A Soldier's Plaything

Yet another comedy set against the backdrop of The Great War (the novelty being that this time round it's more concerned with the postwar occupation), and an unsuccessful attempt to create a comedy team out of Ben Lyon & Harry Langdon.

Despite being directed by the already seasoned Michael Curtiz, fairly generous production values and a likeable transition to sound on Langdon's part revealing an agreeable singing voice, this proved yet another failed attempt to reestablish him in talkies.

The recurring piles of horse manure in this film are a fitting comment on its worth. No matter how strongly his fans plead his case, Langdon is just not funny. Real actors such as Lyon, Fred Kohler, and Richard Cramer left him and his silliness in the dust.

This one was a blind buy for me from the Warner Archives, interesting to me because it was Harry Langdon's first talking feature film. Here Langdon plays Tim, the operator of a carnival shooting gallery, and Ben Lyon plays Georgie, occupation unknown, whom we first meet at a poker game being played in a bookie's office from the looks of the surroundings, with bookie Hank (Fred Kohler) and associates. Apparently Georgie and Tim are buddies, and also apparently Georgie routinely cleans out Hank and his associates at their poker games. When an extra ace is discovered after George collects his winnings and leaves, Hank jumps to the conclusion that George cheated and tracks him down to face off with him over it. In self defense George hits Hank hard enough that he crashes through the railing of the rooming house hallway in which they are arguing and falls several stories. Being chased by both Hank's gang and the police, and with Hank not looking particularly alive the last time he saw him, George decides to hide by - joining the army??? (The time is WWI).

The U.S. army is NOT the French Foreign Legion, and the police would have no trouble tracking George down if they so desired, but that's beside the point apparently. Tim has already joined the army, so the rest of the movie is set in Europe with Lyon and Langdon as two privates in the war with the rest of the script just being a bunch of comic bits strung together like so many disconnected comic Vitaphone shorts. There really is not much of a story here. The odd thing about it is that all of the soldiers shown here in "the army of occupation" as it is blandly called by the title cards, inexplicably see less combat action than marine Gomer Pyle saw at the height of the Vietnam War - which was absolutely none. Instead they shovel horse manure when they run afoul of the gruff captain, played by Noah Beery in a role that reminded me very much of his brother, and spend the rest of their time drinking, singing, and fraternizing with the local Germans who don't seem at all bothered by the fact that they are being occupied and treat them like tourists.

I'm no expert on WWI, but somehow I don't think this was a typical wartime experience. As for the comedy, I found Ben Lyon likable as always, doing the best he could with comedy material that was obviously meant to give the spotlight to Langdon. I like Langdon in his silents, but here he just seemed to wrestle with incorporating the dialogue he was given with his traditional befuddled expressions and slapstick from his silent years.

Oddest scene/line in the film: Tim and George want to escape the MPs by donning the horse costume that two of the German saloon performers were wearing, but they are getting nowhere with these two fellows due to the language barrier. George turns to Tim and says : "Let's just knock these two guys off". That stunned me and I replayed this section of the DVD just to make sure I didn't misunderstand what was being said - I didn't. George, who has not been portrayed as anything more than a rather streetwise fellow up to this point is suggesting killing two men to escape punishment for being in a bar off-limits to military personnel? This seemed like overkill to me (pardon the pun) and something that belonged more in Little Caesar than in a buddy war pic.

I'd recommend this one mainly for fans of Harry Langdon, early sound enthusiasts, and for those interested in the early career of director Michael Curtiz. I can just imagine his frustration in directing such a film that is part Big Parade (minus the combat), part gangster picture, and partially an early sound version of Buck Privates.

I'm rating this as high as I am because Harry Langdon is in it, and because he's hilarious. The common wisdom on Langdon is that his career nose-dived when he fired Frank Capra and took over the direction of his late silents himself, and that he was incapable of adjusting to sound. In an otherwise sympathetic article James Agee made the magnificently patronizing comment on Langdon that "the whole tragedy of the coming of dialogue … can be epitomized in the mere thought of Harry Langdon confronted with a script." The common wisdom is wrong on all counts; there's a marvelously dark strain in Langdon's comedy that he indulged in more after Capra left, and in his earliest talkies (like this one and the flawed but marvelous "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum") he handles the tighter scripting of a talkie quite well. If he isn't as brilliant here as he was in "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" or "The Strong Man" it's because he isn't the star; he's playing comic relief to the relatively dull Ben Lyon, who's really just recycling his role from "Hell's Angels" (and leading lady Lotti Loder is cute and charming but hardly in Jean Harlow's league as a screen presence). "A Soldier's Plaything" is hardly a great movie, and when Langdon isn't on the screen it's either overdirected by the usually more conventional Michael Curtiz (a fight between two characters on a staircase is shot from above) or simply dull. But when Langdon is on screen front and center, it's hilarious.

"A Soldier's Plaything" is living -- and talking -- proof that not every movie directed by Michael Curtiz was another "Casablanca" or "Yankee Doodle Dandy." Even by 1930s standards, it's a pot-boiler that appears -- from a barrage of title cards -- to have been planned as a silent, then revamped after "The Jazz Singer" opened. Ben Lyon gives a cardboard performance as a gambler who joins the army to escape a murder rap, Harry Langdon does better as his klutzy stooge, Noah Beery is the apoplectic officer who keeps putting them in the stockade. There are a few sight gags that may have been mildly amusing in 1930 and the sound is surprisingly sharp for the era. Otherwise, though, it's a museum piece.