This takes place in 17th century England. A young noble mans son Gwynplaine (played as an adult by Conrad Veidt) is kidnapped by a political enemy. He then has a surgeon carve a monstrous grin on the boys face. Years later he's part of a freak show and in love with a beautiful blind girl (Mary Philbin). However his political personage becomes known and causes trouble.This is usually advertised as a horror film due to Veidt's hideous grin but it's not. It's a slow-moving and frankly boring historical drama. Universal spend a lot of money on this and it shows. The sets and costumes are very elaborate and it IS well-directed by Paul Leni. Also Veidt is great in his role. He had to convey all his emotions through his eyes and pulls it off. However I was bored silly and had my finger of the fast forward button more than once. Also Mary Philbin was terrible as the blind girl. Boring and uninvolving.

One of the things I noticed in viewing this was the tight editing. There is little wasted space. Many of the silent films are presented in jerky photographic moments, with the actors emoting and letting us figure out their motivations. This one begins with a sad event. A revolutionary pays the price of his life for not respecting James II. In addition to his execution, his little son is surgically altered to have a perpetual smile, to become the subject of ridicule, seeming to be laughing. The little boy is cast aside by the Gypsies that did this to him and on his journey finds a dead mother clutching a little baby girl. He seeks refuge in the home of a poet and this launches him on a career as a kind of freak actor. The little girl grows to be a beautiful woman, but she is blind. He feels great love for her, but is afraid that other women either hate him or pity him. He becomes a great celebrity, but is submerged in loneliness and depression, having to go in front of audiences each day to be a clown. Mixed into all this is the fact that he is heir to a great position and becomes a threat to the aristocracy and to the Queen. How this is all sorted out is utterly captivating. There is a little Les Miserables and a little Elephant Man in his portrayal. A truly remarkable film.

Where people say that smiling is the best cure for sadness, there's never been a story like this that takes a nice and joyful smile that everybody loves to see and make into a curse for a man for the rest of his years. Based on Victor Hugo's 1869 novel L'Homme qui Rit, The Man Who Laughs starred German import Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, a carnival freak doomed to live life wearing a perpetual grin carved on his face by Dr Hardquannone (George Siegman because his father, Lord Clancharlie (Allan Cavan), had offended England's King James II (Sam De Grasse). Taken in as a child by Ursus, a mountebank (Cesare Gravina), Gwynplaine grows up alongside the beautiful but blind Dea (Mary Philbin). They fall in love but Gwynplaine refuses to marry her because his hideous face makes him feel unworthy. Queen Anne (Josephine Crowell), meanwhile, has ascended the throne and when she learns from her predecessor's evil jester Barkilphedro (Brandon Hurst) that the recalcitrant Duchess Josiana (Olga Baclanova) is in possession of Lord Clancharlie's estates, she decrees that the royal femme fatal must marry Gwynplaine, the rightful heir. Josiana, who has caught Gwynplaine's act incognito and arranged a rendezvous, is at the same time sexually attracted to and repelled by the "Laughing Man," but Gwynplaine, who realizes that the duchess' attraction has legitimized his right to love Dea, renounces his title and follows his heart to the new World. We have seen many movies and stories where we have seen different kind of extraordinary people and the usual people give out a smile, good or bad, like a superhero users a smile to welcome people of the city and show that he comes in peace, but a villain gives out a smile when his doing something wrong or just loves playing bad. But what about a story about man that has a very usual gift that he views it as a curse, that not everybody as thought off before, even I didn't thought of it. His not a bad guy and his not a hero as well, his just a guy trying to make the best out of life but the smile that sticks on his face that courses all this attention really gives Gwynplaine (Main character) a hard and difficult life. The Man Who Laughs is a silent film that very cleverly get's it's message and it's story across very well and this a silent film with no sound at all and I still felt emotional for the character's in the film.Conrad Veidt played Gwynplanie and through out the film he had a lot of make-up on his face for the effect of the big smile for his character; it must have been really difficult for him to show any emotion by all that make-up, but he nailed it by showing as much emotion as he can by simply his eyes which people say "The eyes are the windows to the soul", and I felt it all that in his eyes, just like Bane from The Dark Knight Rise who had a mask that covered half of his face and still can be scary and the kind of guy that nobody mess with, all by his eyes and Conrad Veidt also did the same thing.All the cast did a great job in their roles and Olga Baclanova can play a right nasty bitch but she did it really well. The directing is really good allowing some really impressive and heart felt moments that the cast and the director got right.My only my problems with the film is that at times it dragged a little bit in some parts, and that's really it for problems.Overall The Man Who Laughs is a freaking fantastic movie with scenes that really played with my heart strings.

When Universal found that they had two monumental successes on their hands with "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "The Phantom of the Opera", both of whom had for their main characters a being so deformed and hideous, they turned once again to Victor Hugo for what they hoped would be another hit. But Lon Chaney was not available - he had gone to MGM in the meantime and was now established as their top star and they were not about to lend him. The late 1920s saw German expressionism at it's height in Hollywood and the studios at the forefront of the surge were Fox and Universal. So Universal turned to the country of it's founder's birth and in particular a thriller called "Waxworks" to find both a new director, Paul Leni, and a star, Conrad Veidt.The very grim Victor Hugo story is about an outlaw band - the dreaded Comprachicos, whose surgeon roves the country carving huge grotesque grins onto young children's faces, forcing them to grow up to become side show freaks. There are some chilling images in the prologue where Gwynplaine, as a child, wanders among bodies and human bones hanging from scaffolds as a blizzard whips up. The little boy then finds the blind Dea clasped in her dead mother's arms. The England that Paul Leni has conjured up is a bleak and haunted world.As the years go on Gwynplaine (Veidt) becomes the "laughing man", a strolling player in the troupe of Father Ursus (Cesare Gravina), the one person who didn't turn his back on the orphans, but to Dea (beautiful Mary Philbin), who cannot see his hideous grin, he will always be goodness and light. Chaney could not have bettered Veidt's performance in which his eyes are truly the windows to his soul. At Southwark Fair, one of the sideshow proprietors (George Siegman, a Griffith regular) realises that Gwynplaine is the missing heir to Lord Clancharlie's estates, now taken over by the seductive Duchess Josiana and the ambitious Barkiphedro who had Gwynplaine's father tortured and killed in the "Iron Lady" over 20 years before. Olga Baclanova is just a sensation - the censor must have been asleep - she has two nude scenes within her first introduction and she plays a Countess who loves nothing better than donning dirty peasant rags and mingling (and allowing them to take great liberties) with the ruffians down at the fair.The last part of the film is very Griffith influenced ("Orphans of the Storm"). Gwynplaine's castle and land have rightfully been restored to him but he is being forced into marriage with the lustful Josiana. Dea (like the blind Louisa in "Orphans") is thwarted at every turn until she and Ursus are forced from the city by the power hungry Barkiphedro, then it is Gwynplaine's turn to race through the town. His head was turned by Josiana and in the scene where she strips away his mask and, displaying both lust and loathing, kisses his deformed mouth, there is so much sensuality and passion in her performance, a reviewer at the time commented that "she burns holes in the screen".The Kino release that I have features a restored orchestral Movietone soundtrack, complete with a theme song "When Love Comes Stealing" that they may have hoped would be as popular as "7th Heaven's" "Diane" - but it wasn't.