More than 90 years after its initial release, Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (Universal, 1928) is still mentioned in popular culture. In Brian De Palma’s 2006 film The Black Dahlia, part of the plot revolves around Leni’s masterpiece; several scenes from Man Who Laughs are shown in the movie, revealing the gross physical deformities of the face of Conrad Veidt in his role as the tragic Gwynplaine.
For a brief time, Leni, the German-born director, found his way to the perfect place, Universal Studios, and at the right time, but the only other films Leni would make at that studio were The Cat and the Canary (1927), The Chinese Parrot (1927) and The Last Warning (1928). His Universal films remain today as a source of joy for countless film buffs. What a shame that the life of this genius was cut short so soon at the age of 44 in 1929.
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Born in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, on July 8, 1885, he was always artistic in nature and became seriously involved at a young age in fine art. After a period of designing sets for theaters in Berlin, his talents brought him to the attention of filmmakers like Joe May, Ernst Lubitsch and E.A. Dupont who started using him as an art director for their films. Throughout the 1920s Leni was learning his trade around some of the best German film directors.
During this period, he would also direct films, and he became good friends with Conrad Veidt after working with him in five productions, including Prinz Kuckuck - Die Höllenfahrt eines Wollüstlings (1919) and Waxworks (1924). The latter would change Leni’s life. In Waxworks a young William Dieterle plays a writer who answers an advertisement to write “Startling tales about these wax figures,” according to one of the subtitles in the film. Emil Jannings, as the caliph in the first tale, tries to seduce the local baker’s wife, but she outsmarts him into hiring her husband as the royal baker. In the second story, Conrad Veidt gives a stellar performance as Ivan the Terrible who loves to watch his victims suffer, seeing their lives end as sand passes through the hourglass in front of them. That same hourglass drives him to insanity in the end. The third tale with Werner Krauss as Jack the Ripper is the most Caligari-like, with an eerie look to the expressionist sets. As the writer has a nightmare, he and the girl find “The Ripper” everywhere. No matter which way they turn “The Ripper” catches up to them. The film ends as they escape into each other’s arms and the nightmare is over.
Waxworks’ amazing premise and stylish sets attracted the attention of Universal’s Carl Laemmle, who also liked the inclusion of playfulness and humor. These traits would come in handy for Leni’s first film at Universal.
In a 1924 article he wrote, Leni commented on Waxworks: “For my film … I have tried to create sets so stylized that they evince no idea of reality. …All it seeks to engender is an indescribable fluidity of light, moving shapes, shadows, lines and curves. …I cannot stress too strongly how important it is for a designer to shun the world seen every day and attain its true sinews.” It is fascinating to hear how Leni was thinking while making such a film. Watching the film, you can sense what his visual intentions were, and he seems to have had a way of anticipating how you, the viewer, would react.
William Dieterle, who plays the writer in Waxworks, would be another one of those young talented European directors to go to America in 1930. He had a successful career in the 1930s and ‘40s. His Jewel Robbery (1932), and Fog over Frisco (1934) remain amusing and in a short time he would become widely respected for films like A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and especially for his bio-pics like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). These talented young German filmmakers such as Lubitsch, Murnau, Pabst, Dieterle, and Leni were learning from each other and refining their talent.
Director Michael Curtiz was so pleased with Leni as art director on Fiaker Nr. 13 (1926), he used him again on his last film before coming to America, Der goldene Schmetterling (The Golden Butterfly) (1926). One of Curtiz’s best attributes as a director was getting great talent to support him and great performances out of his actors. Lili Damita gives one of her best as an aspiring dancer. Leni, as art director, added to the film’s atmosphere.
In America, Leni’s first film for Universal was The Cat and the Canary, which would become a template for later “Haunted House” mystery films like The Old Dark House (1932). The story’s theme was used so many times in other films in the 1930s and ‘40s that they are too numerous to list. You know what you are in for as a gloved hand wipes the cobwebs off the glass in front of you to reveal the title credits. The first title card reads: “On a lonely, pine-clad hill overlooking the Hudson, stood the grotesque mansion of an eccentric millionaire.” To set the mood, Leni again utilizes the technique of printing two separate images on the same piece of film as he did at the end of Waxworks. This is effectively employed to show large black cats (symbolizing relatives who want his money) and even larger empty medicine bottles that lead to the death of the millionaire. Right after the opening scene, the tone is set by a wonderful tracking shot as the camera moves down a hallway with tattered curtains on the windows billowing in the wind. Shadows on the walls and low camera angles intensify the eerie atmosphere. Obviously, Leni had learned well the stylish Expressionist techniques used by other talented filmmakers in Germany. Great humor is tactfully used to offset the fright and horror scenes.
Annabelle West (Laura La Plante) is at the mansion twenty years after her eccentric cousin’s death for the reading of the will. The housekeeper Mammy Pleasant (Martha Mattox) meets her at the front door. Mammy reminds you so much of Cloris Leachman’s housekeeper Frau Blücher in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) that you wonder if she was patterned after her. After the will is read, the lawyer Roger Crosby (Tully Marshall) warns Annabelle, “You are just like your uncle—in a cage, surrounded by cats.” The fast pace of the film and storyline keep you on your toes. It is Leni’s direction and the look he gives the film that makes it work. It was a box office success. An auspicious American debut for the director.
There is no finer tribute to a film than to have a satire made of it: In 1930 Laurel and Hardy made The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case. To every film buff’s delight, Bob Hope later remade The Cat and the Canary as a comedy for Paramount in 1939. There was also a British remake in 1978 starring Honor Blackman and Michael Callan.
Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan mystery novel The Chinese Parrot was first published in 1926. It was so popular that the publisher reprinted it in the same year and Universal bought the screen rights. The result was that Paul Leni would direct the film and it would be released in 1927. Today, The Chinese Parrot is considered a lost film and even the Warner Oland remake, Charlie Chan’s Courage (1934), is lost. You can only imagine, with Leni in charge, what the film would be like. Sôjin Kamiyama portrayed Charlie Chan and the lovely Anna May Wong played a dancer. We can only hope that someday soon a print of the film will show up.
If The Cat and the Canary brought Leni widespread acclaim and be remembered today for all of its innovations, his next film, The Man Who Laughs (1928), would turn out to be his masterpiece. Carl Laemmle originally sought Lon Chaney to star, but difficulties with some of the film rights caused Chaney to choose to do The Phantom of the Opera (1925) instead. Laemmle decided he wanted Leni to direct The Man Who Laughs with Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine. Jack Pierce, who joined Universal’s make-up department in 1926, made up Veidt’s face. The make-up was so successful that the creators of Batman saw a photo of Veidt’s Gwynplaine grin and used it as a template for the Joker’s face. “The Last Laugh” is the title of the 15th episode of Batman: The Animated Series (1992) with the Joker.
Charles D. Hall, who had helped Leni on The Cat and the Canary, designed the sets. Hall’s experience with Leni helped him develop the Gothic and expressionistic expertise that led him to later design sets for films like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and the incredible futuristic ones for The Black Cat (1934) which may have been his finest achievement. Other productions of note in which Hall created sets in the 1930s include All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Show Boat (1936) and My Man Godfrey (1936).
No amount of money was spared on The Man Who Laughs, and it was called a Carl Laemmle Super Production. Veidt plays both a father and son in the film. The king puts the father to death for not kissing his hand. The king then gives the father’s ten-year-old son to gypsies who disfigure the boy’s mouth so he always looks as if he is smiling. As the gypsies are leaving by boat, the son Gwynplaine is left to die in the winter snow. As he wonders about, he comes across a woman who has frozen to death holding a live, blind baby girl (Dea) who grows up to be beautiful. She (Mary Philbin) loves Gwynplaine not knowing of his deformity. The film becomes a Beauty and the Beast scenario—but Gwynplaine is no beast. He is a gentle, loving human being crushed by a deformity so severe that he cannot tell Dea that he loves her. Conrad Veidt puts in one of his most sympathetic and heartwarming performances as Gwynplaine. You feel his pain as he tells the queen, “A king made me a clown, a queen made me a Lord—but first, God made me a man!” Gwynplaine finally lets Dea feel his mouth and its great deformity and she says, “God closed my eyes so I could see only the real Gwynplaine.” Paul Leni was a big reason all of this was so successful. His vision of who Gwynplaine was had enabled him to draw such a great performance out of Veidt. The tight pace of the film and the mood of seventeenth-century England are all on display. After you meet Gwynplaine you will never forget him for the rest of your life.
Film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the final treasures of German silent Expressionism.” Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas named The Man Who Laughs Leni’s masterpiece stating, “In Leni it found its perfect director, for his bravura Expressionist style lifts this tempestuous tale above the level of tear-jerker to genuinely stirring experience.”
When you watch The Last Warning (1929) you immediately see that it seems like a follow-up to The Cat and the Canary. Instead of an old mansion you are in an old abandoned theater that is about to be reopened. That is exactly what Carl Laemmle and Paul Leni wanted to do—to make another highly stylized murder mystery. The inside of the opera house from Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera was used to great advantage.
Actor John Woodford is murdered on stage and his body disappears. Five years later, a new producer, Arthur McHugh (Montagu Love), mysteriously wants to open the theater again and produce the same play that closed it with the same cast. Leni brings back Laura La Plante from The Cat and the Canary as the heroine.
Once again Leni uses overlays of film to evoke fear. He creates mystery with close-ups, camera angles and movement. The camera is often set at a low angle looking up at the cast to make them seem larger than life. The film is fast paced and done with the same panache that he showed in The Cat and the Canary.
In 2016, Universal Pictures released a new digitally restored print of The Last Warning. The new restoration was made possible from prints provided by Cinémathèque Française and the Packard Humanities Institute Collection of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The film was shown at the 2016 Cinecon Film Festival with accompaniment by talented Jon Mirsalis and the audience loved it. It is so nice to see a film like this restored for everyone to enjoy again.
Carl Laemmle purchased the rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and intended to have Paul Leni direct with Conrad Veidt playing the titular role. Leni’s sudden death, on September 2, 1929, from blood poisoning caused by an ulcerated tooth, shocked everyone. He would have been one of the two directors at Universal who were slated to bring in the horror cycle of the 1930s. Because of his death Dracula was delayed for another year. You can only wonder what the film would have been like if he had directed it and Veidt had played Dracula. Leni’s pace and style would certainly have made for a different film from the one we know so well today. Had it been made, Veidt’s career would certainly have changed. That is not saying anything negative about Bela Lugosi whose Dracula is legendary. Nor is it anything against Tod Browning’s direction of the famous film. It is just always interesting to contemplate how different a film might have been if a uniquely talented person like Leni had been at the helm.
Did Paul Leni influence how horror films were made during the 1930s? James Whale said that both The Cat and the Canary and The Last Warning influenced both the making of The Old Dark House and Frankenstein. Looking at Charles D. Hall’s sets you see the influence that Leni had on Hall and the atmosphere in many other Universal horror films of the 1930s.
You cannot help thinking of the tragic loss of F.W. Murnau, director of one of the grandest of all films, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), when considering the loss of Leni. Murnau’s career was more established at the time of his death and Leni’s was just getting underway in America. This might possibly be one of the reasons why he is not better remembered today.
It is with directors like Paul Leni, who led the way with his style and technique, that make it possible for so many films today to have a special look. Every so often we should reacquaint ourselves with the work of directors like Leni. Not only to see if our view of his work has changed but to remind ourselves of how he may have changed film. His complex set designs as in Waxworks or bold use of light and shadow in The Cat and the Canary set him up for his greatest triumph, The Man Who Laughs. Our familiarity with his genius was cut short. How we wish we had more of it to savor. Even though he did have a lasting impact on other filmmakers, we can't help but feeling that his early death was a great loss.