Film Details

The latest score by the Alloy Orchestra (see 9/28 at 8 pm), premiered at this year's Telluride Film Festival, accompanies a little-known but sensational silent melodrama made in Hollywood by the great Swedish director Victor Sjöstrom (The Wind, The Phantom Chariot). Lon Chaney (see previous blurb), the "Man of a Thousand Faces," plays a brilliant scientist who loses both his groundbreaking research and his wife to a dishonest man. Wounded, he joins the circus and becomes a sad clown who wears his heart on his sleeve and suffers repeated humiliation and abuse—to the delight of hundreds of spectators. This piercing, Pagliacci-style fable, shown in a restored version from the George Eastman House, may have inspired Sternberg's The Blue Angel and Bergman's The Naked Night/Sawdust and Tinsel. With Norma Shearer and John Gilbert.