So grotesque it verges on the operatic, The Way of the Strong, written by William Counselman and Peter Milne, was described by Columbia as the story of “the world's ugliest man, who can bear anything except the sight of his own face in a mirror.” Mitchell Lewis plays “Handsome” Williams, a hulking gangster whose misshapen face is crisscrossed with scars. The beauty underlying his brutish exterior is shown by his tenderness toward Nora (Alice Day), a blind violinist who works in his cafe and falls in love with him, thinking he is truly handsome. But when she realizes for the first time how he looks, she recoils. The Way of the Strong includes one of many suicide attempts in Capra films, but this is one of only two that succeed (the other is in The Bitter Tea of General Yen), and it is a particularly startling ending for a supposedly “optimistic” director.