Rediscovering the Fourth of the “4 Great Comedians”

Summer is usually a time to relax and go out to the latest hit movies, but it also provides a great opportunity to work on various projects that there is simply not time to pursue once classes and assignments are in full swing. One of those is catching up with a variety of recent DVD releases and revisiting movies not viewed in a long time.

Most people, once exposed to it, enjoy classic silent comedy. Many people are familiar with at least the names, if not the films, of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, the three most popular movie comedians of the 1920s. Most Chaplin and Keaton films have been easy to see for decades, and a few years ago the Harold Lloyd estate finally made available his well-preserved library of classics to the public.

Devoted silent film buffs also know of a fourth “king” of silent comedy--Harry Langdon--but until this year few were able to see more than a handful of representative titles from his career. Over a decade ago, Kino Video came out with Langdon’s three most popular feature films: “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” “The Strong Man,” and “Long Pants” (later put onto a triple-feature DVD in 2000). These were all guided by legendary filmmaker Frank Capra, the first as one of the writers and the other two as director, but they account for less than half his feature films.

Earlier this summer, Kino released a double-feature of the two surviving silent features that Langdon directed himself after firing Capra: “Three’s a Crowd” and “The Chaser.” A third Langdon-directed feature, “Heart Trouble,” no longer survives.

Last December, Allday Entertainment issued an amazingly ambitious four-DVD set called “The Harry Langdon Collection Lost and Found.” This includes an illuminating 74-minute documentary on Langdon’s career, over two dozen shorts (both silent and sound), and Langdon’s very first feature, “His First Flame,” which was newly restored by the late Rusty Casselton of the Minnesota State University-Moorhead film department.

Many of the shorts, which cover most of his career at the Mack Sennett comedy studio, have been reconstructed on this set for the first time from a variety of fragments, foreign versions, excerpts, and original script materials.

A few are included in alternate versions that had cannibalized major sequences for TV comedy shows or abridged home versions.

The feature and 20 shorts all have new audio commentary tracks. These, along with the documentary, enthusiastically set out to establish that Langdon was a creative comic genius in his own right, and not merely molded by Frank Capra as has long been believed.

Langdon had worked on the vaudeville stage since the early 1900s, and by the early 1920s his popularity and critical acclaim led to interest by Hollywood. Mack Sennett, noted for his fast-paced slapstick, outbid comedy producer Hal Roach for Langdon’s talents.

On the Allday 4-DVD set we can see film by film how Langdon gradually imposes his own peculiar child-man character to greater degrees into the traditional Sennett formula. Well before Frank Capra began to work for Sennett, we can now recognize that Sennett was already making Langdon comedies rather than Sennett comedies starring Langdon.

A major part of Langdon’s style was his slow and sometimes excruciatingly gradual reaction to the things going on around his character, a sharp contrast to the gag-a-minute (or gag-a-second) style of most other silent comedies at the time.

The audio commentaries point out how his fresh approach to humor drastically influenced other comedians, notably Stan Laurel.

Langdon also enjoyed exploring what even today is very black, even disturbing humor, dealing with murder, suicide, and sexual roles, among other things. His last film with Capra, “Long Pants,” is among his darkest subjects, despite its happy ending.

On his own, Langdon was free to experiment even further, and the tragi-comic “Three’s a Crowd” is the purest example of Langdon’s vision, verging on avant-garde surrealism. Despite a few self-indulgently slow sequences, and some inevitable comparisons to Chaplin’s little Tramp, this touching portrayal of love and loneliness probably deserves to be called Langdon’s masterpiece.

“The Chaser” returns to more traditional domestic comedy while incorporating darkly comic elements. Although it has a few abrupt plot shifts (possibly due to some pre-release cutting), it contains some of Langdon’s most inspired episodes as an inattentive husband sentenced to trade places with his wife for 30 days--not only wearing skirts and struggling to prepare meals, but discovering he must deal with amorous deliverymen while his wife is away at the office.

Image quality on Allday’s “The Harry Langdon Collection Lost and Found” varies according to the condition of the surviving material that was pieced together. Overall it is good, with pretty good transfers to video that will look fine on a regular television but appear a bit softer and more grainy when projected on a large screen. However, the rarity and comprehensiveness of the set, the generous bonus materials, and an included 20-page booklet make the set a must-have. Appropriate music scores are provided by a variety of musicians.

The Kino video transfers of “Three’s a Crowd” and “The Chaser” are state-of-the-art high-definition masters from the original 35mm camera negatives. Even the regular DVD run through a hi-def projector approaches Blu-ray quality in its clarity, although brief portions of both films show some nitrate decomposition, and parts of “The Chaser” had to be inserted from a 16mm film copy.

The Kino DVD includes an audio commentary on “Three’s a Crowd” by film historian David Kalat (a driving force behind the Allday 4-disc collection). Both films include excellent pipe organ scores by veteran accompanist Lee Erwin.

The old Kino DVD of “Harry Langdon the Forgotten Clown” (which has his three Capra features, all with fine music scores added) is a fine video transfer, but somewhat softer on a big screen than the new “Three’s a Crowd"/"The Chaser” DVD.

All of these Langdon DVDs belong on every library shelf alongside the box sets of Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.