Soldier Man

This is another hilarious Mack Sennett short film starring Harry Langdon, with story and titles by Frank Capra. The story begins amusingly: Harry is the last American soldier left behind in Europe at the end of World War I. He is still wandering around the former battlefield, dazed, with his helmet and gun, wondering where everybody is. He had been captured by the Germans and then escaped 'because they were all busy celebrating something' (i.e., the end of the War). Meanwhile, King Strudel the 13th of Bomania, is feeling threatened because of the fall of his cousin Wilhelm (the Kaiser). King Strudel is a drunken degenerate who is hated by his entire Court, and not least by his wife. He does have one redeeming feature, however, he is the twin of our hero, as both characters are played by Langdon. A scheming courtier kidnaps the king and conceals him, but a loyal courtier stumbles across Langdon in his uniform and realizes he can act as the double of the king. So Langdon becomes King Strudel in order to sign the Treaty of Peace which the real Strudel had refused to sign. Endless comic situations ensue, and this film is truly hilarious. The film is considerably longer than the usual 20 minutes for a short, but I did not time it, and its duration is not recorded on IMDb. One reviewer says it is over 30 minutes, and that is certainly true. Another Langdon gem!

The emergence of Harry Langdon in 1924 was an important moment in the history of comedy and the baby-faced comic would enjoy an immediate and phenomenal success (which, alas for Langdon, would also prove ephemeral). Unlike the other great comics of the silent era (Linder, Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd), Langdon was not really able to write his own material or mould his own distinctive character. In these early days, he was lucky in having an expert team behind him but, after some excellent shorts in 1924-1925 written (principally) by Arthur Ripley and directed mostly by Harry Edwards, they start to lose their rhythm (coinciding seemingly with the arrival in the writing-team of Frank Capra. This short has some good ideas but they are a bit hit-and-miss and the two parts of the story, the soldier who doesn't know the war has ended (the best part) and the parody of Rupert of Hentzau, do not fit together well and make the film a rather uneven pleasure.

With regard to the parody, The Priosner of Zenda (Hope's first Ruritanian novel) had been well filmed by Rex Ingram in 1922. The sequel Rupert of Hentzau had been filmed in 1923 (Selznick) but seems to have been a particularly bad film (I have not seen it and it may be lost). It had already been parodied (very feebly as Rupert of Hee Haw in 1924 by Stan Laurel). To judge from the parodies, it evidently emphasised the Ruritanian King's fondness for alcohol (not an important element in the book) which tended to render the story ridiculous as well as to providing a topical note during prohibition (which gets a specific mention in this Langdon film).

It is a better parody than Laurel's but most of the humour derives from the character's constant search for food (nothing to do with the parody as such and the only linking element between the two parts of the plot). The kissing scene is also parody, this time of a film of the same year, The Sea Beast, and works rather well. Millard Webb's The Sea Beast (a romanticised travesty of Melville's Moby Dick) was a huge hit and its most famous scene had the heroine, played by Dolores Costello, faint after being kissed by co-star (and real-life lover and future husband) John Barrymore, who plays Ahab. This film too attracted a good deal of attention from comics (the kiss and faint gag would recur periodically). The Sidney Smith film She Beast (1926 or 1927), where the hero has a domineering wife but dreams of sailing the seas with an all-female crew, is also a vague parody.

Animal-lovers will be glad to hear that Langdon does not blow up a cow, as stated by another reviewer; he merely thinks he has The cow has in fact long gone by the time the explosion occurs and the ribs come (proximately, at least) from an unattended basket of shopping.

A lot has been made of the similarities between the film comedy characters of Harry Langdon and Stan Laurel. While both uniquely and individually wonderful, one can see a pretty clear lineage. "Soldier Man" starts with an opening gag premise that wouldn't work very well for almost any other characters -- Harry is a soldier from World War One who has not realized years later that it is over -- which would be repeated years later for Laurel in "Block-Heads," a feature Langdon would co- wrote.

"Soldier Man" goes in a very different direction than "Block-Heads" will, though. Instead of being discovered and reunited with Oliver Hardy at on old soldiers' home, we get a wonderful gag sequence in which a series of coincidences and confusions allow Harry to think he is still fighting the war -- and being fought back at. These gags, involving some ingenious and grotesque bits with a scarecrow and a complex visual joke that has to do with a blown-up co that becomes pre-butchered meat, make great use, of course, of Harry Langdon's signature slow, confused reactions, but here, in a rarer occurrence even in Langdon's own shorts, the comedy is not just in these between-the-lines reactions that make up his performance. His character has really been developed to complete fruition here and that means that gags are now being written not just for generic comedians or to give Harry a chance to do his thing, but custom-tailored to the way his character behaves. It all feels right and works well. This new development makes itself felt also in the very funny and in-character title cards that Harry is given throughout the film.

Another sign of this is the fact that this short, while its premise would have fit into the twenty minutes of a standard two-reel short, is given three in which to develop. The producers knew that so much of the comedy could come between the parts written in the script from Harry's still and slow expressions.

In the second part of the film we move to a old standard trope, in which Harry resembles exactly the country's alcoholic king; he plays the king in just a few shots but impressively projects a very convincingly different alcoholic despot. In this part of the comedy the "plot" elements remain almost totally separate from anything Harry does. They remain fairly unobtrusive (though still they seems a little unnecessary), which allows us to follow the pure comedy of Harry Langdon attempting to be a king.

Of course, he doesn't understand a thing about how to do it. In some ways making Harry Langdon have to play king is a perfect idea because the decisiveness and power that a king is supposed to project are the exact opposite of the complete ineffectualness and uncertainly that define his character. So we can sit back and watch Harry at his best, unable to take his concentration away from a bowl of fruit, interacting with a suit of army he thinks is alive, jumping with fright at a wig that falls off a man's head, ordering a man beheaded because he thinks he is supposed to and then becoming horrified when he realizes what beheading is, and more.

The ending is of a kind that is often used in films (I won't reveal it for those who haven't watched it yet), and it almost always feels like a complete cop-out. Here, though, it is topped by such a sweet gag twist that all is forgiven.

This is Harry at his purely funniest, in material that is clearly and happily designed just for him.