Lon Chaney offers a heart-wrenching performance as an agonizing, aging circus performer (clown) who raises a pretty orphan girl found while he and a colleague, Simon (Bernard Siegel) are taking a rest break during their country travels. Take us about ten or so years later, and Chaney's Tito wants Simon to include Simonetta (Loretta Young, a cutie) in their act as a balancing on the wire act in a ballerina suit. Simon doesn't like and walks out on Tito, but he later recants when they start selling out large theaters. Enter affluent aristocrat, Luigi (Nils Asther), seeing Simonetta caught on a fence wire, instantly in love. Tito soon realizes he is falling in love with Simonetta (a bit creepy considering he's much older and she's still a teenager), and a triangle ensues with Luigi seemingly a monkey wrench. It all ends in tragedy.
The anguish with Lon is palpable and effective. That is what I take from this film. Loretta is cute and bubbly. Lon reacts in ways that are both subtle and over the top (his eyes widening an example, and his slipping away at the end with the eyes less bugging and more introspective and hurt), but I always felt it all works well at exposing his inner adoration, pain, and madness. What he goes through is all right there on screen. A tour de force. The ending is predictable but compelling and spellbinding. Lon was an absolute silent film actor's actor.
The anguish with Lon is palpable and effective. That is what I take from this film. Loretta is cute and bubbly. Lon reacts in ways that are both subtle and over the top (his eyes widening an example, and his slipping away at the end with the eyes less bugging and more introspective and hurt), but I always felt it all works well at exposing his inner adoration, pain, and madness. What he goes through is all right there on screen. A tour de force. The ending is predictable but compelling and spellbinding. Lon was an absolute silent film actor's actor.