このレッスンの実行方法

レッスン6は5つのセクションから構成されています。各セッションでは、以下の順番で授業を受けてください。

(1) ビデオレクチャー（動画）を見てください。(2) レクチャーのテキストを読んでください。(3) 動画（映画の抜粋）を見てください。各セクションで上記のステップ（1）から（3）を繰り返してください。

Part 1 – In my last lesson I said that we were getting closer and closer to the first film to be called a “Horror film”, but we still have a way to go before we get there. You can think of this as a kind of puzzle or riddle or even a mystery. It’s fun putting the pieces together. One of the most important pieces is The Man Who Laughs. This was the third of Universal’s “human tragedies” following The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of The Opera both of which were hugely profitable for Universal.  You are now going to take a look at the first part of a documentary film about the making of The Man Who Laughs. Unfortunately, this film does not have Japanese subtitles so I am going to ask you to challenge yourself and try to understand as much of the English as you can. 

Part 2 – As I said, much of this is review. We know all about The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of The Opera as well as Lon Chaney. One interesting new thing we learn about the story of The Man Who Laughs is that the woman Gwynplaine loves is the blind girl, Dea (played by none other than Mary Philbin who had been Christine in the Phantom of The Opera ).

Can you imagine what role her blindness plays in the story? Think about this and write down your thoughts in your notes before you go on to the next excerpt.

Part 3 – The documentary also goes over what I have already told you about how Carl Laemmle solved the problem of not having Lon Chaney as the star of the film by hiring the great German Expressionist, Paul Leni to direct. Leni, in turn, brought on Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine. This changed the film from being a vehicle for Lon Chaney to a very different sort of film.

In The Hunchback of Notre Dame Quasimodo loved Esmerelda but she loved the handsome Knight who had rescued her, while in The Phantom of The Opera Christine already loved the handsome Raul and she regarded Erik with loathing and revulsion once she saw his face. But, in The Man Who Laughs, the love triangle is between two women, the blind Dea and the wicked Duchess Josiana, and the “monster” Gwynplaine.

The Man Who Laughs really explored some taboo subjects such as the fact that Duchess Josiana is not repulsed by Gwynplaine’s mutilation, she is sexually attracted to it. That is disturbing even by our standards today, but if there is one thing we know about sexual attraction, it is that it takes many and varied forms. But in 1928 that attraction was supposed to reveal that Josiana was a cruel and wicked character in contrast to the good and pure Dea. We know that Dea’s love for Gwynplaine is “pure” because when he at last allows her to touch his face she says “God closed my eyes so I could see the real Gwynplaine!” That was a message Tod Browning could have embraced, the idea that one should judge someone not by how they look, but by the content of their heart. But is this a message the audience will understand and accept?

When a film loses money, it is often because it cost too much. Irving Thalberg had become famous in Hollywood for firing one of the greatest directors Universal ever had, a man named Erich Von Stroheim, for spending too much money to make one of his films. But in the case of The Man Who Laughs Paul Leni kept to his budget. So, there was no problem that way. There was no one single problem that caused The Man Who Laughs to fail. It was a combination of many things. In addition to the strange sexual desires of Duchess Josiana putting off the more conservative members of the audience, the ending in which Gwynplaine and Dea escape together and find happiness did not fulfill the audiences strong desire for tragedy which The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of The Opera both provided. Chaney had sensed this when he insisted on Erik dying at the end of Phantom of the Opera instead of following the original story in the novel.

Paul Leni did the exact opposite. He changed Hugo’s original tragic ending to a happy ending. American audiences usually preferred happy endings, except in horror films.

Then there was the technical problem.

Part 4 – There it is. The Man Who Laughs was made at exactly that point in Hollywood history when studios were switching over to sound. The documentary does not make it clear how important this transition was. The change from silent film to sound film was the single biggest change ever to occur in Hollywood history. It quite literally changed what film was.

But the single thing that contributed to the failure of The Man Who Laughs more than anything else was Lon Chaney…because he wasn’t in it. Chaney was so popular by 1927 that audiences went to movies just to see him and they really didn’t care whether the movie was any good or not. This is what is called “star power”. It is why London After Midnight made a great deal of money for M.G.M. while The Man Who Laughs lost money for Universal. This seems especially unfair because Conrad Veidt was probably the one actor in the world who could portray the kind of deformed tragic characters Chaney made famous in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of The Opera. Veidt’s Gwynplaine is surely as great a performance as Chaney’s Quasimodo or Erik. But audiences didn’t know who Conrad Veidt was, so they didn’t go see The Man Who Laughs. So, the film lost money and failed at the box office.