Laugh, Clown, Laugh

The key line:

"Laugh, clown, laugh, even though your heart is breaking."

A great line of what seems to be a great movie, a silent film from 1928, starring the then famous horror actor Lon Chaney and a very beautiful Lorretta Young (15 years old!?!). It was on Turner Classics tonight. It featured a new (2002) and very good soundtrack by H. Scott Salinas as the poster to the right indicates. Here is IMDB's listing of the movie, which includes what seems to be a knowledgable write up by a viewer.

I caught the ending but was immediately taken in the same way that Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise caught me. --The simultaneous glimpse of how actors' lives and stage performance interact and influence each other. This is, I like to think, not mere ephemeral and superficial interest such as one might find in supermarket tabloids that cover the private lives of celebrities. The interest arises from how life's experiences become grist for the creative imagination.

It is much more obvious in Children of Paradise, one of my favorite films, and I might indeed be misled with the little that I saw of Laugh, Clown, Laugh, but perhaps not. The critical scenes in each seem to be, at least to my way of thinking, wherein the protagonist (a mime in COP and a clown in LCL) looses his beloved to a rival. For the mime, it becomes the source of inspiration for his shows, which is why he becomes so popular among the poor and downtrodden. For the clown, it leads to his inspired performance that shows him, in the midst of his show, swing from the elation of learning her love to the succeeding moment when he learns that he was misled. His show must go on and his inspired playing which thrilled the crowd is dangerously close to being ruined with his subsequent disappointment. At that moment, the clown's friend prompts him to bow to the adoring audience, saying,

"You are theirs. . . Laugh, Clown, Laugh, even though your heart is breaking."