Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928)

Um, yuck. I mean, I'm a sucker for cheap melodrama, but the blah tear-jerker crud on display here wouldn't fetch fifty cents at a garage sale. Apart from Lon Chaney's fine performance, there's nothing to recommend here (the sad-clown character had to be a cliche even in the '20s), and in fact there's one glaring misstep that makes this film go down like a gasoline cocktail: Apparently, the standard love triangle wasn't interesting enough for the writers, so they threw in a kink by having the Chaney character pine for the love of a girl he found orphaned at the age of three and subsequently raised as his own daughter. Yes, folks, this film is about vicarious incest. And nobody in the film finds time to comment on this repellent notion -- not even the female lead, who responds to the revelation of Chaney's feelings with joy instead of something along the lines of "Um, you know, you're like my dad. You saw me through childhood and puberty and my first period and all that. So, um, get the fuck away from me you fucking pervert." Funny how injecting taboo subject matter into an innocuous formula drama can prove fatal...

Grade: D+