Plein les bottes

Harry Langdon appeared in his first feature film, playing the son of a shoe maker who tries to win a large monetary prize by a walk-across-America race contest in March 1926's "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp." The sponsor of the race, a shoe manufacturer, uses the photo of Joan Crawford for the contest's promotion, sparking a love-interest in Langdon's heart. This movie has been credited as one of the first films to use a Madison Avenue-type public relations slant as the main nexus to the plot.

The screenplay was written by Frank Capra. He was a gag writer for Mack Sennett since 1924. Sennett assigned Capra to work with Langdon a year later when the comedian was acting in two-reelers. Langdon was offered a more lucrative salary and feature film roles with First National Studios in 1926, taking along Capra with him to be his personal writer and later on his director.

Joan Crawford, in only her second year on the screen, received her largest role yet in cinema as the promotional woman in the ad. She also was the central motivational force for Langdon's deep inspiration for winning the foot race. The actress was on loan from MGM to increase her visibility in Hollywood. She appears in the concluding scene with Langdon admiring a baby, which turns out to be Langdon in a crib with infant clothes. During filming, the real baby was so fidgety and uncooperative that Langdon lightly suggested he could replace the baby to garner a laugh from the viewers. When the preview audience saw the Langdon stand-in for the baby, they howled. The comic decided to leave the scene of him in the nationally-released version.

"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" was a financial success for Langdon. Film Critic Maria Schneider described Langdon's character as an innocent caught up in the middle of a corrupt world. She felt Langdon's acting to be "an acquired taste, his gentle absurdities and slow rhythms take some getting used to, but patient viewers will be rewarded." The American Film Institute felt the same way, nominating it as one of 500 movies to be considered for the Top 100 Funniest American Movies Ever Made.

The title of silent comedian Harry Langdon's debut feature may have been borrowed from the popular song of the same name, but it also carries a hint of challenge, suggesting by comparison to the Little Tramp that Langdon must be three times as funny as Chaplin. And, under certain circumstances, he was just that. Unlike other comics (Chaplin included) who needed constant activity to be funny, Langdon's wistful, winsome character was at his best when simply standing still, getting the maximum effect out of a minimal effort: subtle facial expressions, tentative hand gestures, and so forth. Not that he wasn't given plenty to do: enlisting (reluctantly) in a cross country foot race; falling in love with the billboard image of young Joan Crawford; escaping from a chain gang; and battling a cyclone almost as fierce as the one Buster Keaton faced in 'Steamboat Bill, Jr'. His minimalist technique and odd, infantile mannerisms are an acquired taste today, but adventuresome fans of silent comedy will discover in Langdon a unique, often astonishing talent.

"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" was the first feature film Harry Langdon made for his own newly formed production company to be distributed by First National Pictures, and the first of his features to be released.As such it faced the problem of adapting his slow, underplayed style of comedy to a greater length for the greater length and more lavish production of a feature, and it meets this challenge well to create a very funny film.

The plot is strange -- essentially Harry finds himself walking in a cross-country marathon to save his father's shoe business -- but it manages to pull of the trick of remaining quite unified while encapsulating a number of discrete stages for Harry to do spread out and do comedy. The first ten minutes or so of the film are taken just to lay out the scenario, and that saves the necessity of their being interruptions during further scenes. In fact, all the opening revelations about the small businessman being squeezed dry by the big company are played more like grim drama than comedy, and this works -- I think Harry Langdon is funnier when he innocent, childlike, and somehow supernatural character is contrasted with the unpleasantness of reality.

Harry's fallen in love with a young Joan Crawford, the girl on the shoe conglomerate's billboards. This is funny in itself just as a concept, funny because of the humorous sight of sophisticated, glamorous Joan and befuddled, infantile Harry falling for each other, and funny because of gags that are drawn out of it (the torn-off images of her all around Harry's hotel room, and then hiding under his sheets). It also works to drive Harry along in walking the race. The girl's character isn't really built though, and little time is actually spent on their interactions (except for a great gag shot where a house is blown away in a cyclone to reveal them kissing passionately). At such this element of the film works well, but "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" doesn't have quite the emotional punch that other Langdon comedies sometimes have.

Of course, the real comedy in a good Harry Langdon comedy comes mainly between what happens, from Harry's subtle but mesmerizing and hilarious little reactions and ineffectual, childish attempts at action. This film allows for a good assortment of comedy set pieces where there is room for that, and probably one of Harry's best pieces of pantomime comes in the extended shot where he is flummoxed by encountering two Betty Burtn's at once: one on a billboard and one the real person. It would be a throwaway gag to most comedians, but Harry draws a long series of laughs from his reactions to it. There's a great scene around Harry's inadvertent antagonism of his new roommate the walking champion of the world (in which, in the don't-try-this-at-home department, he is given a whole handful of sleeping pills), and a sequence of Harry in a chain-gang after his arrest for stealing berries that could have been rearranged slightly into its own two-reel comedy. It also contains perhaps my favorite little moment where Harry, breaking up tiny rocks with his tiny hammer, is given a gun -- and uses the butt of it to break up slightly bigger rocks.

While the characteristic signature of Langdon is in these moments, bigger production gags are in evidence here as well, and are both funny and impressive. Especially the scene in which Harry, after hanging off a cliff (and, characteristically, is very funny just by being oblivious to it) falls down it but easily survives by accidentally sliding on a detached fence, and the one in which the barber shop he has entered is constantly being physically twisted around by a volcano are extremely funny, inventive, and visually impressive.

The end, in which Harry is revealed to have had a baby named Harry that is exactly like him in an over-sized cradle, is very weird, but somehow very appropriate. Harry is an eternal baby in a grown-up world, who will be somehow the same no matter what his supposed real age.

The Strong Man is generally considered THE Langdon film, but I

think that's because it's dramatically stronger and more unified-- which in some ways only makes it less suitable for the quizzical little comedian at the center of the story, who's really too small to carry such a big film. Tramp, Tramp, Tramp is more shapeless and to my mind is the quintessential Langdon comedy, especially since its high point lets him do his own distinctive variations on famous moments from two other silent comedians. A competitor in a cross-country marathon walk, Langdon winds up in the middle of nowhere, dangling from a fence over a cliff; where Harold Lloyd dangled over a busy city, the reaction of the crowd being used to whip up a comic frenzy, Langdon's childlike struggles occur in the most desolate, abandoned nowhere, a place where his body wouldn't even be found for 50 years. Later, sliding down the cliff, Langdon finds himself in the middle of an avalanche, much like Keaton in Seven Chances-- but where Keaton dodges boulders heroically, Langdon simply shuts his eyes and wishes his predicament away. From the wildly oversized mugging of the Keystone era we are now at the absolute extreme of comedy minimalism; Langdon is to slapstick what Malevich's White on White is to painting.

Baby-faced Harry Langdon never made it to the top in the way that Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd did, and watching this, his first feature film, it isn't difficult to see why. Langdon isn't a bad comic actor, but the pacing of the gags is sometimes painfully bad (over-extended usually) and, while this film does hit a few modest high notes it never comes near to challenging the work of the silent comic greats.

Langdon plays the son of a shoe store owner who is going out of business because of the competition from Burton Shoes, a major factory with a nationwide advertising campaign fronted by a young (and barely recognisable) Joan Crawford, on whom young Harry has a hopeless crush. This being Hollywood, Joan is quite attracted to Harry too, and encourages him to embark on a cross-country race to raise the money he needs to save his father's store.

While there are some funny scenes, too many of the big moments seem to be steals from other movies. Harry hangs precariously from a fence on the edge of a cliff by his belt buckle in much the same way Harold Lloyd hung from the side of a building in Safety Last. He also slides down a long hill, dodging rolling rocks as Keaton did in Seven Chances. The comical scenes that are original aren't all that funny and go on too long, and the climactic cyclone sequence is particularly poorly handled.

While Tramp, Tramp, Tramp isn't by any means a dud, it's purpose now seems merely to show how much better the likes of Chaplin and Keaton were at their craft.