Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
He Who Gets Slapped
A scientist robbed of his life’s work by his patron runs away to a Paris circus, where his whole act is being struck in the face.
Victor Sjöström came from Sweden to make one of the first pictures of the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and gave it a Scandinavian severity that the rest of the studio’s output never had again. Lon Chaney plays a man who has turned humiliation into a living: the crowd roars at every slap because it once roared at him for real, in a lecture hall. Norma Shearer and John Gilbert are the young lovers he can only watch. This is Chaney without the make-up kit, a clown’s white face over his own. Watch the clowns circling the turning globe, the image the film opens and closes on, and the lion in the cage that waits for the last reel.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Victor Sjöström
- With
- Bela Lugosi · Norma Shearer · Lon Chaney · John Gilbert · Edward Arnold · Ford Sterling
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Lon Chaney in consecutive years as a man an audience laughs at or runs from, each time in love with a performer who knows him only in costume. The Phantom hides behind a face he built; the clown wears greasepaint over a face the film lets you see.