Tramp, Tramp, Tramp

"Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" was the first feature film Harry Langdon made for his own newly formed production company to be distributed by First National Pictures, and the first of his features to be released.As such it faced the problem of adapting his slow, underplayed style of comedy to a greater length for the greater length and more lavish production of a feature, and it meets this challenge well to create a very funny film.

The plot is strange -- essentially Harry finds himself walking in a cross-country marathon to save his father's shoe business -- but it manages to pull of the trick of remaining quite unified while encapsulating a number of discrete stages for Harry to do spread out and do comedy. The first ten minutes or so of the film are taken just to lay out the scenario, and that saves the necessity of their being interruptions during further scenes. In fact, all the opening revelations about the small businessman being squeezed dry by the big company are played more like grim drama than comedy, and this works -- I think Harry Langdon is funnier when he innocent, childlike, and somehow supernatural character is contrasted with the unpleasantness of reality.

Harry's fallen in love with a young Joan Crawford, the girl on the shoe conglomerate's billboards. This is funny in itself just as a concept, funny because of the humorous sight of sophisticated, glamorous Joan and befuddled, infantile Harry falling for each other, and funny because of gags that are drawn out of it (the torn-off images of her all around Harry's hotel room, and then hiding under his sheets). It also works to drive Harry along in walking the race. The girl's character isn't really built though, and little time is actually spent on their interactions (except for a great gag shot where a house is blown away in a cyclone to reveal them kissing passionately). At such this element of the film works well, but "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" doesn't have quite the emotional punch that other Langdon comedies sometimes have.

Of course, the real comedy in a good Harry Langdon comedy comes mainly between what happens, from Harry's subtle but mesmerizing and hilarious little reactions and ineffectual, childish attempts at action. This film allows for a good assortment of comedy set pieces where there is room for that, and probably one of Harry's best pieces of pantomime comes in the extended shot where he is flummoxed by encountering two Betty Burtn's at once: one on a billboard and one the real person. It would be a throwaway gag to most comedians, but Harry draws a long series of laughs from his reactions to it. There's a great scene around Harry's inadvertent antagonism of his new roommate the walking champion of the world (in which, in the don't-try-this-at-home department, he is given a whole handful of sleeping pills), and a sequence of Harry in a chain-gang after his arrest for stealing berries that could have been rearranged slightly into its own two-reel comedy. It also contains perhaps my favorite little moment where Harry, breaking up tiny rocks with his tiny hammer, is given a gun -- and uses the butt of it to break up slightly bigger rocks.

While the characteristic signature of Langdon is in these moments, bigger production gags are in evidence here as well, and are both funny and impressive. Especially the scene in which Harry, after hanging off a cliff (and, characteristically, is very funny just by being oblivious to it) falls down it but easily survives by accidentally sliding on a detached fence, and the one in which the barber shop he has entered is constantly being physically twisted around by a volcano are extremely funny, inventive, and visually impressive.

The end, in which Harry is revealed to have had a baby named Harry that is exactly like him in an over-sized cradle, is very weird, but somehow very appropriate. Harry is an eternal baby in a grown-up world, who will be somehow the same no matter what his supposed real age.

One of Harry Langdon's most enjoyable outings, this one gets into the plot straight away. The laughs start coming thick and fast as soon as he makes his dull-witted entrance, and they continue most heartily right up to the cyclone climax which, with all its mechanical contrivances, I thought the least funny in the movie. I feel Harry is at his best when he has minimal props to sustain him and is forced to rely heavily on his stop-and-start walk, his facial twitches and his hesitant to-and-froing to keep laughter at its height.

Langdon's style of comedic reacting needs excellent stooges and in this film he has two of the best in his entire career: Tom Murray who is beautifully set up for conflict right from the opening shot and is then brilliantly revealed not only as a ruthless landlord but as a stop-at-nothing competitor; and pushy Brooks Benedict who artfully manages one of Harry's funniest routines in the movie.

And then, of course, there's Joan Crawford. Admittedly, although she is the catalyst for Harry's cross-country sprint, she is not exactly treated as a star equal. In her key scene with Harry, her face is hidden by her cloche hat. But nonetheless, she's in there swinging.

Superbly enhanced by some of the most beautiful tints ever presented on the screen, this movie is a visual delight from first to last.

While it may today mark a milestone for giving early work to both Joan Crawford and director Frank Capra (here writing his first feature), "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" mattered at the time for quickly launching Harry Langdon as one of the silent screen's chief clowns.

By the way, that may be the first time the words "Harry Langdon" and "quickly" have appeared in the same sentence.

As a piece of history, "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" is certainly worth viewing and relatively painless at just over an hour. As a comedy, it's not so smooth a ride, with a thin-as-crepe main story about a walking race across the United States and a lot of padding in the form of Harry's ceaseless blank-faced mugging.

The story has the makings of a Capra classic: While big corporation Burton Shoes ("The Sole Of The Nation" its omnipresent billboards read) gloms up the market by sponsoring the walking race, little shoemaker Logan & Son struggles to pay the rent. It's up to the "Son," Harry, to win the race for the $25,000 reward - with help from Crawford as the Burton CEO's daughter.

"I'll get the money in three months if it takes a year," Harry vows.

But nothing is done with the whole big-company-versus-little-guy thing, it just sort of is there. Harry doesn't have any problems with Mr. Burton, except when he tries to shake the man's hand while eating a sandwich. The love interest with Crawford likewise just sort of happens, with Crawford looking as lost in her role as underdog-loving ingénue as Babe Ruth would be playing shortstop. If her father notices her falling in with this no-account, he doesn't seem to care.

Long sections of the film grow tedious, like a section which finds Harry a prisoner in chains, or another where he first meets Crawford with much shy blinking. At one point Harry shares a bedroom with his chief race rival and landlord, Nick Kargas (Tom Murray). It's almost like Laurel and Hardy, except for the absence of chemistry and Murray's inability to play anything for a laugh.

You see why people talk about Langdon as a proto-Stan Laurel; with his baby face and winsome gaze you never feel anything other than protective of the poor guy. Sections of the film do work, too, like the culmination of a cliff-hanging scene that keeps Harry a step ahead of his competition, or a big finale where Harry and Nick cower in a barber shop buckling in a cyclone.

But even the film's big moment, of Harry on that cliff, only work when you don't think too hard of those other silent clowns whose thrill sequences involved real danger. Here you can see Harry's working with the aid of process shots, and the jump cuts as Harry dodges a series of rolling rocks are hard to miss.

Whoever was directing the film (Harry Edwards is credited, though Capra may have been helping) doesn't seem able to sustain anything, or get the various bits to cohere. While the title cards amuse, the laugh lines are weak. "I'm so crazy about that girl I'm crazy," Harry exudes.

Give "Tramp X 3" points for charm: Langdon was a genial clown, and a minute or two of his finger nibbling can be amusing. It just goes on too long, including two minutes at the end when we see Harry mug some more, this time as a baby in a giant cradle. As a vehicle to launch Harry Langdon to a national audience, "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp" worked like a charm. But as a lasting testament to his comedy, it stumbles more than a bit.

The Strong Man is generally considered THE Langdon film, but I

think that's because it's dramatically stronger and more unified-- which in some ways only makes it less suitable for the quizzical little comedian at the center of the story, who's really too small to carry such a big film. Tramp, Tramp, Tramp is more shapeless and to my mind is the quintessential Langdon comedy, especially since its high point lets him do his own distinctive variations on famous moments from two other silent comedians. A competitor in a cross-country marathon walk, Langdon winds up in the middle of nowhere, dangling from a fence over a cliff; where Harold Lloyd dangled over a busy city, the reaction of the crowd being used to whip up a comic frenzy, Langdon's childlike struggles occur in the most desolate, abandoned nowhere, a place where his body wouldn't even be found for 50 years. Later, sliding down the cliff, Langdon finds himself in the middle of an avalanche, much like Keaton in Seven Chances-- but where Keaton dodges boulders heroically, Langdon simply shuts his eyes and wishes his predicament away. From the wildly oversized mugging of the Keystone era we are now at the absolute extreme of comedy minimalism; Langdon is to slapstick what Malevich's White on White is to painting.

Baby-faced Harry Langdon never made it to the top in the way that Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd did, and watching this, his first feature film, it isn't difficult to see why. Langdon isn't a bad comic actor, but the pacing of the gags is sometimes painfully bad (over-extended usually) and, while this film does hit a few modest high notes it never comes near to challenging the work of the silent comic greats.

Langdon plays the son of a shoe store owner who is going out of business because of the competition from Burton Shoes, a major factory with a nationwide advertising campaign fronted by a young (and barely recognisable) Joan Crawford, on whom young Harry has a hopeless crush. This being Hollywood, Joan is quite attracted to Harry too, and encourages him to embark on a cross-country race to raise the money he needs to save his father's store.

While there are some funny scenes, too many of the big moments seem to be steals from other movies. Harry hangs precariously from a fence on the edge of a cliff by his belt buckle in much the same way Harold Lloyd hung from the side of a building in Safety Last. He also slides down a long hill, dodging rolling rocks as Keaton did in Seven Chances. The comical scenes that are original aren't all that funny and go on too long, and the climactic cyclone sequence is particularly poorly handled.

While Tramp, Tramp, Tramp isn't by any means a dud, it's purpose now seems merely to show how much better the likes of Chaplin and Keaton were at their craft.