United States, 1924
Directed by Victor Sjöström
With Lon Chaney (Paul Beaumont), Marc McDermott (Baron Regnard), Ruth King (Marie Beaumont), Norma Shearer (Consuelo), John Gilbert (Bezano), Tully Marshall (Count Mancini)
A white-dressed, white-faced clown hoots with laughter as he makes a huge ball spinning on his right hand: is this film a comedy? Such a funny image as an establishing shot suggests it but the narrative proves to be instead disquieting and tragic.
Tragic it is, as a typical melodrama, centered on a man who is betrayed, humbled, and forced to lose everything that mattered to him: first the work he made as a scientist when his distinguished but dubious benefactor and friend, Baron Regnard, publicly claims it to be his own and then when his lovely but hypocrite wife Marie Beaumont breaks with him to start a new life with the baron, his betrayer. So Paul Beaumont gives up on any hope of having a normal life and becomes a clown in a big circus of the Paris area, performing a most basic and foolish number (his performance simply demands that he keeps telling things that prompt his fellow clowns on the stage to slap him on his face repeatedly until he drops, supposedly dead) and resigning himself to be a lonely heart.
Of course, an event would alter the picture. A poor aristocrat, Count Mancini, gets his daughter, a beautiful and gifted horse rider, hired in the circus. Consuelo becomes the partner of the circus’ top acrobat, Bezano, who gets besotted with her the minute he spots her. More slowly, but as passionately, Paul Beaumont, or rather HE Who Gets Slapped, or more simply HE, also falls in love with the gentle and graceful young woman. But it is Bezano who proves to be the more appealing and audacious: an improvised picnic under a glowing sun in the quietness and loveliness of a corner of the countryside around the French capital makes both young stars of the circus commit to each other forever. HE would never get the same attention from Consuelo, as a later conversation between the two characters demonstrates in the most heartbreaking way.
But Consuelo’s father manages to convince a more respectable and wealthier fellow to marry her – and to give him money. It turns out he is Paul Beaumont’s nemesis. When HE realizes what is going on, he would perform a last number, in a backroom of the circus, to prevent the wedding planned by the two callous and perverse aristocrats from taking place, with the help of a wild beast: if he could not marry Consuelo, at least he could spare her a humiliating marriage and at long last punish the man who ruined his previous life. HE does get achieve his goals and is badly wounded: death knocks at the door as the show goes on, shortening a life that has been cruelly deprived of sentimental love, leading to a poignant final scene.
What is disquieting is how the whole story deals with the human reaction so pleasantly highlighted at the start. Beyond the initial contradiction between the clown’s laughter and scenes relating the life of a scientist the film proceeds to cast laugh in a more sinister light: mark the scene where Baron Regnard makes a speech to the Academy of Sciences and then disparages Paul Beaumont who has been stunned to hear his friend usurping his work. In a blunt nod to social hierarchy, the camera eagerly records the reaction of the assembly to the frantic behaviors of Paul Beaumont and the cold-blooded lie of Baron Regnard: the old men split their sides, obviously jeering at the young man. Laugh can be not so funny, but the cruel expression of contempt, and not just class contempt when Marie Beaumont makes fun of her husband’s pleas.
Left alone, however, after his benefactor and his wife ran away, Paul Beaumont would stop being sorry or flabbergasted: he would start to laugh, having the reaction that humbled him twice to start getting a hold of himself and to cope with his changed destiny. Laugh is now a matter of defiance – the image of the old scientists laughing at him is a motif emphasizing what has driven him to be HE Who Gets Slapped. But this defiant response to fate has still a quality of disturbing self-destruction woven into it. After all, it means nobody would take him seriously (witness his talk with Consuelo when he tries to convince her he loves her and is ready to protect her) and that he is doomed to be beaten and mocked every evening.
That this punishing and self-defeating number gets a huge success causes a malaise. The camera lingers on the circus’ audience, with unflattering closeups on the most excited reactions, underlining how quickly and strongly people enjoy such a silly number. It seems that even when it is part of an artistic endeavor, a simple entertainment for one carefree evening, laugh cannot be an innocent and pleasant thing: it is also a matter of bad taste, bad behavior, bad reaction. And the fact that this audience keep roaring even as HE Who Gets Slapped barely stands up in the film’s final number, clearly dying from his wounds, only makes the malaise deeper and harder to dispel. This is not, after all, a comedy – even if “He Who Gets Slapped” has a feisty ability to provide compelling caricatures, in part targeting Consuelo’s undignified father. This is a moral and poignant melodrama, a hopeless story of despair that refuses the lead a lasting happiness and forces the audience to grapple with a narrative based on romantic tragedy but twisted in a way that keeps them wondering what comes next indeed and to confront their own views and attitudes toward laughing.
This is also a visually bold and splendid film, with the initial image of the guffawing clown spinning a globe (what a symbol) turned into a clever motif introducing the film’s main sections in the most elegant way (as the globe morphs into another element), a powerful, provocative use of long shots capturing crowds, an imaginative and effective exploration of spaces (witness the scenes where HE Who Gets Slapped traps the two aristocrats as well as the various shots showing the love affair between Bezano and Consuelo blooming in an idyllic environment). The film’s achievement rests also on consistently strong performances, with star Lon Chaney delivering arguably one of his most moving ever, running a whole gamut of perfectly expressed and timed emotions.
This is also a film of firsts: the first film to be directed inside the new Hollywood entity known as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the first film made in the United States by great Swedish director Victor Sjöström. Both the young studio and the seasoned director of such groundbreaking Scandinavian films as “Körkarlen – The Phantom Carriage” (1921) were keen on making something great and were rewarded fantastically, “He Who Gets Slapped” eventually being a commercial success and a critics’ favorite. And this was a fair outcome.