The Man Who Laughs

The Man Who Laughs draws from the literary formalisms that surround sequestered or itinerant romantic heroes. How else could I say it? It’s a story about freaks, or a romance thriller, or a gothic horror. It has a bit of all these things. Mostly, this movie’s project is the development of a Shakespearean trope that’s pretty well summed up by Antonio in Twelfth Night:

In nature there’s no blemish but the mind; None can be call’d deform’d but the unkind: Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil

These lines, I think, carry a lot of weight for us here. It’s an adaptation of a Victor Hugo novel which sort of plays in the shadow of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and precedes Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera by a few decades. Then, of course, this screen adaptation comes out during Hollywood’s golden age, immediately preceding movies like The Iron Mask (1930), Frankenstein (1931), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). In 1939, Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame would be adapted for the screen a second time (first in 1923).

The height of silent swashbuckling

I love it, frankly. Paul Lani does an amazing job of telling this story silently. The heightened naturalism in the performances is practically contemporary. It’s thrilling when it needs to be and heartbreaking when it needs to be. All the while, we get to sit back and take part of this travelling family, the players of the Green Box. Ursus, their kindly philosopher/playwrite/showman patriarch, becomes our own patriarch, in a way. His concern and love for the tortured Gwynplaine is a reflection of our own. I feel completely calibrated with the movie whenever he’s on screen.

It lacks the gravitas of Nosferatu or Metropolis, but as a piece of fantastical German expressionism it shows incredible tonal, even genre-bending, flexibility. I feel the echos of this in Pirates of the Caribbean and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, big time. Similar to how watching Marx Brothers movies increases our literacy of North American humour, The Man Who Laughs increases our literacy of contemporary romance adventures.