In the clip above, I discuss “The Chaser,” starring and directed by Harry Langdon. Unlike the great silent comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, Langdon was nearly forty before he first went in front of a movie camera, in 1923. He was born in 1884 and got his start (according to a superb biographical sketch by William Schelly, who is also the author of the book “Harry Langdon: His Life and Films,” which I haven’t read) in Dr. Belcher's Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show and "knocking around in medicine shows, minstrel shows and circuses" before becoming a top-tier vaudevillian.
Langdon’s persona is often described as childlike; he plays meek and befuddled characters who find themselves buffeted by the winds of fate. The other three great silent comedians also played sweet souls bullied by a cruel world, but Langdon’s stock character was distinctively resourceless. Yet he triangulated his innocence with a singular, stunning, deeply poignant maneuver: he looked into the camera, aware of his fate and bringing the viewer into complicity with his awareness. The drama of his consciousness gave the comedy of his pratfalls and mishaps a darkly bittersweet undertone as well as a distinctive psychological modernity.
Most of his best-known films of the nineteen-twenties were directed by Frank Capra—whom Langdon had the privilege of firing, in order to assume the direction of his own films. And, as a director, Langdon was far more radical and original than Capra ever was, which accounts for the audience’s rejection of his films. “Three’s a Crowd,” from 1927, is a grimly Sisyphean comedy of a lonely man in quest of a family, and its slapstick brilliance is smeared with a mire of poverty that few dramas could rival. In “The Chaser,” Langdon’s directorial originality fuses remarkably with his unique performance style: he gives himself long, static, and obsessional closeups of a sort that wouldn’t be seen again until the rise of the overtly modernist cinema of the nineteen-sixties. The commercial failure of these films coincided with the coming of sound, and, for the rest of his life (he died in 1944), Langdon became mainly a B-movie and short-subject performer (notably, he performs alongside Al Jolson in the Depression-steeped 1933 musical “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” in which he plays a comical Communist intellectual). Langdon is still often remembered as a performer (Jean-Luc Godard claimed to have based his own performance in his 1987 film “Soigne Ta Droite” (“Keep Your Right Up”) on Langdon’s persona—here’s a clip). It’s time to remember Langdon as a director, too.
