The Chaser

...(with apologies to Reginald Perrin). There has been a lot of interest in Harry Langdon of late. Thanks to HARRY LANGDON: LOST AND FOUND it was possible to finally see the early comedy shorts that brought Langdon to prominence. Now with this Kino International release, you can see the two films that brought about his downfall.

Much has been written about THREE'S A CROWD over the years almost all of it negative. Seeing it today, there is much to admire but it's easy to see why audiences of 1927 hated it. Existential comedy in the silent era was doomed to failure and while you can admire Langdon for attempting it, you just have to wonder why. The audio commentary by film historian David Kalat makes a good case for the film even if he occasionally is a little overenthusiastic.

The second feature THE CHASER is a return to safer territory as it is basically a reworking of Harry's numerous henpecked husband shorts of the early 1920s. Part of the humor derives from seeing Harry as a ladykiller or "chaser" but it then veers into strange territory by having the partners switch roles as ordered by a judge and Harry's inability to handle the loss of his masculinity. This time around there are lots of gags but it wasn't enough to win his audience back. His final feature film HEART TROUBLE was barely released and is now considered lost.

If you're just starting to familiarize yourself with the work of Harry Langdon then this is definitely not the place to start. Try the LOST AND FOUND set first and then move on to THE STRONG MAN and LONG PANTS before you tackle these. The prints from the Raymond Rohauer collection are excellent for the most part although THREE'S A CROWD has one segment of serious nitrate decomposition. The organ scores by Lee Irwin provide an excellent accompaniment. Thanks to Kino for reviving these late Langdon efforts so that we now have a fairly complete picture of the comedian from start to finish in the silent era...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

After one too many nights out a judge forces a man to become the wife for 30 days. He can't handle it so he tries to commit suicide. He goes for a golfing trip with his pal and his actual wife thinks he's dead. While golfing he makes women swoon and gets stuck on a runaway car only to end up back at home alive and well.

Here's the thing. SOME of this movie is great, with really weird humour and typical Langdon slow reactions. The problem is that it's really two movies mashed together that don't really fit. The idea of him as a woman is solid ish but the swift turn to the golf outing is a drastic change. Then the idea that his kisses make women pass out? It's never explained or given a purpose, it's just there. That part doesn't work and the movie never fully recovers. It's hardly awful, but it's not a classic or anything.

The Chaser is, admittedly, not all of a piece. It has some successful parts, several misfires and lacks the quality of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the most coherent of Harry Langdon's features and one that balances a dramatic narrative with comic invention. The Chaser appears to be several short films welded together (as does The Strong Man). However this device of patching several two-reelers together for a features is much the formula for other comedians' feature films of the period (Laurel & Hardy among them). After all, the guys who wrote scenarios for feature-length films were the same guys who devised the one- and two-reelers. Because Harry Langdon came to Hollywood years after Ben Turpin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Olver Hardy, Stanley Laurel, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton had established themselves, critics inevitably compared Langdon to some of them: most notably Chaplin. Rather than emulate Chaplin, Harry Langdon sought to preserve his established comic character that he developed in vaudeville. His soured view of the world was more akin to W. C. Fields' than Chaplin's. Congratulations to previous reviewers, Chris Peterson and, especially, Rodrigo Valenzuela, for reviewing The Chaser with unbiased minds and for keeping up with contemporary research and for knowing something about the circumstances under which The Chaser was made. 1) First National Pictures, being acquired by Warners, was keeping everyone on tight budgets. Vitaphone (also part of the Warner Brothers/First National/Vitaphone family) had released the first commercially viable sound shorts in 1926, when there were only about 100 theatres equipped for sound. However, as Jack Warner expected, that number doubled in a year and by 1928 most of the better motion picture exhibitors were "okay for sound," and Warners was counting on sound features to make them a major studio. Unlike Chaplin and Lloyd, both Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon did not "own" themselves, and were forced to continue making silent comedies for several years into the sound era. MGM and Warners saved the expense of making sound movies for musicals and what they deemed "prestige dramas." 2) Harry Langdon spent more than 20 years in vaudeville. By the time he came to movies in 1924, just a few years before the sound revolution, he had been a headliner in big-time vaudeville for years. He did not need anyone, especially a relative greenhorn like Frank Capra, to "invent" a comic characterization for him. Harry's hen-pecked, slow-to-react comedic persona was well developed as is evidenced by descriptions of his vaude act, "Johnny's New Car." 3) Frank Capra was good at devising gags for Mack Sennett and Harry Langdon. Capra became a great movie director after he left Harry Langdon's employ, but he was as ambitious and self-serving as he was gifted. GHis autobiography is suspect and was his chance to settle old scores. Capra saw Langdon as a tool to propel him into prominence. But Capra clashed with Arthur Ripley, Harry Edwards and Harry Langdon. Between First National's cuts to Harry Langdon's production company's budgets and dissension in the creative process, someone had to go, and it was Capra who fought with Harry and Harry's other writers and directors. Also, Capra, as is apparent by his later films, was not in tune with Langdon's established comic character and the dark side of humanity explored by Langdon and his more sympatico writers/directors. 4) Langdon, indeed, did allow his long-time unhappy marriage (his wife had been in Harry's vaude act) to influence his choice of material. Most artists do mine their own lives for material. That Harry did not do as dispassionately or fairly as some may wish is subject to debate. I, for one, would have preferred more objectivity on Harry's part. Still, The Chaser is a fairly good comedy, no worse than all but the few best of the late 1920s.

I just watched this movie. I'm a big fan of silent comedies & I've really enjoyed some of Langdon's other movies, but WOW this one was bad. It's the worst silent comedy I've ever seen. - Langdon was certainly a capable comedian, so I can only image that he was severely depressed or something. The humor is often very dark or completely out of step with the audience.

The movie is only an hour long, but it was still tough to get through. It goes wrong when the judge sentences Harry to wear a dress & take on his wife's role in the house. Langdon doesn't wear a drag outfit like Arbuckle would have. He doesn't disguise himself as a woman. He just put on a dress. He's obviously a man, but somehow every man he runs into thinks he's a beautiful woman & makes a pass at him?! It doesn't make any sense, but that's what they do. Does Harry learn something about how men treat women? No, Harry just decides to kill himself.

The suicide scenes are almost funny, but that's always going to alienate half of your audience. It's bleak humor. - And the whole thing ends with a 10 second shot of an empty room. Harry runs out of shot, the camera remains, and we wait for something else, but never get it.

The next uncomfortable moment comes when his wife returns & believes that Harry has killed himself. His wife begins to weep at his suicide. So what does Langdon do with this scene? He tries to get a laugh out of her eye make-up running from the tears?!! We're supposed to laugh at a weeping woman! - To add to this odd scene, the woman wipes her eyes & then her nose giving herself a slight smudged mustache. She continues to weep & look at the camera with the smudged make-up. -

Harry later goes on a golfing outing. Again, we have some morbid humor when they seem to disturb a grave. - Then, out of nowhere, Harry inexplicably gains the ability to make women faint with his kiss. - And then, what does he do with the gag? Nothing! One matronly woman tries to beat him up, does he even consider disarming her with his new skill. No. When he & his wife reconcile, does he end the movie by kissing the woman he loves? No. They just forget the whole thing.

This is failure on all counts. A bizarre movie. Langdon's worst.

Harry Langdon was a uniquely gifted silent clown with a style all his own. Several of the short comedies he made for Mack Sennett in the mid-1920s retain their quirky charm, and the first two features he starred in hold up quite well, but as soon as Harry took over the reins and started producing and directing his own movies he fumbled the job, and managed to wreck his career with dizzying speed. In Three's a Crowd, Langdon's first solo job, he took a promising premise and squandered it through awkward timing, weak gags, and sticky sentimentality, but his second self-produced effort The Chaser makes its predecessor look like a masterpiece. This time, Harry took a story idea that's wrong-headed and distasteful from the start, and created a movie which I for one find impossible to enjoy.

The introductory title cards suggest that this is a battle of the sexes comedy with a male bias, i.e. the Innocent Husband versus those Unreasonable Harpies who make his life hell. Other comedians have ventured into this dicey territory and created something worthwhile (think of Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, W. C. Fields, etc.) but Harry's first mistake here was to stack the deck so thoroughly in his own favor. We're commanded to feel sorry for him from the get-go. During the film's opening sequence Harry's wife and mother-in-law take turns chewing him out over the phone, while he sits motionless, listening. The poor guy's crime, it turns out, is that he's been staying out at his lodge every night until 8:30, and the womenfolk are furious. Isn't that just like a woman, being so unfair? Once he comes home the situation escalates between Harry and his mother-in-law to an alarming degree, to the point where she becomes crazed and pulls a gun on him. All three principles wind up in court, but Harry gets all the blame, and is slapped with a truly bizarre sentence by the judge. Get this: in order to "realize his responsibilities" as a husband, Harry must stay at home in a dress for 30 days doing housework while his wife dons men's clothing and goes off to some unspecified office to be the breadwinner.

Okay, no one should expect gender issue 'correctness' from a comedy made in 1928, but this is just twisted. And it gets worse: although Harry's emasculation consists of little more than being forced to make breakfast for his gruff, male-attired wife (admittedly while he's wearing a skirt), his misery is emphasized at the expense of any humor. When Harry sadly looks outside, the barred window he's gazing through is clearly meant to resemble that of a jail-house. Oh, but there's saucy comedy relief to perk things along: every peddler, milkman and ice man who appears at the door instantly assumes that Harry is the lady of the house -- although he looks like his usual self from the waist up -- and makes a pass at him. Yuck! Before long, naturally enough, Harry is ready to end it all and attempts suicide, but instead of taking poison he accidentally takes cod liver oil. After he races to the toilet the camera lingers for a very long moment on the darkened hallway, giving us lots of time to ponder the physical effect of the laxative. Is it my imagination, or has our star comedian lost his hold on the average viewer by this point? And it gets even worse! When Harry's wife arrives on the scene she mistakenly believes that her husband has actually killed himself, and the camera lingers on a seemingly endless close-up of the woman as she sobs miserably, making her mascara run. (Many years later, leading lady Gladys McConnell revealed that the mascara gag was her idea, and expressed regret that it was used.) I guess the mascara smeared under her eyes was supposed to get a laugh.

Along about this point I think Mr. Langdon must have recognized that his movie was sinking fast, so he turned the second half into a retread of one of his best Sennett comedies, Saturday Afternoon. Rotund Bud Jamison (filling in for rotund Vernon Dent) shows up, rescues Harry from his drudgery, gets him back into manly slacks and takes him off to the golf course. It's a relief to us all, but the ensuing routines feel uninspired and a little desperate. And then, to demonstrate that wearing that skirt didn't turn him into a sissy, Harry encounters some girls frolicking in a park, kisses a few at random and makes them swoon. How? Why? By this point it doesn't much matter. Towards the end, when Harry's car plummets down a slope he crashes through a billboard advertising a movie called "Over the Hill," but the gag takes on an unhappy double meaning as we consider the trajectory of the star's career.

The nicest thing I can say in conclusion is that Langdon's failures are just as quirky and off-the-wall as his successes, but his successes sure are a lot more fun to watch. After sitting through this ill-begotten misfire you'll want to rush back to The Strong Man to remind yourself how Harry Langdon earned his reputation as a great clown in the first place.