General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

He Who Gets Slapped

He Who Gets Slapped is a 1924 American silent psychological drama directed by Victor Sjöström (credited as Victor Seastrom) and starring Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, and John Gilbert. It was the first feature produced by the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the first film to carry the studio's Leo the Lion logo¹^•². The film adapts the 1915 play Tot, Kto Poluchaet Poshchechiny (Тот, кто получает пощёчины) by the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev through Gregory Zilboorg's 1922 English translation³. Chaney plays Paul Beaumont, a scientist whose work and wife are stolen by Baron Regnard; humiliated in public, he joins a Parisian circus as a clown whose entire act consists of being slapped¹.

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York premiere 9 November 1924; general release 22 December 1924¹
Studio milestone	First production of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and first film with the MGM lion logo²
Source	Andreyev's 1915 play, adapted by Carey Wilson and Sjöström from Zilboorg's 1922 translation³
Box office	Broke records at New York's Capitol Theatre, taking $70,468.05 in its first week¹
Physical format	Silent, black and white, seven reels, 6,953 feet, 1.33:1¹
Survival	Original negative partially decomposed; prints survive at the Academy Film Archive (Blackhawk Films collection); public domain in the USA⁴^•³
Restorations	Restored by The Film Foundation with George Eastman House; 4K restoration by Blackhawk Films in 2024; Flicker Alley Blu-ray debut in 2025¹^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Paul Beaumont, a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough about the origins of humankind, is betrayed by his patron, Baron Regnard, who takes credit for the work with the help of Beaumont's wife, Marie, and slaps him in front of his peers at the Academy of Sciences⁶. Five years later Beaumont has joined a circus as a clown called "He," whose act is to be slapped repeatedly while the audience roars; each slap makes him relive his humiliation⁶^•⁷. He falls in love with the bareback rider Consuelo (Norma Shearer), who laughs when he confesses his love, believing it part of his act. When he learns that her father, Count Mancini, plans to marry her to Baron Regnard, He releases a lion that kills the pair; fatally stabbed by Regnard, the clown staggers around the ring to the audience's delight and dies in Consuelo's arms¹.

From Russian stage to MGM's first film

Andreyev debuted the play at the Moscow Art Theater in 1915. It is an example of what the writer called "panpsyche" theater, in which external action is driven by the inner psychological struggle of the characters⁸. The first regular English production, in Zilboorg's translation, opened at the Garrick Theatre in New York under the Theatre Guild on January 9, 1922, with Richard Bennett as He⁹. MGM postponed other projects to expedite the film after obtaining the motion picture rights to the 1922 stage production¹.

Sjöström's arrival. Victor Sjöström, already a leading figure of Swedish cinema with films such as The Phantom Carriage (1921), had come to the United States in January 1923 at the invitation of Goldwyn Pictures. Admired by the newly appointed MGM production head Irving Thalberg, he was chosen to direct the new company's first film⁷. Thalberg supervised the production but interfered little; Sjöström said he wrote the script without any interference and that shooting went quickly and without complications⁷. The film was in production between June 17 and July 28, 1924⁷. Louis B. Mayer produced, Carey Wilson and Sjöström wrote the scenario, Milton Moore photographed, Cedric Gibbons designed the settings, and Hugh Wynn edited¹.

Casting. Chaney, then a major star after The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), took the lead as the disillusioned clown⁷. The film was an early example of MGM star packaging, and its success helped establish Shearer and Gilbert as the first of the studio's roster of stars¹⁰^•⁵. The supporting cast included Ford Sterling, Tully Marshall, Marc McDermott, Ruth King, and Paulette Duval¹. A long-circulated rumor that Béla Lugosi, then a recent émigré from Hungary, appeared uncredited as a clown has never been supported or refuted by evidence⁷.

Reception and adaptation choices

The film was a success with critics and audiences. It broke box-office records at the Capitol Theatre in New York, taking in $70,468.05 during its first week, and was chosen as one of the top ten films of the year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Post, the New York News, Photoplay, and other publications¹^•⁷. Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times called it "the finest production we have yet seen"¹¹.

The adaptation departs from the play in tone and ending. The film's ending, in which the villains are killed by a lion, is the kind of spectacle Andreyev had predicted cinema would make possible, and the screen version emphasizes romance and revenge rather than the play's focus on psychological development⁸. The film also transformed the play's intellectual central figure into a research scientist working on ideas about human origins⁸. The play itself proved generative in America, later adapted into a 1925 novel by George Carlin and a 1956 opera by Robert Ward and Bernard Stambler⁸.

Afterlife and restoration

The film's survival was close-run. When the original negative was pulled from dead storage around 1951, the first four reels had decomposed and were junked⁴. Prints survive at the Academy Film Archive in the Blackhawk Films collection, including a first-generation 35mm safety positive (incomplete) and a 16mm reduction positive, and the film is in the public domain in the United States³. It was restored by Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation with support from George Eastman House¹.

The 2024 restoration. For the film's centenary, Blackhawk Films carried out a 4K restoration in 2024 from a first-generation 35mm safety print and a 16mm dupe negative, supported by the Sunrise Foundation for Education & the Arts¹². Flicker Alley released the restoration on Blu-ray in 2025, recreating the original amber-tinted sequences (all surviving prints are black and white) and presenting the film at its original 18 frames per second, which yields a running time of about 95 minutes against the 72 minutes of earlier video editions⁵. The release includes two scores, a piano composition by Antonio Coppola and a 2013 orchestral score by the Alloy Orchestra, plus a commentary by Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake⁵.

Legacy

The film's success set up Sjöström's American career, which produced The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928) before the coming of sound led him back to Sweden; he later acted in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957)⁷. For Chaney, it began a lucrative association with MGM that lasted until his death in 1930². Chaney said in 1925 that he wanted to remind people that "the lowest types of humanity may have within them the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice," a theme he carried through much of his work¹¹. The image of the sad clown whose public humiliation replays his private one has made the film a recurring reference point in discussions of comedy and suffering on screen¹¹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026