Laugh, Clown, Laugh

Lon Chaney's most emotionally naked performance — a heartbreaking portrait of a man trapped between the comedy he performs and the tragedy he lives. Chaney plays Tito, an Italian circus clown who rescues an abandoned baby girl and raises her as his own. When she grows into a beautiful young woman (Loretta Young, luminous at fifteen), Tito realizes with horror that he has fallen in love with his adopted daughter — a love he knows can never be expressed or returned. The film draws its power from Chaney's ability to convey enormous emotion with the subtlest shifts of expression: behind the clown's painted smile, you can see a heart quietly breaking. The parallel storyline with a young count who cannot stop laughing mirrors Tito's inability to stop weeping, creating a symmetry that is both elegant and devastating. One of silent cinema's most moving love stories.