Pure alien mystery makes this the most avant-garde and enigmatic project ever by Sjöström (working in Hollywood as Seastrom). Horror star Lon Chaney plays Paul Beaumont, a brilliant scientist whose rich benefactor steals his wife and thesis manuscript, then denounces and humiliates him before the French Academy. Disappearing into the persona of an absurdist circus clown known only as He Who Gets Slapped, Beaumont pathologically replays his original trauma nightly for a callously insatiable public. As screenwriter, Sjöström liberally adapted Andreyev's 1914 Russian Symbolist play, and the influence of antirealist dramaturgy and German Expressionist lighting is evident. Yet Sjöström/Seastrom also allegorizes his own alienated condition of voluntary exile and cultural hybridity, as well as his deep ambivalence about satisfying American mass-market tastes within a rapidly consolidating Hollywood studio system. Despite the conventional Pagliacci love triangle, this strange, experimental masterwork is about infinitely more than the tears of a clown.