Don't know how much interest there is in silents here, but there seems to be a little, so I'll repost reviews of the two Harry Langdon comedies released by Kino, which were originally posted on
NitrateVille, a discussion site for silent and early talkie films. I seem to be one of the few who found much of worth in these films; I'm not a big Langdon fan (and generally bristle at the claim that he's one of the four great silent comedians, both because I don't think he is and because I don't think there should only be four), but in this case, I seem to be among the few defenders.
Three's a Crowd
So the standard story (Frank Capra's) on this is: Langdon didn't understand his own character, made a film or two that was too sentimental and not funny enough, quickly torpedoed his own popularity and proved that he should have trusted the great Capra to guide him.
This much of the above is true:
Three's a Crowd is not funny enough.
My friend Ben Urish wrote an
article pretty well demolishing Capra's version as after the fact self-justification-- you get fired, you tell everyone your boss was an idiot. The case is summed up by a comparison of two quotes from Mack Sennett; by his 1950s autobiography Sennett was peddling the
Langdon, clueless naif story, but in 1928 Sennett (who no longer had a financial interest in Langdon's success, though a bit of one in burnishing his own reputation as a discoverer of great talent) was calling him "greater than Chaplin" and saying "He had his own ideas, exactly, of how everything should be done." Which sure sounds like someone who's heard what one of Langdon's ex-employees is saying about him, and wants to set the record straight.
Three's a Crowd is a misguided film in some ways, but what you cannot say is that it's an inept one, the work of someone who took over reins he wasn't up to holding. It is, in fact, a very precise work in its effects, reflecting someone who has a very clear idea of what his character is and what he can do. The problem is, that idea tends to paint him into a bit of a corner where he can't be all that funny, or even function as a dramatic character. But nevertheless, it represents a very high level of understanding of and commitment to his comic persona.
Langdon works for a trash hauler and admires, a bit pathetically, the man's home life with wife and children. (This leads to some rather queasy gags about the man suspecting Langdon of trying to break up his home. These would be funnier if Langdon's character weren't actually writing secret admirer notes to the man's wife.) Out of nowhere a woman about to give birth appears in Langdon's life, and soon he has, miraculously, wife and child, or so it seems. But I am surely spoiling nothing by saying this can't last.
People have called this Langdon's take on
The Kid, but that just shows how different Langdon and Chaplin are. Chaplin works all the stops on the organ to make us laugh and cry; his devotion to the kid is total and heroic, so when he gives him up, as we know he must, it's one of the great tearjerker scenes in silents. Langdon, on the other hand, is such a strange creature that all the reaction to this situation has to take place inside his own infantilized head. He doesn't really interact with mother or child, he's just enthralled by the idea of having them; they're props in his fantasy world, not other people. It's Langdon's take on
The Kid, crossed with Langdon's take on
The Collector.
One admires the rigor with which Langdon keeps his reactions to other people on a four-year-old level, but it does tend to make it hard to take his film as drama. What almost makes it work is that Langdon as a filmmaker constructs such a stark, fable-like visual environment for his tale that you can believe such a character inhabits such a world. Half the film or more takes place in Langdon's tiny shack at the top of an endless flight of stairs-- hell, half the film or more takes place from the same
camera angle in that room. (He seems to have gotten his shack from the same Expressionist builder as Rotwang in
Metropolis or Charles Farrell in
Lucky Star.) Where Langdon's earlier features seemed to want to put him in a big environment for the comic contrast with his tiny reactions (a tactic which to my mind falls apart in
The Strong Man's epic-sized and noisy climax, where he seems very out of place), this film constructs a perfect tiny world around him-- his own Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
And so it all might work as a kind of minimalist fable... if only it were funnier. There's the problem, Langdon seems to have forgotten to develop gag sequences, and the ones there are seem oddly half-hearted-- a long sequence about frozen diapers on a clothesline ends with pie filling being poured into a diaper-crust-pie, which is low-grade Sennett stuff, and a scene of him dangling out the floor of his shack doesn't have the existential hopelessness of a similar scene of peril in
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, which makes his peril so funny. In the end,
Three's a Crowd is oddly beguiling in some ways, and (like Langdon always is) creepy in others, but what it just isn't it is funny enough to win us over to its very odd, but undeniably fully realized, world.
Print quality is excellent, beautifully clear apart from a couple of moments of nitrate decomposition in non-critical scenes; the organ score by Lee Erwin might seem a little sepulchral for a better comedy, but seems to suit this one's otherworldliness fine.
The Chaser
You can instantly tell that
The Chaser is the work of someone who got burned making too artificial and precious a movie last time out. This movie works overtime to establish Langdon in a sardonically realistic setting-- getting bawled out by both his wife and mother-in-law over the phone, while he sits at his office, zoning out but dutifully checking in from time to time to assure himself that they're still there, blathering at top speed.
I've always thought of Langdon as sort of a Laurel without a Hardy, and the early scenes of
The Chaser come so close to L&H territory that you start to wonder if they didn't consciously pick up a thing or two from here-- not only is the scornful wife straight out of L&H, but lodge membership as an excuse to get away and have a good time out of the wife's control plays a major role in the establishment of the plot. His wife eventually catches him partying-- the title refers to the notion of him being a skirtchaser, not to being the last item on the bill to clear the house, though that's probably how the film has been thought of for many years-- and hauls him into divorce court. But the judge has a novel idea: make Harry be the wife for 30 days, down to wearing a skirt, while his wife wears a suit and goes to work.
This is a first-rate premise for Langdon's weird, asexual yet randy persona, and though
The Chaser isn't the first-rate comedy the premise was hoping for, it's not a bad one. And Langdon gleefully takes it into gender-bending territory which seems very modern by silent comedy standards, as a procession of tradesmen, oblivious to everything but the skirt, start flirting with Harry-- who reacts violently to the first one but is practically in Joe E. Brown "Nobody's perfect!" territory by the end. This is the best section of the film, the most interesting and the funniest part (it also has the most striking camera work-- there's a tracking shot through multiple sets which Keaton would have been proud of), and all in all it makes
The Chaser good enough to erase the arbitrary distinction between the good Capra-era Langdons (which are often overrated, especially
The Strong Man whose big finale is, to me, an overblown misfire) and the bad post-Capra ones. There's just not that much qualitative difference between them; it's like the difference between Keaton's self-produced films and the final two MGM silents, maybe, but nothing like the far greater gulf in quality between Keaton's silents and his MGM talkies.
The last two reels are a bit of a fall-off, because they play like a two-reeler that's been tacked on-- he winds up playing golf, and then discovering a group of young women out on a chaperoned outing, and it all wraps up so quickly you might wonder if they were running low on film. Here, maybe, we can safely say that Capra brought a solid story sense to the films which Langdon didn't have;
The Strong Man, for all I think it's overrated, unquestionably has a solid dramatic climax (specifically, it has the climax of
Hell's Hinges) and this is more like a throwback to the what-the-hell-try-it Sennett days, when premises would spin on a dime two or three times over the course of a two-reeler.
Still,
The Chaser has some good laughs and even more moments of sexually-tinged weirdness only Langdon would have dared. If Harry Langdon has probably gotten more attention than he deserves, laugh for laugh, thanks to
James Agee, these two films, at least, have gotten less attention than they deserve, not only relative to Langdon's other work but to silent comedy generally. And they've
continued to be viewed through the lens of Capra's rewriting of history, as evidence of Langdon's incompetence and naivete when, in fact, they offer considerable evidence of his keen insight into his character and directing ability.* For those reasons alone, anyone interested in Langdon ought to check them out and see for yourself that you can't trust everything you read about silent comedy.
Again, the print quality is very good (though this is a more pedestrian-looking film than
Three's a Crowd), and Lee Erwin's sprightly organ score is well suited to the comedy.
* Walter Kerr cited as an example of Langdon's misunderstanding of basic comic principles a scene in which he's laying under a sheet, thinking he's drunk poison but actually having drunk a laxative; for maximum comic effect the shot needs to hold absolutely steady on the sheet until he bolts from it for the toilet off-screen, but it's interrupted by a cut which, in effect, resets the clock on the gag. Yet that's an editing failure, not a directorial one, and almost certainly the cut, which pointlessly gives us a closer view of the sheet for a couple of seconds, is there to allow the sequence to be shortened. My guess is, Langdon shot the scene with a full 30 or 40 seconds of nothing happening, exactly as Kerr wished, and it was probably cut after audiences became restless at previews.
!