Papa d'un jour

Contrary to many nay-sayers, and that includes quite a few noted film historians, "Three's A Crowd", Harry Langdon's first directorial effort, is a hidden masterpiece. Now in full control of his screen character, Langdon attempts to take it in a new direction in this stunningly-photographed (kudos to Frank Evans and Elgin Lessley), UFA-like tragicomedy about loneliness and desperation (indeed, at times it looks as if it could have been filmed in Germany).

Unfourtunately, the public was not ready to accept Langdon at this level, and left him hanging. It can be safe to assume that had Langdon made his cinematic debut in "Three's A Crowd", he would have moved ahead of Lloyd in his place among "Comedy's Big Four", possibly as co-equal with Keaton.

So, whether you are a Langdon buff or not, "Three's A Crowd" should be watched on its own merits. At the same time, it stands as a sad harbinger of what could have been.

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.

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.

Even at their most unremarkable, there's generally something irrepressibly charming about silent films, and in some capacities this one is a good example. The sense of humor and entertainment is sometimes very simple and even quaint, more passive amusement than robust fun. We see passing reflections of notions like abusive labor practices or the necessary resourcefulness of the working class, showing that even almost 100 years later, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And sometimes we see elements of early film-making, or attempts at gags, that just haven't aged well, such as the use of blackface, which even at its most "innocent" is rather distasteful unless the context is emphatic mockery of the concept. Yet for all in 'Three's a crowd' that doesn't necessarily immediately inspire, there's also a lot to enjoy. It's not the most essential film of the 1920s, but this is still a pretty good time.

Star and director Harry Langdon sometimes gets mentioned alongside silent luminaries like Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and at his best one can see why. He has a propensity for physical comedy, stunts, and sacrificing his body that lends to a great deal of humor, in addition to the sight gags and situational comedy that rounds out any given picture. One sees glimmers of this intelligence in 'Three's a crowd,' and it's duly enjoyable. Would that it were applied more consistently, or that the writing, direction, and sequencing were tighter and more mindful to better facilitate the storytelling and merriment. This is hardly to say that this particular feature is bad - only, this would seem to be Langdon's first outing as a director, and broadly speaking it kind of shows. Case in point - though the narrative is complete, the ending mostly just kind of peters out, and the last impression we have of the movie is arguably at one of its weakest points.

Though it's no one's fault, it's also worth noting the apparent deterioration over time of the surviving print before it was digitized. There are a few considerable stretches in which the image quality is so heavily degraded that the visual presentation is all but entirely nullified - a deeply unfortunate reality of watching pictures from so long ago. Still, through every shortcoming of the movie as it was and the movie as we see it, there was no intent here except light-hearted entertainment. Save for that it is a surviving title of the earliest years of cinema, there's nothing about 'Three's a crowd' that stands out so much as to demand viewership, but it fairly succeeds in its modest goal, and anyone who appreciates older films will surely find this to their liking, too. Moreover, one can only admire the hard work that went into the production, including set design and decoration, hair and makeup, and even the basic orchestration of scenes that are filled with silliness of one type or another. The climax is notably imaginative and done well, including some sharp editing. Everyone involved put in fine work to make this a reality, and though it may not get name-dropped the way some of its brethren do, or deserve to, Langdon's directorial debut is nevertheless suitably enjoyable.

If you're not already a fan of the silent era then there won't be anything here to change your mind. For those enamored of film history, however, this is satisfying enough and worthwhile if you come across it. Likeable if not a must-see, 'Three's a crowd' is a decent way to pass an hour.