Comedians were a dime a dozen in the days of silent film, but great comedians were precious and few. The judgment of history has left us maybe a half-dozen top-notch talents, and just a few of those names are much remembered today. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd are the heavy hitters of course, the names that immediately come to mind, with perhaps Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Charley Chase, and a few others lagging not so far behind in name recognition. Still others, like Laurel and Hardy, did well in silent films but are today best known for their sound work.
But the name of Harry Langdon still languishes in relative obscurity. The consistency and quantity of his best work may not quite place him among the ranks of the big three, but he is awfully close. Or at least he would be, if his work was more widely seen and appreciated.
For years, the three great films that marked his peak—The Strong Man (1926), Tramp Tramp Tramp (1926), and Long Pants (1927)—have been available on DVD in the form of a single disc from Kino entitled "Harry Langdon: The Forgotten Clown." His tenure at the top was brief, but with few other films readily available for viewing over the years, that meteoric streak across the comedy horizon was difficult to contextualize and fully comprehend. But hopefully a pair of recent DVD releases will help to resuscitate Langdon's reputation, presenting the bookends to that brief, shining moment—the rise and fall of a great clown.
Kino has released the next two comedic features in Langdon's oeuvre, the films that mark the comedian's descent from his peak. And this disc, combined with the release earlier this year of All Day Entertainment's "Lost and Found: The Harry Langdon Collection," a four-disc set consisting primarily of Langdon's earlier films, finally establishes a body of work worthy of study and appreciation.
Most of the discussion and commentary of Langdon's career stems from two sources: Walter Kerr's insightful analysis in his landmark book The Silent Clowns, and from the autobiography of director Frank Capra. Kerr, with his graceful prose and articulate deconstructions of the form, has become the de facto authority on the comedian, with virtually every discussion of Langdon centering on Kerr's distillation of the essence of the comedian's work.
It was Kerr's view that Langdon "existed only in reference to the work of other comedians." The form had to exist already, and "with that form at hand—a sentence completely spelled out—Langdon could come along and, glancing demurely over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking, furtively brush in a comma."
By 1926, Kerr wrote, audiences were well versed in the mechanics and traditions of screen comedy. The major comedians delighted viewers by their unique approaches to the form, by the idiosyncratic ways in which they both met and flouted those conventions. But Langdon more often than not simply defied those conventions altogether, usually by doing...nothing. In situations where another comedian would have leapt into action, or at least turned tail and run, Langdon just stood there. As the world moved around him, he stood watching and blinking, allowing us to observe the slow thought process that left him hilariously ineffectual.
Kerr again:
"[L]angdon's special position as a piece of not quite necessary punctuation inserted into a long-since memorized sentence means that he remains, today, dependent on our memory of the sentence. It is not even enough to know the sentence. We must inhabit it, live in its syntax in the way we daily take in air, share its expectations because they are what we expect, if we are to grasp—and take delight in—the nuance that was Langdon. You would have to soak yourself in silent film comedy to the point where Lloyd seemed a neighbor again, Chaplin a constant visitor, Keaton so omnipresent that he could be treated as commonplace, and the form's structure as necessary as the roof over your head in order to join hands with Langdon once more and go swinging, fingers childishly interlocked, down the street. That sort of immersion can never really take place again, except perhaps among archivists, and we shall no doubt continue to have our troubles with Langdon. It seems likely, however, that our reacquaintance with silent film comedy is going to develop a good deal beyond what is is now; the closer we come to feeling reasonably at home in it, the larger will Langdon's decorative work—all miniature—loom."
Kerr's analysis of Langdon's downfall is that the comedian lost control of the delicate ambiguity that defined his screen presence—the mercurial blend of man and child, of sexual adult and pre-sexual nymph. "The ambiguity dissolved," wrote Kerr, as Langdon no longer walked the line but stepped right over it, even going so far as to portray himself as an actual child, at one point peering out from a baby carriage. The character was no longer ambiguous and intriguing; it was grotesque and absurd.
Frank Capra, on the other hand, was a bit less nuanced in his take. It was Capra's view that Langdon did not fully understand his own character, and that once he dispensed with the directors who had hitherto handled him—Capra among them—he was simply at a loss. Of course, Langdon had been a successful comedian for years in Vaudeville, and had even managed to carve out a space for his quiet comedy amid the bluster and bombast of the knockabout Sennett studio—all suggesting that Langdon had a very complete understanding of his talents. But despite Capra's self-aggrandizing tone, there may some truth in his account. But the better explanation may be that Langdon, in his desire to establish himself as an independent man, as an auteur in the style of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, simply overreached. His understanding of his character was probably quite solid; it was more likely his inability to sustain a high level of quality while acting as writer, director, producer and star that did him in. And the fickleness of the audience must also be factored in; it is possible that the public simply lost interest in him, their fling with Langdon revealing itself as more of an infatuation than the sustained love affairs they experienced with Langdon's rivals.
The All Day Entertainment set explores Langdon's evolution from Sennett slapstick to the comedian's full flowering as the curious man-child of 1926-27. But it also includes a few films from Langdon's later years. Kino's initial release put the three best Langdon features on one disc. This second edition showcases the two rarely seen follow-up features. Three's a Crowd (1927) and The Chaser (1928) have been deemed by history to be lesser efforts, to have set in motion Langdon's steep decline, but now at least we can make up our own minds.
And yet it's not an easy task, for as Kerr said, an appreciation for Langdon is predicated on a thorough understanding of the form as it existed in 1927; to understand Langdon, we must first steep ourselves in the idiom of silent comedy, in the quirks and mannerisms and formulae and framework of the great films of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, and the myriad other comedic talents of the day. There are worse forms of homework.
Three's a Crowd. 1927. 61 minutes.
The Chaser. 1928. 63 minutes.
$24.95. www.kino.com.
Lost and Found: The Harry Langdon Collection
$39.95. www.alldayentertainment.com.
Harry Langdon: The Forgotten Clown
The Strong Man. 1926. 84 minutes.
Tramp Tramp Tramp. 1926. 97 minutes.
Long Pants. 1927. 88 minutes.
$29.95. www.kino.com.
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