The Chaser

Harry Langdon was a very peculiar genius, with his own odd rhythms and his own odd character. He was, in his day, enormously influential. It was his slow pace, his willingness to let the audience get ahead of his baby-faced naif, that so influenced Stan Laurel that he, too, began to slow his pace, creating the Mr. Laurel all fans of old movies love and cherish.

But that slow pacing calls for an extremely careful balance, and here the edifice topples over, so that when I saw this movie in a theater with a crowd of Langdon fans, I fell asleep.... and there was no laughter to wake me up.

When I awoke, there was Harry in a house dress with a milk man trying to seduce him..... and Harry was playing his bewildered, inert screen self.... and it suddenly occurred to me that if he didn't care, there was no reason I should, so I stood up and walked outside into the sunlight.

Lest you think it is because I simply don't get Langdon, well, I don't think that's the case. It's just that every once in a while something comes along to snap our suspension of disbelief in a work of fiction, and this was one of those times. I can look at the cheap shorts he turned out in the early 1930s and enjoy him playing with a rubber hose. But this feature simply doesn't work. Alas.

Capra partisans have pointed to the commercial failure of Langdon's final three pictures for First National - Three's a Crowd, The Chaser, and Heart Trouble - to bolster their claims that firing their man was a fatal mistake and that Langdon couldn't direct. Both points could certainly be argued, and the controversy is unlikely ever to be settled. What seems clear from the two surviving silent features directed by Langdon (Heart Trouble is widely considered a lost film) is that if Ripley was inclined toward the dark and grim, Langdon's artistic vision made a good match. Three's a Crowd is a black comedy in which Harry, desperate for a family of his own, loses all. In The Chaser, he spends most of his time in drag, and his best gags revolve around suicide. This wasn't what the public wanted to see in 1927-28, and the reviews were scathing. It's been suggested that Heart Trouble may have marked the beginnings of a comeback, but too late - First National chose not to renew Langdon's contract.

Well, you're all wrong.

The only real trouble with this film is in the editing. Cut down to 45 minutes, it is really a very amusing movie.

There are many, many shots that are repetitive or simply unnecessary; for example, the repeated shots of the women scolding the telephone make the characters ghastly and unbearable, but remove a few of these shots and the characters become less hideous and more laughable. What would really make it work funny would be if each shot of the women were a little faster, if you catch my drift...

A lot of shots are too long and can have a few seconds removed at the beginning or end with no damage to continuity, and a number of intertitles can be deleted with no loss of understanding. The wife crying can be faded out before the jump-cut and the thing with the mascara. The entire sequence of the morning newspaper headlines about Man Commits Suicide, and the ensuing shots of the judge can be removed. Generally, I would NOT shorten shots of Harry doing his schtick (the whole purpose of watching this film is to see Harry do his schtick).

And of course you can just take out the whole bathing-beauty section: when Harry and Bud think they've awakened the dead, they run off in a panic... with the help of a dissolve, they could end up in the car with Harry putting his dress back on (an important visual), and then a wipe could take us from there to Harry hiding in the rumble seat. Every vestige of the stupid and meaningless bathing beauties scene could thus be excised to streamline the film, and the two characters still have plenty of motivation to dash off the golf course.

Once the film is cut down this way, it becomes a very respectable 7 stars out of 10: not bad at all. At this point the only real criticism I would have is that I just wish the story were something a little less domestic and that lent itself more to physical comedy.

...(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.

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.