How The Man Who Laughs rede­fined ear­ly hor­ror cinema

When pop­u­lar stage clown Gwyn­plaine (Con­rad Vei­dt), also known by his stage name ​‘the man who laughs’, clos­es the cab­i­net hous­ing his make­up mir­ror, we see clear­ly on either pan­el door a depic­tion of the twin masks of com­e­dy and tragedy. This is at the South­wark Fair in Lon­don, dur­ing the reign of Queen Anne at the begin­ning of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, and those con­ven­tion­alised masks – one smil­ing, one frown­ing – encap­su­late the dual nature not only of the the­atre that is Gwynplaine’s domain, but also of Gwyn­plaine himself.

The Man Who Laughs opens over a decade ear­li­er with very dif­fer­ent per­former Bark­ilphe­dro (Bren­don Hurst), the schem­ing, ambi­tious court jester to King James II (Sam de Grasse). ​“All his jests were cru­el,” an inter­text reveals, ​“and all smiles were false.” False smiles are all that Bark­ilphre­do has in com­mon with the sin­cere, sen­si­tive Gwyn­plaine. For while Gwynplaine’s rebel­lious father Lord Clan­char­lie, who had refused to kiss James’ hand, has been in exile, the King has had the ten-year-old Gwynplaine’s mouth sur­gi­cal­ly mis­shapen into a grotesque grin, ​“so he might laugh for­ev­er at his fool of a father.”

Lord Clan­char­lie (also played briefly by Vei­dt, but with a frown that con­trasts with his son’s per­ma­nent smile) returns for Gwyn­plaine, only to be killed by the King in the iron maid­en, while the young boy, left for dead, has the good for­tune to fall in with the kind­ly trav­el­ing impre­sario Ursus (Cesare Grav­ina) and anoth­er young orphan, the blind girl Dea.

As adults years lat­er, Gwyn­plaine and Dea (Mary Philbin) have an act that is the toast of the town, but Gwynplaine’s ric­tus, while mak­ing him a per­fect clown, con­ceals a deep sad­ness. For the very qual­i­ty that allows him to raise a laugh onstage incurs ridicule out­side of the audi­to­ri­um – and his deep sense of shame about his appear­ance is an imped­i­ment to his love for Dea, even though she nei­ther can see, nor cares, what he looks like.

When Gwynplaine’s for­got­ten geneal­o­gy catch­es up with him, Queen Anne (Josephine Crow­ell) decides to ele­vate him to the House of Lords and to mar­ry him off to the promis­cu­ous Duchess Josiana (Olga Baclano­va) to legit­imise the Duchess’ occu­pa­tion of the late Lord Clancharlie’s estate. Now Gwyn­plaine must decide whether to embrace Josiana and the estab­lish­ment, or to rebel and stay – or indeed leave – with Dea and Ursus.

In keep­ing with much of the film’s set­ting amid the stalls, rides and freak show exhibits of South­wark Fair, The Man Who Laughs is ruled by what Russ­ian lit­er­ary crit­ic Mikhail Bakhtin would term the ​“car­ni­va­lesque”: this is a top­sy-turvy world where masked aris­to­crats cavort with drunk­en ​“ruf­fi­ans”, where a low­ly, dis­fig­ured clown can be induct­ed into the House of Lords (“It’s out­ra­geous!”, as one peer com­plains) and where Ursus (named for the Latin word for ​‘bear’) has a pet dog called Homo (Latin for ​‘human’).

In this the­atri­calised space where the bound­aries between social ranks and even species are read­i­ly trans­gressed, Gwyn­plaine is the ulti­mate embod­i­ment of the car­ni­va­lesque – a man who is his own mask – while only his blind beloved Dea can see through the van­i­ties of class and cadre to a more sub­stan­tial under­ly­ing nobility.

If its char­ac­ters keep switch­ing between high and low, hap­py and sad, The Man Who Laughs also comes with a cer­tain inter­me­di­a­cy in for­mal terms. Made in 1928 on the thresh­old of the Talkies, the film is silent, with its dia­logue ren­dered through inter­ti­tles, while also boast­ing an inno­v­a­tive mono­phon­ic Movi­etone score with occa­sion­al syn­chro­nised sounds (bells, knocks, trum­pets) and even the mur­mur­ing hub­bub of crowds and a roman­tic song.

The Man Who Laughs is per­haps most famous now for the influ­ence of Gwynplaine’s unusu­al facial fea­tures on the man­i­cal­ly grin­ning iconog­ra­phy of the Batman’s com­ic book neme­sis The Jok­er, or of the tit­u­lar lead in William Castle’s Mr Sar­don­icus. Such com­par­isons, how­ev­er, will inevitably lead to false expec­ta­tions of this film’s nar­ra­tive con­tent and themes. Bet­ter sim­ply to mar­vel at Veidt’s per­for­mance, as he dis­plays a full emo­tion­al range for his char­ac­ter despite being unable to move what is nor­mal­ly one of the face’s most expres­sive parts.

Adapt­ed from Vic­tor Hugo’s 1869 nov­el of the same name, The Man Who Laughs might set itself up to be a spir­i­tu­al sequel to Wal­lace Worsley’s influ­en­tial 1923 hor­ror The Hunch­back of Notre Dame (also adapt­ed from Hugo). In both, a mon­strous but inno­cent hero becomes embroiled in an erot­ic tan­gle and a clash of class in a cap­i­tal city. Yet despite ini­tial ref­er­ences to uncon­ven­tion­al surg­eries and dead­ly tor­ture, Leni’s film nev­er real­ly dis­plays the kind of hor­ror found in his oth­er fea­tures like Wax­works and The Cat and the Canary, but is rather a sen­ti­men­tal romance and a polit­i­cal satire, with just a smidgin of rooftop swash­buck­ling thrown in near the end.

In keep­ing with the smil­ing and frown­ing masks dis­played on Gwynplaine’s mir­ror cab­i­net, The Man Who Laughs is cer­tain­ly a tragi­com­e­dy. But where Hugo’s orig­i­nal ulti­mate­ly veered towards tragedy, Leni’s prefers a hap­pi­er, more hope­ful end­ing that will leave a smile on the face of the view­er. The real tragedy here, of course, is that Leni died the year after this was made.

The Man Who Laughs is avail­able in a 1080p pre­sen­ta­tion on Blu-ray from Universal’s 4K restora­tion, as part of Eure­ka Video’s Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma Series, on 17 August.