The Chaser

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.

Frank Cullen's review here contains an interesting discussion of Capra's role in the career of Harry Langdon, most of which I agree with entirely. But his vaudeville experience did not translate to the screen quite as readily as Mr. Cullen supposes (it did not so so even for Chaplin or Keaton) and it is evident from the earliest films that Langdon had no very clear idea about his screen persona when he started in 1923. The film made in that year for Sol Lesser, Horace Greely Jr., as far as one can make out from the very abbreviated Pathé-Baby (Pathex) version that survives, is a very conventional and forgettable comic western where Langdon displays none of the distinctive characteristics that would bring him fame a year later. Picking Peaches (seemingly the earliest of the shorts made for Sennett and not directed by Edwards)is a poor piece of work, combining tasteless slapstick with equally tasteless sexual innuendo. The later Langdon character is quite absent from the lecherous shoe-clerk, dapper and articulate but not in the least amusing, that he plays in this film, largely intended to show off the Sennett "bathing beauties". "The lecher" reappears in equally undistinguished fashion (this time a photographer)in Smile Please! (also not directed by Edwards and essentially still an overextended "Keystone" comedy).

Several of the other 1924 comedies appear to be lost but in Shanghaied Lovers, although a little more of an innocent than in the previous efforts, there is still little to distinguish him from other comics of the time and the slapstick is very standard fare. The First Hundred Years is another rambling farce of the late Sennett variety and once again Langdon's characterisation is entirely conventional. The first momentary signs of a more vulnerable, childlike character come in His New Mama but this too is not sustained and the film soon degenerates into yet another outing for the "bathing beauties" in which Langdon's role is negligible and then another typical "Keystone" slapstick chase-ending.

So the Langdon character did not appear fully-fledged on the screen after being first honed in vaudeville. It was unquestionably created during the course of the shorts made during 1924-1926. This was equally clearly not the work of Capra but rather of director Harry Edwards, who rapidly became Langdon's sole director, and writer Arthur Ripley. The real change comes with The Luck of the Foolish, the first of a whole series of first-rate shorts that Edwards-Ripley-Langdon would produce in the next year or so. One or two are are less good but The Luck of the Foolish, The Hansom Cabman, All Night Long, His Marriage Wow and Remember When? are all outstanding. For one thing the cinematography improves immensely (with Ernie Crockett providing "special effects") and the direction takes on a much more coherent form. A surreal element is frequently introduced along with an increasingly darker side to the comedy. But there is also a progressive development in the Langdon character towards inarticulacy (accompanied by a set of very distinctive hand gestures) and childlike simplicity.

The inarticulacy (which continues even in the early sound films and is crucial to the films he himself directed) is almost certainly an innovation due to Langdon himself. The "noir" elements and certain recurrent themes (wartime reminiscence) are more probably the contribution of Ripley.

And this is I think the crucial turning-point in Langdon's career, the moment that will bring him his greatest success and equally his eventual tragic decline. Because the balance involved in the Langdon character that now emerges is an extremely delicate one. Take it too far and the character can easily become a simple imbecile of little enduring comic or dramatic interest. And the shorts begin to unravel somewhat during 1926, with more writers introduced (too many cooks?) and notably with the arrival amongst them of Frank Capra. Increasingly the plots seem to bypass Langdon himself, who is increasingly portrayed as an imbecile. And this process culminates, after the move to First National, with Capra's The Strong Man. This starts well enough (a typical Ripley wartime reminiscence, used also in Soldier Man and extensively in All Night Long) but then turns into a slow-paced sentimental drama (entirely in the Capra manner) where Langdon seems to have little to do but act the idiot.

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the first of the First National features with Harry Edwards still directing is an excellent comedy, if a little uneven, with some classic episodes. Long Pants, the second feature directed by Capra, is again very slow-paced and would be almost entirely forgettable if it weer not for the marked "noir" element (the attempted murder of the wife) which is presumably the work of Ripley. After the break with Capra, Langdon's own first film, Three's a Crowd is, to my mind, Langdon's masterpiece. Here we have all the vulnerability, the surreal, the dark but a central character who, however inarticulate and forlorn, is anything but an idiot. Alas, as we know, the film was never appreciated at its real value at the time and failed dismally at the box office.

This film, if one comes to it after Three's a Crowd, is a major disappointment. It is also a very personal film but the idea of a divorce-judge obliging husband and wife to exchange roles is just silly and the depiction of it equally lacks any kind of credibility. Nor is the theme new (it had been used more plausibly by Charley Chase in one of his "Jimmy Jump" comedies in 1924). Moreover the Langdon character seems to have relapsed back into the idiocy from which it had been reclaimed. After the successive failure of his three Firs National features (the third, Heart Trouble, is a lost film), Langdon was doomed to continue playing the imbecile in a perfectly ghastly series of sound shorts for Hal Roach.

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.

...(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.

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.