Laugh, Clown, Laugh

1928 romantic melodrama


Rating: 16/20


Plot: It's another tale of unrequited circus love! Tito is a clown who finds a crying infant who has apparently been stranded. He "adopts" her and she travels with the troupe. As she matures, she learns to art of the tightrope and becomes part of the act. While looking for a rose to put in her hair, she meets the womanizing Count Ravioli who immediately falls in love with her and kisses her bare foot while she's nursing a barbed-wire-fence wound. It's ok. She's of age (14) and he's got a monocle. Tito also rather inappropriately falls in love with his little Simonetta but knows he can not pursue. Tito and Count Ravioli meet through a psychologist they're both seeing, the former because he can't stop crying and the latter because he can't stop bursting into spontaneous laughter. They become friends and the circus love triangle is complete.


"Laugh, clown. . . laugh even though your heart is breaking." Lon Chaney was much better in this than he was in The Unknown, and this also had much better pacing, more elaborate style, and a more emotionally involving story. I had to take a point off my rating because the movie made me feel uncomfortable. I'd commented to Jen that the love interest of Chaney was "pretty hot" and then discovered that Loretta Young was only fourteen when she acted in this. Of course, it didn't seem to be a problem for the male characters in the movie. The denouement is sort of clumsy here, and I'm not sure about the character's motivation at the end, but this still had a lot of moments that silently hit you in the gut. Melodramatic but smooth. One other note: there's barely a wasted title card in this silent film. The dialogue used is poetic, but so much of the story takes place successfully with pantomime and the camera work.


I'm all blubbery eyed: