Pai Sem Selo

Three's a Crowd is one of those famous silent comedies -- or is "notorious" the better word? -- that has been difficult to find in any format suitable for home viewing, and hardly ever gets any public screenings. It's well known to silent comedy buffs mainly because it proved to be a career killer for its producer/director/star, Harry Langdon. Although the production values appear to be rather modest, this brief feature cost a lot of money to make, mainly because of poor planning and extensive re-takes. When it flopped at the box office Langdon never recovered his footing. His earlier features benefited from the writing and directorial skills of Harry Edwards, Arthur Ripley and Frank Capra, but by the time Three's a Crowd went into production only Ripley remained. The resulting product suggests that Langdon took on more than he could manage, and couldn't handle the demands of properly crafting a feature-length film to suit his eccentric screen persona.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the basic premise, although in outline the plot may sound a bit sticky: oddball loner Harry adopts a young woman on the run from her dissolute boyfriend, and when she gives birth he acts as caretaker for both mother and child. When the boyfriend (now suitably reformed) shows up, however, the two young lovers reconcile and depart with their child, leaving Harry alone and forlorn. With a story like that any comedian is going to need some strong laugh sequences to avoid a descent into bathos, but therein lies the biggest single problem with this film, and it's a cardinal sin for any comedy: it just isn't very funny. Gags as such are few and far between. Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd knew how to develop gag sequences with a strong hook, then build momentum to a big climax, but that never happens in Three's a Crowd. There are occasional, strange semi-gags that sort of erupt and then sputter out, often concluding on an anticlimactic note, and other bits that aren't really gags at all, just oddities. For example: after waking up in the morning Harry goes to a cabinet, takes out a kerosene lamp that has apparently been burning all night, blows it out, places it back in the cabinet and shuts the door. It's a strange moment, but that's all it is. Later, he shows up at work with a lunch pail, opens it, and reveals a cup of hot coffee already poured and sitting neatly in a saucer. Another odd moment, but not what you'd call a belly laugh.

A major problem from the opening scene onward is the director's erratic grasp of timing. There are seemingly endless shots of the star staring blankly, blinking, and puttering around to little effect, or doing the same things repeatedly, such as trying to amuse the baby with funny faces, over and over and over. On top of that, when preview screenings indicated that the film was in trouble Langdon re-cut and re-edited so extensively that certain plot points make no sense. (A sub-plot involving a carrier pigeon who delivers a love letter is confusing because footage is missing, however.) Another problem: in Langdon's earlier features Harry was pitted against strong opponents such as Vernon Dent and Gertrude Astor, but here the supporting players aren't especially colorful and don't provide much conflict. Aside from our lead comic, the strongest impression, curiously enough, is made by the set: a garret apartment at the top of an impressively long and rickety stairway that leads up the side of a building and looks like something out of a German Expressionist melodrama. It's not exactly funny, but it sure is striking. Aside from the set, the most memorable element is a dream sequence that occurs towards the end. In this bit Harry imagines himself as a boxer, complete with absurdly over-sized glove, defending his household from an interloper, i.e. the baby's father. It's an interesting scene and stands as the highlight, but even this sequence lacks punch (so to speak) and, instead of building to a strong climax, dwindles away.

Langdon's defenders assert that he was a gifted director, but his real problem was that he lacked the ability to produce his own films; i.e., to keep costs under control. The latter point may well be correct, but there is little evidence of directorial skill on display here. A quirky, offbeat sensibility most certainly, but no sense of proportion or control. Silent comedy buffs interested in Langdon's meteoric rise and fall will definitely want to see Three's a Crowd, but although it offers occasional worthwhile moments and the odd chuckle or two, the experience is ultimately a harrowing one. This isn't a comedy so much as a Post Mortem examination of what killed Langdon's career, and a textbook example of how ego can overwhelm talent.

When watching this film, ignore the conformists (Langdon owed everything to the wonderful Frank Capra and, after breaking with the great man, his ego brought about his downfall) and ignore the "where are the larfs, then" brigade (I have discussed this lamentable - and equally conformist - tendency elsewhere. This is actually a very remarkable film.

It is easy enough to see why it met with a certain incomprehension on the part of the audience and the studio and why it failed in the box-office. It is really very very different, not merely from the expected comedy routines but from almost any US comedy of the period (although it has certain similarities with Chaplin's 1923 film A Woman of Paris (which also failed at the box-office for very similar reasons but which is, to my mind, a less good and certainly less radical film).

Forget expectations of a typical farcical comedy and this film has some wonderful things in it. First of all the extraordinary set(Tati-esque avant l'heure) which has (like its equivalent in Mon Oncle)a defining relationship with the character who inhabits it. Then the poignant (but not really sentimentalisd) symbol of the discarded doll, disturbing alter ego of the Langdon character, representing both him and the child he does not have.

Then the extraordinary piece of audience entrapment where one is led to believe he is preparing a baby's nappy (diaper for those in the US)when he is in fact making a pie. I notice some viewers imagine he IS making a pie in a nappy (which would be rather silly) but it is quite clear that this is not the case and that it must in fact be frozen dough hanging on the line, using the great outdoors as a kind of refrigerator. But that some viewers should still believe what THEY THINK THEY ARE SEEING shows just how effective the entrapment is (and this too put one in ind of Tati) but it also illustrates how difficult it is to defeat slapstick expectations (the whole point of the humour here) when you are playing to an audience that is geared up to expect nothing else..

Or the very surreal dream beginning with the manic face at the window and continuing with the strange boxing-contest which is the only point at which the film approaches anything like slapstick. In one of his best films, He Did and He Didn't 1916, Arbuckle also uses a dream-sequence to isolate slapstick from an otherwise serious (and rather dark)frame-story but there are nevertheless extended scenes of slapstick in the film. Here even this slapstick is curtailed and the standard expectations of the comic boxing-match defeated.

Then there is the striking indifference to conventional morality (both the women with whom the Langdon character is involved are married). And the superb ending that seems to sum up the bleak message of the film. All in all, a very innovative and remarkable film.

While the film is clearly a very personal one for Langdon, much of the darkness of the film is no doubt due to Arthur Ripley, the writer who had been with Langdon from the outset and, along with Sennett director Harry Edwards, was most responsible for the development of the Langdon character. Ripley had no doubt been responsible for the "black" element sin Long Pants (the more interesting of the two Capra-directed films) and his work became increasingly "noir" and increasingly experimental as he went along (in the acid shorts written for W. C. Fields and in his own final films noirs.

As with these Langdon films, Ripley's later work, though appreciated by the critics, failed to find success at the box-office. US studios and US audiences had, and continued to have, problems with "noir" material (see Aldrich's withering mockery of this in The Player) unless it was very clearly kept obeyed the conventional rules of "the film noir" itself in the strictly limited sense in which this was understood in the US. As late as 1950 US audiences were seemingly unable to appreciate a masterpiece like Laughton's magnificent Night of the Hunter.

The tragedy is not that Langdon should have made this film but that it should have gone unappreciated. Had Langdon been working within the more supportive European film industry, this and his other two films (The Chaser, sadly not a good film,and the lost Heat Trouble) might well have established him as an important director. Given US conformism (nothing has changed) and the merciless box-office politics of US cinema, they ruined his career. It was a blow from which he never recovered and he was obliged to embark on the difficult adventure of the talking pictures playing a complete imbecile (Which, although typically inarticulate, he is not in the least in Three's a Crowd) in a series of embarrassingly unfunny shorts for Hal Roach.

There are really only two problems with Three's A Crowd, and one has nothing to do with the film: (1) the editing is often a problem (this can be fixed), and (2) it needs insightful and properly-synced music (this can also be fixed).

It seems to me that final editing was never actually done on the film. It was re-cut and then quickly released. I maintain that with refined editing to fix the "matching shots" that do not match (ex: the "Husband" gets out of bed twice), to cut down some of the sequences that go on too long (climbing up the rug, preparing the diaper for the rolling pin), and to eliminate some of the unnecessary and repetitious shots (such as of the 'goodbye note', and Gladys at the boxing ring), and cut out the entire Adventures-of-a-Doll sequence (which is damaged beyond repair anyway), an effective film results that flows along seamlessly with one exception—the pigeon. I would NOT cut down the Harry-Langdon-static-shots, which are the essence of Harry Langdon. I would, however, cut some of the unnecessary business that stretch out certain scenes too long (some of waiting-at-the-door-with-the-toys shots, people milling around inside the shack after the baby is born, repetitious business during the diaper scene, pretending to spank the baby, etc.).

After making these editing refinements, if some enterprising film-school Harry Langdon nut could find a Langdon impersonator and film the missing section where Harry sees Gladys at a distance (through his toy telescope), and sends off his pitiful love letter with his pet pigeon (who then just drops down to the window below, where his boss's wife finds it), I swear that would make this a perfect movie.

You might not like the story, but there are a whole lot of depressing films out there that have received awards; and in this case, the ending is NOT so bleak as some insist: there is a strong ray of hope at the end. Gladys tells Harry that she and her husband hope to show their gratitude. When the husband's father sees that his daughter-in-law and grandchild were saved from an icy death by good-hearted Harry, he will surely hire him as a handy man!

This is a beautiful film, engaging and haunting. The cinematography is gorgeous (ex: the horses snorting along in the first snow-fall of the year). All the characters are ultimately sympathetic, and unlike the opinion of 50% of those who have seen this movie, I find Langdon very funny; not only that, but I find his character immediately and constantly mesmerizing. The movie only needs a little refined editing at the least (and an added scene at most), and a sensitive soundtrack that is actually synchronized to the action (unlike the organ track currently on the Kino release of the movie, which is sensitive, but not well-synchronized to the picture).

Harry Langdon dreams of having a wife and child. When pregnant Gladys McConnell runs away from her husband, Cornelius Keefe, in the hope and expectation that this will let him reconcile with his father, she collapses in front of Harry, seemingly giving im everything he hopes for.

Of course, he doesn't know quite what to do with anything, which is half of his comedy; the other half is the slapstick that goes on, not on the screen -- although there's a fine final gag to this movie that works quite well -- but behind his eyes. We get a glimpse of what goes on in his head in a dream sequence in which Keefe returns for Miss McConnell and the baby. It is as disastrous as anything the audience might imagine.

This was the third movie on Langdon's First National contract. The previous two had been successful for First National, not so much for Harry when they went over budget. Caught between disagreements on his staff, he fired Frank Capra as director, and did the directing himself. You can argue that this made it a much better Langdon movie, and I agree. I liked it a lot. It also made it less popular with the contemporary audiences.

The copy I looked at was in pretty good shape, although there were spots of outgassing from the film it was pulled from on two occasions.

A child-like man lives alone in an old house, in a slum neighbourhood that seems to be otherwise deserted. One night, in a snowstorm, he finds a young woman and her baby. He brings them home to his hovel, and takes responsibility for the woman and her child. The child-like man falls in love with the woman, and he imagines himself as her husband and the baby's father. But then the baby's real father shows up...

That's the plot of "Three's a Crowd", starring Harry Langdon in an "auteur" film that he also produced and directed. Langdon is traditionally considered one of the four great comedians of the silent screen, a few paces behind Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Unlike those three comedy geniuses, Langdon never really understood the character he played on screen, even though he had created this character in vaudeville. Langdon played an extremely infantile man, a gigantic innocent baby who was nonetheless capable of adult passions whenever he met a pretty girl. Harry Langdon's best work was in movies written and directed by people who understood Langdon's baby-man character better than Langdon himself: most notably Harry Edwards, Arthur Ripley and Frank Capra. (Capra got his comedy training in Langdon's slapstick comedies.) After these men helped Harry Langdon achieve stardom and box-office success, Langdon got a big head and decided that - like Chaplin, whom Langdon envied to the point of obsession - he could make all the decisions himself, sharing credit with nobody.

"Three's a Crowd" is the unfortunate result of Langdon's ego trip. Based on the success of his previous films directed by Edwards and Capra, Langdon was able to get sizeable financial backing for "Three's a Crowd", his first attempt to be his own producer and director. Unfortunately, Langdon squandered most of his production budget before filming started. His obsession with Chaplin compelled Langdon to fill "Three's a Crowd" with lots of Chaplinesque pathos ... except that it's merely pathetic. This movie is meant to be a comedy, but it tries hard to be a tear-jerker too, and it falls between two genres. A "gag" sequence involving the long flight of stairs outside Harry's house just isn't funny at all.

There are a couple of good laughs in this movie, notably in a dream sequence involving a boxing match between Langdon and the baby's father. The exterior sets in the slum neighbourhood are impressive (except for the street-lamps), and the snowstorms look more realistic than usual for a silent film. But the laughs are very far apart.

Kevin Brownlow's excellent book about silent films, "The Parade's Gone By", describes one scene of pathos in this movie. Late at night, the woman's husband has arrived to take her home with their child. Faithful Harry picks up his lantern and escorts them down the long flight of stairs into the dark street. After the man drives away with his wife and child, Harry stands alone in the street with his lantern. Slowly, sadly, he blows out his lantern ... and, behind him, all the street-lamps go out. The way Brownlow describes this scene, it sounds a masterpiece of pathos and tragedy. Intrigued by Brownlow's description, I sought out this film and I eagerly awaited the scene with the street-lamps. What a disappointment: Langdon directs and performs this scene with no energy at all. It isn't tragic, and it isn't funny. It's just inept. Even the street-lamps look like phony props.

Long before Jerry Lewis, Harry Langdon was the first comedian to wreck his own career with his overgrown ego. "Three's a Crowd" could have been a silent-film masterpiece like "Sunrise" ... instead, it's a terribly disappointing failure, with just enough style and humour to sharpen the disappointment by reminding us of what this movie COULD have been.