To see this film projected from a 35mm print is a special
treat and all praise to the Barbican team for sourcing this copy from a
private collection in France. He Who Gets Slapped has not been digitally restored, which is a crime given its qualities,
and probably has not been screened like this for many a year in the UK.
The event was sold out and I was second in the queue behind
a woman who wondered why they were screening it without the "original score"… I
put her right on the whole silent film thing but also on the importance of live
music to the experience (she was no doubt pleased we didn’t end up sat together).
Today we had a mesmeric and wistful score from Taz Modi who plays a kind of hybrid-jazz,
accompanied by expressive cello from Fraser Bowles. Taz’s piano figures are influenced
by electronica and in the manner of Nils Frahm, Hauschka and even Dawn of Midi, he weaves patterns over the narrative rather than matching specific events; a tonal
rather than a harmonised duet and which, in the context of such a powerfully
visual and humane film, worked very well.
I’d previously seen Taz accompanying the Polish silent The Call of the Sea (1927) at the same
venue and his style is naturally cinematic and very supportive, with humble
lines sublimated to the source material. Bowles’ cello contributed
to what emotional specificity there was and the two produced a pleasingly-organic
sound that contributed enormously to the connections being made between the audience and emotion on screen.
It’s hard to think of a Hollywood silent film as
hard-hitting as He Who Gets Slapped nor
a performance as raw and convincing as that of Lon Chaney. Based on a Russian
play and directed by Swedish silent master Victor Sjöström, it is a tale of
unflinching honesty which doesn’t shy away from the need to show full
consequence. Chaney’s range of facial expression is, as I’ve previously noted, “supernatural”
and the various extremes of clown make-up enable him to reach new heights of
happiness and deeper troughs of despair.
But, it’s the Chaney face without makeup that is the most
impactful as dedicated scientist Paul Beaumont is doubly betrayed by his benefactor
Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott) and his wife, Maria (Ruth King). Just as his
research into the origins of man bear fruit the Baron takes all the credit at
the science Academy, before his wife reveals she is leaving him for the “better”
man… it’s an agonising moment and one that Chaney handles with measured alacrity:
he could so easily go over the top but he nails the moment so convincingly, his
mind snapping as laughter becomes the only response to unbearable humiliation.
After every “act”, Sjöström inserts the image of a clown
laughing hysterically at a spinning world. At the start the clown morphs into
Paul spinning the globe in his office and after his bitter failure, the
spinning globe is joined by clowns who sit around its circumference and watch
as it turns into a circus ring. So many images in the film are used to match
with others and move the focused visual narrative along in a very economical
way.
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| Lifes a walking shadow, nah-nah-na-na-nah |
The action shifts to Paris six years later where Paul, now a
sensational clown called HE – who gets slapped, has taken the city by storm. In
a World in which nothing is funnier than a man getting hit in the face, repeatedly
HE’s act is elaborate, featuring massed ranks of clowns of all sizes, ushered
into the arena by an enthusiastic orchestra, syncopating wildly. HE is at the
back of the parade on stilts alongside the senior clown Tricaud played by Mack
Sennett veteran Ford Sterling who is very effective here acting and not fooling.
HE enters to grand
applause and a wave of hilarity and proceeds with a painful pantomime based entirely
on the humiliation of his previous existence, the clowns carry large books in
mockery of the years he spent in fruitless study and as Paul/HE looks to the audience
he sees the faces of the Academy’s mocking scientists laughing down at him.
In mockery of his failed scientific career he is slapped for
every statement and the entire troop takes turns in beating him to the ground. Eventually
he is beaten down to the ground and his heart, held against his chest by a
cloth pocket, is ripped out by Tricaud, and he is trampled into the sand…
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| Silent Shearer and pre-Greta Gilbert chain daisies |
Elsewhere in the circus is the handsome horse-rider Bezano
(John Gilbert wearing fairly indecent tights…) who notices the arrival of a
pretty girl, Consuelo, (shiny new, silent Norma Shearer so different from her sophisticated
pre-code persona) who is to join his act. Consuelo’s career is being
masterminded by her father, Count Mancini (Tully Marshall, having a ball…) a
hard-up nobleman who aims to use her exposure to marry her off to the highest
bidder.
The two young equestrians bond immediately whilst HE is also
smitten with the young woman; a reminder of the love he has lost. Inevitably, all
balance is soon lost as the Baron comes to watch the show. He doesn’t recognise
the man whose life he stole but Paul certainly spots him just as the old cheat eye
up Conseula. Sjöström cleverly mingles scenes of Conseula and Bezano falling in
love on a bucolic picnic with the negotiations between the Count and the
Baron... clearly the World is troubled and love, faith, honesty and greed all must be reconciled.
This is Chaney’s greatest clown, one who mixes extreme pathos with a laugh
that is so engulfing you truly believe the switch from bliss to bedlam that has
brought it forth. HE is contorted by the misfortunes of existence into someone
who can only take solace in further violence from an unfair world but, in the end, he has to find a way to rise above treachery and defeat... this is no easy melodrama; we're all getting slapped, every day.
The globes spin, the crowds laugh and the clowns all fall down in the end, cast off into
eternity…
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| Lon, Norma, Victor and John Gilbert's tights... |
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