Feet of Mud

The boy, a rubbish football player, weedy and nerdy (the wonderful Harry Langdon, new to me), loves the girl (Natalie Kingston, underused). So he tries to do anything to win her and impress her blustering father (Yorke Sherwood).

So we have the football game (where Harry manages to score a goal!), then his new job as a street cleaner. You can imagine - throwing rubbish and hitting a policeman; getting his sweeping brush caught in a lift. But the best bit of all is where Harry starts from being trapped on the floor under his brush handle in a crowded tube train, and plots to get as many passengers out as possible.

Langdon is an underrated and largely forgotten performer today, which is a shame. His facial reactions were as priceless as Stan Laurel's, while he had great timing for comic situations. I'd like to see much more of his work at festivals and on video.

This is one of many extremely funny shorts starring Harry Landon for Mack Sennett's studios. This one isn't the most unified: Harry's character is pretty well defined by now, and this film takes the not-entirely-unwise decision simply to place Harry in three different situations and allow him to be funny -- the film starts with Harry playing in a college football game, then acts one and two show him navigating the world as a street-sweep, then thrust into a threatening Chinatown.

One thing this short does really well is place his meek, kind, child-man character into heartless, threatening situations and milk the for laughs. He's thrust into the macho violence of a football game, pushed into the mechanical crowds of the New York subway, finds himself threatened by warring Chinese gangs, and confronted with a street-sweep's worst nightmare: a street overflowing with garbage thrown out of windows in a neighborhood fight.

Of course, he deals with in with incomprehension, kindness, and luck, and Harry is as wonderful as always, rubbing the wound of the policeman he has just accidentally stabbed, continually trying again to get a translation of the Chinese note that makes every Chinese reader run away in fear, and reacting with stunned confusion as the football crucially falls into his pants mid-game.

I won't spoil the best gag sequence, but watch for Harry's ingenious ways of dealing with the crowd on the subway car. I predict wishing I cold do that every time I'm on one for the rest of my life.

The Chinatown sequence will be considered stereotyped today, but it can be viewed as an interesting look at the prevailing views of Chinese a the time without interfering with the comedy. In fact, there were historically Chinese gang fights going on at this time, and the film presents some of the common stereotypical Chinese activities as being puts-ons.

What "Feet of Mud" does best is show off Harry Langdon; with no Harry and some other comedian in his place, it would seem completely empty or unremarkable. It does star Harry Langdon, though, and is very funny because it does show off his particular comedic talents so well it's rather a wonderful short comedy.

This is hysterical! Excellent. Every element of this comedy was borrowed by someone. Chaplin(City Lights, Payday), Harold Lloyd (The Freshman, Welcome Danger) and Keaton (The Cameraman). I can see why Langdon enjoyed a period of stratospheric success. This past-paced, innovate comedy is well above the routine soup offered up by Mack Sennet's studio. Langdon ran ahead of the crowd with gems like this. Go for it.