The Man Who Laughs
1928 · Paul Leni
When a proud noble refuses to kiss the hand of the despotic King James in 1690, he is cruelly executed and his son surgically disfigured.
dir. Paul Leni · 1928
The high-water mark of German Expressionism transplanted to Hollywood. Paul Leni, the Ufa veteran who made Waxworks, was imported by Universal and here adapted Victor Hugo's novel about Gwynplaine, a nobleman's son mutilated in childhood so that his face wears a permanent carnival grin — then raised as a sideshow attraction who falls in love with a blind girl who cannot see what audiences pay to laugh at. Conrad Veidt, the somnambulist of Caligari, gives one of the silent era's most astonishing performances, acting entirely with his eyes above a rictus held in place by prosthetic dental hooks; the anguish he wrings from a frozen smile remains uncanny. Around him Leni builds a swirling, shadow-drenched Jacobean England of gibbets, palaces and fairgrounds. Marketed as horror, it is really a grand romantic melodrama about cruelty and spectacle. Veidt's grin was the acknowledged visual source for the Joker in 1940. Leni died of sepsis the following year, at forty-four, one of cinema's great truncated careers.
Lines of influence
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — Established Conrad Veidt's somnambulist Cesare as a body-and-eyes performance under painted expressionist shadow — the exact vocabulary of masklike face plus expressive gaze that Veidt reuses as Gwynplaine.
- Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett) (1924) — Leni's own portmanteau rehearses the fairground/sideshow framing device and warped, hand-built expressionist sets he brings intact to the carnival milieu of The Man Who Laughs.
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) — Lon Chaney's sympathetic grotesque adapted from Victor Hugo — the template of prosthetically deformed outcast as tragic romantic lead that Gwynplaine directly extends.
- The Phantom of the Opera (1925) — Universal's Chaney disfigurement showpiece set the studio playbook of hidden-then-revealed prosthetic horror sold via ballyhoo marketing, the commercial mold Leni's film was cut to fit.
- Nosferatu (1922) — Murnau's low-key chiaroscuro and looming cast shadows codified the German lighting grammar Leni imports to Hollywood interiors and dungeon staircases.
- The Hands of Orlac (1924) — Contemporary Veidt vehicle built around anguished hands and haunted eyes, the same restraint-under-torment acting method he deploys behind the frozen grin.
- Warning Shadows (Schatten) (1923) — A near-titleless drama driven by silhouette and shadow-play, the expressionist chiaroscuro-as-narrative technique Leni matches in his silent storytelling.
- The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) — Architectural expressionist sets and the misunderstood-monster pathos that make deformity legible as innocence rather than menace.
- The Cat and the Canary (1927) — Leni's immediately prior Universal film, where he tunes the gliding subjective camera and old-dark-house lighting he carries straight into The Man Who Laughs.
- The Last Warning (1928) — Leni's final Universal picture, extending the same mobile expressionist camera and theatrical spectacle-space (a haunted playhouse) as this film's fairground stage.
- Dracula (1931) — Inaugurated Universal's sound-era horror cycle on the émigré chiaroscuro and monster-marketing foundation Leni had laid three years earlier.
- Frankenstein (1931) — Jack Pierce's sculpted-prosthetic monster and the creature's mute, eyes-first pathos continue the sympathetic-grotesque makeup lineage from Gwynplaine's fixed rictus.
- Freaks (1932) — Pushes the carnival-sideshow spectacle and 'cruelty toward the malformed' theme to its extreme, extending Leni's fairground staging of bodies on display.
- Eyes Without a Face (1960) — Builds an entire film around a mask-like disfigured face whose horror and tenderness live in the eyes, the direct art-film heir to Gwynplaine's expressive-mask problem.
- Joker (2019) — Realizes on film the character Gwynplaine's carved grin inspired — a rictus-faced outcast whose fixed smile masks anguish — closing the influence/joker loop back to Veidt's makeup.
- Faust (1926) — UFA's peak expressionist light-and-fog craftsmanship and grand allegorical staging, the studio-trained visual command Leni exported to Universal's back lot.