A chilling study of humiliation and obsession, blending circus-world spectacle with symbolism and philosophical undertones, He Who Gets Slapped was Swedish master Victor Sjöström’s second Hollywood film. This is a tale of the fickleness of social status and a treatise on “man as clown”. There were major transformations at work in and around this seminal silent: Sjöström’s full transformation into Seastrom, a major Hollywood director; the merger of Goldwyn Pictures and Metro Pictures Corporation into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with this film as the new company’s first production; and, in the story, Lon Chaney’s metamorphosis from a heartbroken and disillusioned scientist researching the origins of mankind, into a clown letting lions loose on evil men.
Scripted as well as directed by Sjöström (though to his irritation Carey Wilson’s name was added to the credits), this version of a play of the same name by Leonid Andreyev (which had already been adapted for the screen in the playwright’s native Russia in 1916), distilled the cultural shock of being in a new land and the impact of crudity sold as public spectacle. Rotation, spinning and circling are keys to the film’s visuals (which include the first glimpse of Norma Shearer in the film, swirling). Sjöström intermittently introduces morally ambivalent shots of a clown spinning the globe on the tip of his finger. Though set in a circus, the film is an act of de-clowning – only the vile and ignorant laugh at the clown.
Chaney’s typically hypnotic performance adds touches of genuine pain to a film that tends towards self-consciousness. He is portrayed in medium shots where his eyes drain of empathy and fill with despair and deranged insanity in real time. If the film’s study of the “origins of mankind” is anyone’s, it is Sjöström’s, a dark and magnificent dissection.

Ehsan Khoshbakht