Pai Sem Selo

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 man who longs for a wife and child finds a pregnant woman on his doorstep, helps her back to health, only for her husband to show up.

For ages this movie was maligned because of Frank Capra's comments about Langdon that may or may not be true. What is true is that this is NOT a typical silent movie and goes into weird places and severe pathos. Anyone that claimed Langdon didn't understand his own character is wrong, it's all here, he just wanted it to be more than simply silly situations, but into an almost existential, bleakness that was totally not of the time. This movie is harsh and brutal, occasionally fully, always weird, and deserving of rediscovery. But if you only know silent comedy as slapstick, chases, and fast moving craziness, you will probably HATE this because it is the total opposite. Slow, full of long, lingering takes, and only a few big gags, it's more like a morose bitter comedy than a laugh riot. I think it's totally misunderstood and needs to be re-evaluated.

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.

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.

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).