Along with The Wind, this is Victor Sjöström’s greatest American film (there were eight all together, five of which have been tragically lost), naturally bearing in mind the impossibility to evaluate lost films, such as The Divine Woman, of which a fragment appears in our «pars pro toto» section. A grim and pessimistic film, He Who Gets Slapped was MGM’s very first production, and it proved to be as distant from future company fare as Tod Browning’s Freaks seven years later. The film is very mainstream, with remarkable production values, though this is secondary when considering that it may be Lon Chaney’s finest film of all. Sjöström’s film obviously does not reach the extreme oddity and perversity of Browning’s oeuvre, yet there is a toughness about it. The poignant themes (circus) and personalities (the clown) that seemed to obsess Scandinavian writers and filmmakers at the time; themes of humiliation and human degradation, dialectics of art and life (always the losing side), and the farce of society and science – few other films have managed to catch the dark side of universities so effectively. These themes were very basic for the great Russian writer Leonid Andrejev (who died in 1919, following his emigration, and happens to be one of the best commentators on early cinema, as clearly shown in Richard Taylor’s and Ian Christie’s anthology). He Who Gets Slapped is an experimental, bold, and stylistically rich film, full of masterful lighting and chiaroscuro, with an ellipsis circling the human relations that holds up to contemporary masterpieces like Woman of Paris and The Marriage Circle. Remarkable. The vision of the clown’s lonely, bleak, white face as the only source of light in the entire circus arena, is a captivating image of the high price a human being pays for its search for humanity. The images come close to the magic of Fellini’s lightning in Otto e mezzo; the vision of anonymity is on par with Der letzte Mann, the closest cinema has come to Kafka’s «Herr K».

Peter von Bagh