The Man Who Laughs

Director Paul Leni took Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel 'L’homme qui rit' as the basis for his dramatic tale of a man in seventeenth-century England who goes through life with a permanent grimace on his face.

Conrad Veidt plays Gwynplaine, the orphaned son of a nobleman. It turns out that behind his fearsome countenance there’s a kind-hearted person, who looks after blind baby Dea (Mary Philbin), a little girl whose mother has died. A deep affection grows up between the two of them, but this will be severely tested by fate.