Oh, the many great, nerdy reasons to catch He Who Gets Slapped with the Alloy Orchestra at Lincoln's Ross Media Arts Center on Friday and Omaha's Film Streams on Saturday.
Besides Alloy's live performance, you have early appearances from actors John Gilbert and Norma Shearer; a career highlight from Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney; the Hollywood debut of Swedish director Victor Sjöström (oddly Americanized here to “Seastrom”), and the first appearance of the MGM lion.
But at the end of the day, it really boils down to the characters in the photos above and to the right.
The creepy clown factor has rarely been as high as it was here in 1924. He Who Gets Slapped was a huge hit in its day. Now it feels like a movie that might not be aware of just how unsettling it actually is.
Chaney plays a scholar who gets driven to madness after his wife (Ruth King) and his life's work are both stolen by the same man (a Baron played by Marc McDermott). Crushed, he goes to ridiculous lengths to literalize his shame by becoming a clown, joining the circus and developing a masochistic act that keeps him living in an endless surreal loop. It'd all be plenty weird even if we weren't talking about, you know, clowns.
A love story develops on the side, between two other circus performers (played by Gilbert and Shearer), which manages an honest balance of lightness and schmaltz. Sjöström, a director with endless visual ideas (see also: The Phantom Carriage from 1921), proves to be no slouch with the sweet stuff either.
But back to that first, obvious reason for going: the Alloy Orchestra. Two percussionists (Terry Donahue and Ken Winokur) and a member of Mission of Burma (Roger Miller on keyboards) make up the group, which has been composing and performing scores to silent films for more than two decades now. This will be their fifth visit to Film Streams; if you haven't caught them yet, this is definitely not one to miss.
Their sound is incredibly distinctive: melodic, a little industrial and about as heavily percussive as you'd expect from group with two percussionists and a rack of noisy junk (their term) that includes things like bedpans and trashcan lids. Despite such tools, they manage to wholly integrate themselves with the screen, musically and almost even physically — it's always a little surprising, when the lights go up, to remember they're right there in the room with you. Performing since 1990, they've already covered most all of the silent-era bases, from the Soviet avant-garde to Buster Keaton.
Raising awareness of silent cinema is one thing, but the Alloy Orchestra has been able to actually make the films themselves more accessible, and to imbue them with a real, contemporary relevance.
Now, of course, raising awareness of terrifying clowns is something else altogether. Fortunately, Alloy happens to have that covered, too.
The Alloy Orchestra performs their score for He Who Gets Slapped at Lincoln's Ross Media Arts Center on Friday, Oct. 4 at 7:30 p.m. and at Omaha's Film Streams on Saturday, October 5 at 7 p.m. Check theross.org and filmstreams.org for ticket information.
Justin Senkbile is a Hear Nebraska contributor focused on finding Nebraska music angles within the film scene. Help him out. Leave story suggestions or comments below, or email him at jmsenkbile@gmail.com.