Description
Based on a novel by Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs is a truly great, devastatingly beautiful film and one of the final treasures of German silent Expressionism. The second of German director Paul Leni’s American films (Cat and the Canary was the first), The Man Who Laughs is a lavish adaptation of the novel by Victor Hugo. The story concerns Gwynplaine, the son of an enemy of the evil King. Forever disfigured by a wide and mirthless grin on his face, the orphaned son of a nobleman, Gwynplaine, rescues the blind baby-girl, Dea, in cold seventeenth-century England. Taken in by the paternal carnival philosopher, Ursus, the unloved boy grows into a kind and honest man who chooses, however, to hide his grotesque deformity behind a black cloak, utterly convinced that the beautiful Dea will never truly love him because of his horrible secret. Feeling unworthy of Dea’s noble feelings, Gwynplaine will soon cross paths with the aristocratic temptress, Duchess Josiana, as a cruel and long-standing conspiracy in the palace of Queen Anne presents him with the burden of choice. Will poor Gwynplaine, the Man who Laughs, renounce everything in the name of love? The make-up and disfigurement of Gwynplaine is widely assumed to be the inspiration for Batman’s “The Joker”.
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