score was built around the song "When Love Comes Stealing," an instrumental piece composed by Ernö Rapée, with lyrics added by Walter Hirsch and Lew Pollack. Recorded by James Melton and Herman D. Kenin's orchestra, "When Love Comes Stealing" failed to achieve nationwide success. Release Theatrical release The Man Who Laughs opened on April 27, 1928, at New York's Central Theatre. Proceeds from the opening night were donated to the non-profit organization American Friends of Blérancourt. The film was released in the United States on November 4, 1928. The Man Who Laughs received two releases in the United Kingdom. The film originally released in London on May 16, 1928, completely silent, with a score provided by each theater's in-house pianist. Universal later used the Movietone sound-on-film process to give the film a synchronized musical score, which released in London on November 30, 1928. Home media For many years, the film was not publicly available. In the 1960s, The Man Who Laughs was among the films preserved by the Library of Congress following a donation from the American Film Institute; along with 22 other such films, it was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1969. It was again screened by Peter Bogdanovich at the Telluride Film Festival in 1998, but remained largely unavailable until Kino International and the Cineteca di Bologna produced a restored version of the film made from two American prints and an Italian print. This restoration was released on DVD by Kino on November 16, 2007. Slant Magazine gave this DVD 3.5 out of 5 stars, citing the overall quality of the restoration and the uniqueness of the included extras, including a home movie of Veidt. Kino included this DVD in their five-volume American Silent Horror Collection box set on October 9, 2007. Sunrise Silents also produced a DVD of the film, edited to a slightly longer runtime than the Kino restoration, released in October 2008. The Man Who Laughs was released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 4, 2019, sourced from a new 4K restoration, and features the original score performed by The Berklee College of Music Silent Film Orchestra. The film was also restored on August 17, 2020, by Masters of Cinema. Critical reception Contemporary Initially, the critical assessment of The Man Who Laughs was mediocre, with some critics disliking the morbidity of the subject matter and others complaining that the German-looking sets did