The Man Who Laughs (1928)

A child (Julius Molnar), whose face has been mutilated into a perpetual grin, rescues a baby girl in a snowstorm after her mother has frozen to death. As he grows into a man (Conrad Veidt), he works in a traveling carnival side show as a clown (due to his perpetual grin) along with the blind girl (Mary Philbin) he rescued as a baby. Based on the novel by Victor Hugo and directed by Paul Leni (THE CAT AND THE CANARY). The film deviates from Hugo's novel with its happy ending but it shares a thematic structure with Hugo's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Both novels and films dealing with malformed men who are ridiculed for their abnormal features and who just wanted to be treated like "normal" men and allowed to love. Veidt's performance is quite moving and he is able to move beyond the physical limitations of his make up (which reputedly influenced the look of the Joker in the Batman comics) which would seem difficult for a lesser actor. The film's original reviews weren't that great but the film's reputation has grown considerably in the ensuing years. I wish the film had stayed truer to Hugo's novel as the movie's swashbuckler finale didn't work for me. With Olga Baclanova (FREAKS), Brandon Hurst, Cesare Gravina and Stuart Holmes.