Plein les bottes

This is a pleasant comedy with a good assortment of gags and stunts. It also gives Harry Langdon a showcase for his brand of comedy, which is distinctive, although a cut below the comedy greats of his era like Keaton and Chaplin. Langdon's approach is slower and more child-like, sometimes overly so, but often it works well (which is no doubt thanks in large part to some good writing).

"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" has a light, deliberately silly plot that sets up many good moments. Harry is trying to win a cross-country walking contest to win a prize that would save his father's business, while also trying to impress the girl he loves. (It is quite interesting to see a young Joan Crawford in this role - she does not look very much like she would in her later starring roles.) There are several very entertaining scenes, and even if you are not fond of Langdon's personal style, there are some creative gags, and most of the sequences work well. There's also a rather breath-taking stunt on the side of a cliff that even Keaton or Harold Lloyd would have been proud of.

While it may be of interest mainly to those who already like comedies of the era, most silent film fans should find this worthwhile and entertaining, if a notch beneath the great comedy classics of the era.

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.

While it may today mark a milestone for giving early work to both Joan Crawford and director Frank Capra (here writing his first feature), "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" mattered at the time for quickly launching Harry Langdon as one of the silent screen's chief clowns.

By the way, that may be the first time the words "Harry Langdon" and "quickly" have appeared in the same sentence.

As a piece of history, "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" is certainly worth viewing and relatively painless at just over an hour. As a comedy, it's not so smooth a ride, with a thin-as-crepe main story about a walking race across the United States and a lot of padding in the form of Harry's ceaseless blank-faced mugging.

The story has the makings of a Capra classic: While big corporation Burton Shoes ("The Sole Of The Nation" its omnipresent billboards read) gloms up the market by sponsoring the walking race, little shoemaker Logan & Son struggles to pay the rent. It's up to the "Son," Harry, to win the race for the $25,000 reward - with help from Crawford as the Burton CEO's daughter.

"I'll get the money in three months if it takes a year," Harry vows.

But nothing is done with the whole big-company-versus-little-guy thing, it just sort of is there. Harry doesn't have any problems with Mr. Burton, except when he tries to shake the man's hand while eating a sandwich. The love interest with Crawford likewise just sort of happens, with Crawford looking as lost in her role as underdog-loving ingénue as Babe Ruth would be playing shortstop. If her father notices her falling in with this no-account, he doesn't seem to care.

Long sections of the film grow tedious, like a section which finds Harry a prisoner in chains, or another where he first meets Crawford with much shy blinking. At one point Harry shares a bedroom with his chief race rival and landlord, Nick Kargas (Tom Murray). It's almost like Laurel and Hardy, except for the absence of chemistry and Murray's inability to play anything for a laugh.

You see why people talk about Langdon as a proto-Stan Laurel; with his baby face and winsome gaze you never feel anything other than protective of the poor guy. Sections of the film do work, too, like the culmination of a cliff-hanging scene that keeps Harry a step ahead of his competition, or a big finale where Harry and Nick cower in a barber shop buckling in a cyclone.

But even the film's big moment, of Harry on that cliff, only work when you don't think too hard of those other silent clowns whose thrill sequences involved real danger. Here you can see Harry's working with the aid of process shots, and the jump cuts as Harry dodges a series of rolling rocks are hard to miss.

Whoever was directing the film (Harry Edwards is credited, though Capra may have been helping) doesn't seem able to sustain anything, or get the various bits to cohere. While the title cards amuse, the laugh lines are weak. "I'm so crazy about that girl I'm crazy," Harry exudes.

Give "Tramp X 3" points for charm: Langdon was a genial clown, and a minute or two of his finger nibbling can be amusing. It just goes on too long, including two minutes at the end when we see Harry mug some more, this time as a baby in a giant cradle. As a vehicle to launch Harry Langdon to a national audience, "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" worked like a charm. But as a lasting testament to his comedy, it stumbles more than a bit.

"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.

One of Harry Langdon's most enjoyable outings, this one gets into the plot straight away. The laughs start coming thick and fast as soon as he makes his dull-witted entrance, and they continue most heartily right up to the cyclone climax which, with all its mechanical contrivances, I thought the least funny in the movie. I feel Harry is at his best when he has minimal props to sustain him and is forced to rely heavily on his stop-and-start walk, his facial twitches and his hesitant to-and-froing to keep laughter at its height.

Langdon's style of comedic reacting needs excellent stooges and in this film he has two of the best in his entire career: Tom Murray who is beautifully set up for conflict right from the opening shot and is then brilliantly revealed not only as a ruthless landlord but as a stop-at-nothing competitor; and pushy Brooks Benedict who artfully manages one of Harry's funniest routines in the movie.

And then, of course, there's Joan Crawford. Admittedly, although she is the catalyst for Harry's cross-country sprint, she is not exactly treated as a star equal. In her key scene with Harry, her face is hidden by her cloche hat. But nonetheless, she's in there swinging.

Superbly enhanced by some of the most beautiful tints ever presented on the screen, this movie is a visual delight from first to last.