JOHN GILERT as bezano he who gets slapped (1924), dir. victor sjöström.

Norma Shearer in He Who Gets Slapped (1924) dir. Victor Sjöström

Happy birthday to the lovely NORMA SHEARER💗✨ (August 10/11, 1903)

He Who Gets Slapped - He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

Propaganda:

He is just a clown, a fool, not some brilliant scientists who was betrayed and disappointed by the high society, haha...

On March 2, 1927, He Who Gets Slapped debuted in Portugal.

Here's some new Lon Chaney art!

He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

By Victor Sjöstörm.

A Lon Chaney Double Feature

Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney in He Who Gets Slapped

He Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)

Cast: Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert, Ruth King, Marc McDermott, Ford Sterling, Tully Marshall. Screenplay: Carey Wilson, Victor Sjöström; titles: Marian Ainslee; based on a play by Leonid Andreyev. Cinematography: Milton Moore. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn.

He Who Gets Slapped is not a film for coulrophobes (people with a fear of clowns). It's crawling with them, performing antics that are supposed to be, to judge from the hilarity they induce in the audiences shown in the film, side-splittingly funny. The film seems to be based on the highly dubious premise that watching someone get slapped repeatedly is one of the funniest things ever. (There may be people who think so, to judge from the perennial popularity of the Three Stooges.) The whole movie is an artificial concoction, anyway, and only the brilliance of Lon Chaney gives it some grounding in real-life feeling. It was one of the films that launched the MGM studios on the road to Hollywood dominance, and the first one to feature Leo the Lion in the credits. It's also a film that contemporary audiences should watch to see the young Norma Shearer, when she was at her freshest and most natural. In He Who Gets Slapped, her love interest is John Gilbert. It was only after the advent of sound that Shearer's husband, MGM's creative director Irving G. Thalberg, decided to make her into a great lady, the cinematic equivalent of Katharine Cornell, putting her into remakes of Broadway hits like The Barretts of Wimpole Street (Sidney Franklin, 1934), which had starred Cornell, or Strange Interlude (Robert Z. Leonard, 1932), which had featured another theatrical diva, Lynn Fontanne. She is barely in her 20s in He Who Gets Slapped, however, and she's delightful, with no trace of the diva to come.

Lon Chaney and Loretta Young in Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Herbert Brenon, 1928

Cast: Lon Chaney, Bernard Siegel, Loretta Young, Cissy Fitzgerald, Nils Asther, Gwen Lee. Screenplay: Elizabeth Meehan; titles: Joseph Farnham; based on a play by David Belasco and Tom Cushing. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Marie Halvey.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh puts him in clown makeup again, but the film is a grand showcase for Chaney, whose reputation as the man of a thousand faces was somewhat misleading. He had one well-worn face that, no matter how much he distorted or disguised it, shone through. Here he's given an opportunity to perform without disguise through much of the film, and the range of expressions available to him is astonishing. The leading lady is 14-year-old Loretta Young. That she often looks her age is one of the more disturbing things about the film, in which she's supposed to be in love with both Chaney, who was 45, and the improbably pretty Nils Asther, who was 31. The cinematography is by James Wong Howe. Laugh, Clown, Laugh was eligible for Oscar nominations in the first year of the Academy Awards, and Chaney should have received one. The closest the film came to an award was the one that Joseph Farnham received for title writing (the one and only time the award was presented). But Farnham's award was for the body of his work over the nomination period, and not for a particular film.

It's my best meme.

JOHN GILBERT in HE WHO GETS SLAPPED (1924), dir. Victor Sjöström.

Norma Shearer in He Who Gets Slapped (1924) dir. Victor Sjöström

Lon Chaney sr. as Paul Beaumont, a clown (movie still from the 1924 MGM silent film "He Who Gets Slapped")

Films Watched in 2023:

38. He Who Gets Slapped (1924) - Dir.  Victor Sjöström

I was tagged by @missanthropicprinciple to post nine of my favorite movies. Way too many painful cuts here! The last three spots could have also been filled by any of these: The Black Cat (1934), Mad Love (1935), Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), The Last Jedi (2017) (and like a dozen others, but those were the ones on my mind today).