everyone in this movie has very weird and difficult names -- an artifact of the ye olde bullshit typical of Victor Hugo.)  The mutilated child wanders around on the frozen coast in a series of extremely impressive studio shots, stylized, theatrical and effective -- for instance, frozen corpses hanging from trees twist and turn in the gale while crows circle warily.  The boy finds a dead woman frozen under a icy swirl of snow that looks like a massive soft-serve ice-milk from Dairy Queen.  The dead woman is cradling a child.  The boy carries the child to the wagon of a traveling philosopher (probably some kind of snake-oil salesman) named Ursus.  Ursus has a German shepherd dog named "Homo" who figures importantly in the latter part of the movie.  It turns out that the baby girl rescued from the soft-serve blizzard is blind.  She grows up to be the beauteous Dea.

Ten years pass and the mutilated boy Gwynplaine is now the famous "Man who Laughs", showing his surgically enhanced smile in a sort of comic play featuring Dea.  Dea, who isn't aware of the hideous grin, decorating Gwyneplaine's chops, loves the playmate of her youth and they are engaged to be married.  The traveling players go to Southwark Fair and there encounter various thugs sent to detain them by the present monarch, Queen Anne.  Anne looks a lot like she does in Yorgos Lanthimos' equally grotesque The Favorite:  she's fat, dowdy, and perpetually scowling.  A courtier carries a parchment message introducing us to the other female lead in the film, the wicked Duchess Josiana (played wonderfully by the Russian ballerina Olga Baclanova).  People have remarked that the platinum blonde Baclanova looks a lot like Madonna during her own platinum blonde phase and she has undeniable sex appeal.  We first see her through a peephole bathing, a scene that foregrounds the movie's obsession with seeing -- there's a forbidden pleasure in looking at monsters and freaks, we spy on the beautiful naked Josiana through a peephole, and the film titillates us with glimpses of forbidden subjects.  After her bath Josiana gives the courtier a quick glimpse of her crotch and, later, at the Southwark Fair she gets drunk and rides on a kind of swing, kicking her legs in the air to again expose her groin.  She is the film's femme fatale and exudes sinister sex appeal.  The movie gets seriously kinky when the mutilated Gwynplaine is conveyed into the Duchess Josiana's boudoir where she is sexually excited by his huge, mangled mouth -- none of this is even slightly ambiguous.  Josiana is enthralled and titillated by Gwyneplaine's vast crescent smile, all red wounded lip and giant horse-teeth and she eagerly kisses him on the mouth.  We keep expecting some conventional pay-off to the scene -- that Josiana is merely pretending to desire Gwyneplaine but it never comes, she never derides his horrible appearance, and, in fact, seems to almost rape the mutilated man.

At this point, the movie takes a turn for the worst.  For some reason, the Queen wants to restore Gwynplaine to this rightful Clancharlie estates.  So Gwynplaine is press-ganged into the House of Lords wearing an elaborate blonde and white wig.  There his supposed peers mock him mercilessly, although this is a bit disingenuous since they are all grotesque fops themselves.  The traveling players are expelled from the City and have to leave England itself.  This sets up reprise of the opening scenes, although now played out against a lavish medieval city built for the movie.  As the traveling players are harried out of town to a waiting sea vessel, Gwynplaine, longing for the beautiful Dea, fights his way out of the House of Lords, duels with a bad guy and, even, performs a Douglas Fairbanks style leap from one castellated turret to another, dangling down over the agitated extras now wielding halberds and pikes.  The noble hero of the film, Homo, the German shepherd, has led the poor blind girl Dea to the House of Lords and, finally, saves the day by swimming to the sailing ship with Gwynplaine in his jaws.  Gwyneplaine is reunited with Dea and the ship sails into the studio-stage sunset.

The ending makes no sense emotionally or dramatically.  Gwynplaine is fleeing from wealth and riches as Lord of the realm to pursue his career as a circus freak.  Furthermore, his flight is away from the beautiful Duchess Josiana who is certainly evil but also fantastically enticing -- in other words, his flight to the chaste Dea repudiates what the film has shown us about Josiana, a woman really turned on by Gwynplaine's deformity and certainly well-equipped to show him a good time.  We know we are supposed to root for the chaste and humble blind girl (Mary Philben) but Duchess Josiana with her own huge and lascivious mouth is much more attractive and promises pleasures that the blind girl can't even imagine.  (In fact, the film seems to focus a lot on people's mouths:  Dea has refined cupid's bow (bee-sting) lips; Josiana has a lavish spread of lip and tooth second only to Gwynplaine's grotesque grin.  The viewer finds himself inadvertently comparing everyone buccal apertures to Gwynplaine's mouth.)  Olga Baclanova ended-up type cast as the bride of the monster -- she appears memorably in 1932's Freaks as Cleopatra who seduces a dwarf in the sideshow while carrying on an affair with the circus strongman.  When she cuckolds the dwarf, the freaks attack her and she ends up as a mutilated hen woman, a sideshow attraction herself complete with feathers, in the film's final shock scene.)  Director Leni and company put every possible genre into this movie and dare you to look away -- there are society comedy scenes involving a dull concert that the hapless Queen Anne requires her court to attend, we get mild pornography involving Josiana, animal antics courtesy of Zimbo the canine actor playing the loyal German Shepherd, Homo -- the film has horror aspects but, also, channels some of the rabble-rousing crowd scenes in Orphans of the Storm and there is a sword fight, some acrobatics and the like.  The movie seems to burst through the technical limits existing in 1928 -- one long scene in which the members of a traveling company simulate a crowd attending one of Gwyneplaine's performances utilizes every possible technique to make its images sound; the montage literally shouts and rings and is so agitated that we can't perceive it as silent.  (In the original it was accompanied by synchronized sound-effects.)  Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine is spectacular and his make-up seems so painful that your own lips and jaw hurt watching him.  (It's not clear to me how the effect of the surgically carved grin was achieved but it was so impressive to one viewer, Jack Kane, that he later imitated Gwynplaine with his character, the Joker.)  The shame is that the film's last half-hour is a sodden mess, not even effectively edited, and this wrecks the movie.