Too Many Pagliaccis: May 1926

One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley noticed a new trend: “In all your life put together you probably have never seen so many circuses as you are seeing and are going to see in the movies these days.” She was right—the number of circus films had doubled to 20 in 1925 and stayed in that neighborhood until 1929, when they went back to around 10 per year, according to the AFI Film Catalog. Kingsley wasn’t particularly happy about that. She visited the set of one in production, Spangles, and used her report to complain about the tropes she was already tired of: “For one thing, there is no broken-hearted clown! The clowns in this are all clever, snappy clowns, who just do their stuff and step out on their days off like anybody else, without worrying over any particular jane.” She had enough of suffering Pagliacci-type clowns, like the one Lon Chaney played in He Who Gets Slapped. (1924) She was looking forward to this one because she was promised loads of laughs (she even saw a…