Andrew Earle Simpson

HE Who Gets Slapped (silent film music)

Instrumentation	piano
Duration	80'
Film Date/Studio	1924, MGM
Director/Actors	Victor Sjöström, dir./Lon Chaney
Movements	N/A
Premiere	11/26/06, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Performers	Andrew Simpson, pno
Commissioned by	National Gallery of Art
Recording	N/A
Publication	Composer
Performance History	11/06, National Gallery of Art
mp3 sample

Film synopsis and musical notes

Swedish director Victor Sjöström (or "Seastrom," as his name was Americanized) returns frequently to the theme of outcasts in this films.  In the case of He Who Gets Slapped (perhaps the first film made by MGM in 1924), the outcast is a young French scientist, Paul Beaumont (Lon Chaney) whose discoveries, and then his wife, are both stolen by his supposed friend and patron, the Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott). 

In one crushing day, the Baron takes credit for Paul’s scientific ideas by presenting them in a lecture to the Academy, and Paul’s wife announces that she is in love with the Baron instead of him.  Both, at different times, slap him across the face.  The double shock of these blows, and the indignity of being slapped, drives Paul to leave the Baron’s house (where he and his wife had been resident) and take up a new life as a circus clown, known only as “HE Who Gets Slapped.”  His act, in which the humiliations of his experiences before the Academy are nightly re-enacted for the circus crowds, is wildly popular, and his fame grows - fame which eluded him as a scientist.

Seemingly beyond the capacity to love, “HE” yet finds renewed joy and hope in his silent love for Consuelo (Norma Shearer), the daughter of a now-poor Italian nobleman, Count Mancini (Tully Marshall).  Because she is a trick rider of horses, her father has sold her to this circus, where she falls in love with fellow rider Bezano (John Gilbert).  Despite her love for Bezano, her father arranges a marriage between her and the Baron Regnard, HE’s nemesis. 

HE, in a desperately crushing scene, at length announces his love to Consuelo, who believes that he is joking, and playfully slaps him in turn. 

The culminating event of the film is HE intervening to stop the marriage between Consuelo and the Baron, while at the same time enacting revenge on the Baron: both events accomplished by means of a circus lion.  In the course of this, however, HE is stabbed by a sword concealed in Count Mancini’s walking stick, and eventually dies in the arms of Consuelo after going on one last time to portray his now-famous act. 

The film offers ample opportunity for musical set-pieces, particularly in the circus scenes and HE’s act itself.  The extended finale, in which HE manages to engage the services of a lion in his scheme of revenge, also provides an opportunity for agitated, exciting music.