He Who Gets Slapped

He Who Gets Slapped was made in 1924, directed by Victor Seastrom and starring Lon Chaney.  These names are not well-known these days but the Swedish Seastrom was one of the great directors of the silent era and Lon Chaney one of the great actors.  Chaney plays a scientist, Paul Beaumont, whose discoveries and wife were stolen by his patron Baron Regnard, who slapped him in front of his laughing fellow scientists. The humiliated Beaumont became the masochistic clown known as He Who Gets Slapped, and was slapped in the circus every day for laughs for an audience (as a title says) of the "idle, ignorant and vicious."  Beaumont falls in love with a bareback rider whose father tries to sell her to Regnard and Beaumont releases a lion to kill Regnard and the father, sacrificing his own life in the process.

I saw this film again recently on Turner Classic Movies, one of the few places where one can see silent films on a regular basis.  I wish they could show more silent films (some think they are the artistic peak of filmmaking) but only about 20% of the films made during the silent era (before 1929) even survive, mainly because the nitrate stock on which they were printed can deteriorate rapidly and by the time people realized the value of these films and started to transfer them to safety stock many of them were already lost.  Of course nitrate stock produced a beautiful image, as those of us who have seen D.W.. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) on its original nitrate stock can attest; I saw it at The Museum of Modern Art, which has a special dispensation from the fire department to show the extremely flammable nitrate.

There are many misconceptions about silent films.  Some think, based on what they have seen on TV, that they are herky-jerky.  Sound films are projected at a uniform speed of 24 frames per second, but silent films were often filmed with hand-cranked cameras and projected at various speeds.  Generally, 16 frames per second is an acceptable speed for silent films, but MoMA does have a variable speed projector that they use when they have cue sheets from the original showings that give the various speeds (as they did for the extraordinary series of all of Griffith's films in 1976, the 100th anniversary of his birth). Also, there is sometimes not the necessary attention there should be to the music that accompanies these films.  MoMA and Film Forum usually do use a live piano player, as was the case originally (though big-city showings would often use full orchestras) while Turner often commissions scores for the silent films they show, so if you don't like the score you can turn off the sound. Many of the great classical directors --Ford, Hitchcock, Lang, Vidor, Lubitsch, Renoir -- started in the silent era, learning to tell stories visually.

He Who Gets Slapped is a lovely film and, like most silent films  is considerably influenced by Griffith:  the clown holding a spinning globe between scenes reminds one of Lillian Gish rocking the cradle between scenes in Intolerance;  Seastrom also captures "the wind in the trees" beautifully, as lovers Norma Shearer and John Gilbert escape the corrupt circus to picnic in the country.  And Lon Chaney brings a subtlety to his low-key and powerful performance, this subtlety one of Griffith's major contributions to film, discarding the excesses of the theatre.