Tired Feet

In the late 1920s, Harry Langdon was a top comic and made a lot of nice comedies. However, he made a huge career risk and left Columbia Pictures...and pretty much fell flat on his face. Through most of the 1930s, he played for various studios making second and third-rate films for Educational Pictures and Columbia. It seemed that the longer he was away from Columbia, the more tedious and unfunny his films became. Fortunately, "Tired Feet", is decent for an Educational film.

In "Tired Feet", Harry plays a mild mannered mailman who lives at a boarding house with a god-awful landlady. It's his day off and all he wants to do is go to the beach and soak his tired feet...and the land lady invites herself and her pushy resident (Vernon Dent) and insists they go to the mountains....and Harry caves and goes to the mountains. There a variety of problems result...including losing his car and having a gang of nasty hoboes steal their campsite and food.

The film has a few laughs but the plot itself should have taken more risks. Just having Harry playing a mild-mannered milquetoast to me wasn't enough, though it was agreeable....just not nearly as good as his earlier work.

By the way, the copy I found on YouTube was missing the opening credits and perhaps a tiny bit of the start of the movie. It also had some sound issues...and I had to crank the volume all the way up to watch it. Perhaps you can find a better copy elsewhere.

Harry Langdon is a tired mail carrier, roped into going to the mountains with his landlady, her daughter, and fellow boarder Vernon Dent. All he wants to do is rest his weary feet. Instead, he is kept on the hop.

Langdon's shorts for Educational were a mixed bag, running from excellent down to poor. This one is somewhere in the middle, due to some good construction and his interactions with Dent, a frequent co-star from his salad days at Mack Sennett. However, Langdon's strength was not as a slapstick star, but as someone simply bemused by the world. This short doesn't take advantage of him, even if everyone in the movie does.