Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, shows two of them in Victor Sjöström’s prestigious He Who Gets Slapped. The very first project produced by the newly formed MGM in 1924, Sjöström’s silent film was one of those rare popular hits that also caused critics to fall into raptures, and it’s important for more reasons than that. Restored by Blackhawk Films in 2024, the film can be enjoyed by today’s viewers on Flicker Alley’s new Blu-ray, and they’ll discover a gripping and macabre melodrama.
The opening image in He Who Gets Slapped is the existential and symbolic motif of a white-painted clown with a big Cyrano de Bergerac honker who laughs open-mouthed while spinning a ball on the end of his finger. This image transitions to a goatee’d man spinning a globe of the Earth in a library full of fat, heavy volumes. The man is Paul Beaumont (Lon Chaney), who’s been working on a startling theory of man’s origins that, alas, we’ll never learn.
Paul has been living on the support of Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott), who is shown playing chess with Paul’s wife, Marie (Ruth King). When Paul rushes in to exclaim that he’s finally proven his theory, Marie and the Baron give each other significant glances, and the viewer grasps the lay of the land.
Not only does the Baron steal the contemptuous Marie, he even appropriates Paul’s research at a meeting of stuffy, grey-bearded scientists. When Paul jumps up to protest, the Baron slaps him and calls him merely a poor assistant. The greybeards erupt in laughter at the puny upstart.
Five years pass, as indicated by the image of the clown and the spinning ball. This image will be the recurring transitional motif in He Who Gets Slapped, just as the laughing devil and his spinning wheel are similar motifs in Erich Von Stroheim’s Merry-Go-Round the previous year. Audiences of the silent era had no trouble deciphering the kind of narrative symbols that aren’t used in our allegedly sophisticated times.
Paul, painted white with three tufts of hair sticking out of his bald cap, has become a circus star known only as He Who Gets Slapped, and that’s basically his whole act. The troupe of clowns takes turns prancing and slapping, mocking everything he says, to underline the point that nobody wants to hear the truth or anything serious. “There’s nothing that makes people laugh so hard as seeing someone else slapped,” says co-clown Tricaud, as played by slapstick comic Ford Sterling.
The circus audience collapses into convulsions of laughter and applause. One gesticulating portly gentleman with an apple in his mouth looks like a pig on a platter while his equally round son and wife scream on each side of him. Well-dressed gentry in box seats laugh and clap more demurely. Paul’s subjective superimpositions make the visual connection between the scientific greybeards and the hoi polloi.
This routine, and the fame it accrues, is how Paul expresses his contempt for the world. At this point in He Who Gets Slapped, the script by Sjöström and Carey Wilson introduces the plot that will dominate the rest of the film. A stunt equestrian named Bezano (imminent matinee idol John Gilbert) teams up with Consuelo (imminent film diva Norma Shearer), whose greedy, decadent father, Count Mancini (Tully Marshall), wants to marry her off to none other than the Baron, currently still living in sin and sipping champagne with Paul’s wife. Not if the unrecognized Paul has anything to say about it, and he will in a climax that makes literal use of an MGM lion.
Lou Chaney was already a big star, thanks to items like the previous year’s blockbuster of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directed by Wallace Worsley at Universal. That had been produced by Irving Thalberg, who had been lured by Louis B. Mayer to become head of production at the new MGM studio, and Thalberg in turn lured Chaney to a profitable new contract at MGM. Gilbert and Shearer also became major MGM stars, with Thalberg even wedding Shearer to become what we now call a power couple.
Sjöström, the big-deal Swedish director behind such hits as The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, 1922), was another major wooing. He stayed at MGM for a highly acclaimed series of films where the studio basically left him to do as he pleased, a deal you almost had to be foreign to get. His style emphasizes visual simplicity and directness with expressionist flourishes where needed. Narratively, he concentrates on staging the story simply while directing his actors to that mix of the subtle and the self-conscious that the silent era knew how to pull off.
Like many of Sjöström’s other films and like many prestige pictures of the silent era, He Who Gets Slapped boasts literary and dramatic origins. Russian writer Leonid Andreyev first staged the play at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1915, with a Russian film following in 1916. Broadway went wild over a 1922 production, and that’s what Mayer snapped up for his new studio.
Andreyev, who’d died in 1919, was undergoing a literary vogue in the US, so MGM’s project had instant cachet. Audiences could enjoy the macabre melodrama while feeling they were imbibing serious literature, although it ends on the same kind of bloody revenge as Chaney’s more low-brow chillers. Certain points of comparison can be found in the plot of another Chaney vehicle, Herbert Brenon’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928).
Flicker Alley’s restored Blu-ray of He Who Gets Slapped, a film drafted into the National Film Registry, offers a choice of two scores, one for piano and one with orchestra. There’s a Loy Chaney-oriented commentary by makeup expert Michael F. Blake. Extras include Mack Sennett and Lloyd Bacon’s He Who Gets Smacked (1925), a literally slapstick comedy of boxing, and Max & Dave Fleischer’s Ko-Ko at the Circus (1926), one of their mixes of animation and live action. A nice extra is a profile of Leo, the MGM lion, who was actually one in a group of several lions.