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HE WHO GETS SLAPPED
Director: Victor Sjöström
USA 1924 78 minutes silentCast: Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert
HE WHO GETS SLAPPED sold out in our Victor Sjöström retrospective in 2004, so get your tickets early for this rare reprise screening. Horror star Lon Chaney gives a brilliant performance as a scientist whose rich benefactor steals his wife, usurps his research, then denounces him before the academy. Chaney turns his marital and professional humiliation into masochistic spectacle, becoming a circus clown known only as He Who Gets Slapped, who recreates his trauma every night for a roaring audience. Profoundly strange and disturbing, Sjöström's masterful classic perhaps reflects his sense of himself as an exile - and an artistic “sell out” - in Hollywood. “Chaney's performance is extraordinary, but the real amazement of the film is Sjöström's direction, incorporating incredibly subtle lighting effects . . . and perfectly blending its daring Expressionistic devices with the horror movie ethos which takes over when the clown finally seeks revenge” (Tom Milne, Time Out Film Guide ).
Presented with live piano accompaniment by William O'Meara.
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