The Chaser

After one too many nights out a judge forces a man to become the wife for 30 days. He can't handle it so he tries to commit suicide. He goes for a golfing trip with his pal and his actual wife thinks he's dead. While golfing he makes women swoon and gets stuck on a runaway car only to end up back at home alive and well.

Here's the thing. SOME of this movie is great, with really weird humour and typical Langdon slow reactions. The problem is that it's really two movies mashed together that don't really fit. The idea of him as a woman is solid ish but the swift turn to the golf outing is a drastic change. Then the idea that his kisses make women pass out? It's never explained or given a purpose, it's just there. That part doesn't work and the movie never fully recovers. It's hardly awful, but it's not a classic or anything.

Harry Langdon was a very peculiar genius, with his own odd rhythms and his own odd character. He was, in his day, enormously influential. It was his slow pace, his willingness to let the audience get ahead of his baby-faced naif, that so influenced Stan Laurel that he, too, began to slow his pace, creating the Mr. Laurel all fans of old movies love and cherish.

But that slow pacing calls for an extremely careful balance, and here the edifice topples over, so that when I saw this movie in a theater with a crowd of Langdon fans, I fell asleep.... and there was no laughter to wake me up.

When I awoke, there was Harry in a house dress with a milk man trying to seduce him..... and Harry was playing his bewildered, inert screen self.... and it suddenly occurred to me that if he didn't care, there was no reason I should, so I stood up and walked outside into the sunlight.

Lest you think it is because I simply don't get Langdon, well, I don't think that's the case. It's just that every once in a while something comes along to snap our suspension of disbelief in a work of fiction, and this was one of those times. I can look at the cheap shorts he turned out in the early 1930s and enjoy him playing with a rubber hose. But this feature simply doesn't work. Alas.

Frank Cullen's review here contains an interesting discussion of Capra's role in the career of Harry Langdon, most of which I agree with entirely. But his vaudeville experience did not translate to the screen quite as readily as Mr. Cullen supposes (it did not so so even for Chaplin or Keaton) and it is evident from the earliest films that Langdon had no very clear idea about his screen persona when he started in 1923. The film made in that year for Sol Lesser, Horace Greely Jr., as far as one can make out from the very abbreviated Pathé-Baby (Pathex) version that survives, is a very conventional and forgettable comic western where Langdon displays none of the distinctive characteristics that would bring him fame a year later. Picking Peaches (seemingly the earliest of the shorts made for Sennett and not directed by Edwards)is a poor piece of work, combining tasteless slapstick with equally tasteless sexual innuendo. The later Langdon character is quite absent from the lecherous shoe-clerk, dapper and articulate but not in the least amusing, that he plays in this film, largely intended to show off the Sennett "bathing beauties". "The lecher" reappears in equally undistinguished fashion (this time a photographer)in Smile Please! (also not directed by Edwards and essentially still an overextended "Keystone" comedy).

Several of the other 1924 comedies appear to be lost but in Shanghaied Lovers, although a little more of an innocent than in the previous efforts, there is still little to distinguish him from other comics of the time and the slapstick is very standard fare. The First Hundred Years is another rambling farce of the late Sennett variety and once again Langdon's characterisation is entirely conventional. The first momentary signs of a more vulnerable, childlike character come in His New Mama but this too is not sustained and the film soon degenerates into yet another outing for the "bathing beauties" in which Langdon's role is negligible and then another typical "Keystone" slapstick chase-ending.

So the Langdon character did not appear fully-fledged on the screen after being first honed in vaudeville. It was unquestionably created during the course of the shorts made during 1924-1926. This was equally clearly not the work of Capra but rather of director Harry Edwards, who rapidly became Langdon's sole director, and writer Arthur Ripley. The real change comes with The Luck of the Foolish, the first of a whole series of first-rate shorts that Edwards-Ripley-Langdon would produce in the next year or so. One or two are are less good but The Luck of the Foolish, The Hansom Cabman, All Night Long, His Marriage Wow and Remember When? are all outstanding. For one thing the cinematography improves immensely (with Ernie Crockett providing "special effects") and the direction takes on a much more coherent form. A surreal element is frequently introduced along with an increasingly darker side to the comedy. But there is also a progressive development in the Langdon character towards inarticulacy (accompanied by a set of very distinctive hand gestures) and childlike simplicity.

The inarticulacy (which continues even in the early sound films and is crucial to the films he himself directed) is almost certainly an innovation due to Langdon himself. The "noir" elements and certain recurrent themes (wartime reminiscence) are more probably the contribution of Ripley.

And this is I think the crucial turning-point in Langdon's career, the moment that will bring him his greatest success and equally his eventual tragic decline. Because the balance involved in the Langdon character that now emerges is an extremely delicate one. Take it too far and the character can easily become a simple imbecile of little enduring comic or dramatic interest. And the shorts begin to unravel somewhat during 1926, with more writers introduced (too many cooks?) and notably with the arrival amongst them of Frank Capra. Increasingly the plots seem to bypass Langdon himself, who is increasingly portrayed as an imbecile. And this process culminates, after the move to First National, with Capra's The Strong Man. This starts well enough (a typical Ripley wartime reminiscence, used also in Soldier Man and extensively in All Night Long) but then turns into a slow-paced sentimental drama (entirely in the Capra manner) where Langdon seems to have little to do but act the idiot.

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the first of the First National features with Harry Edwards still directing is an excellent comedy, if a little uneven, with some classic episodes. Long Pants, the second feature directed by Capra, is again very slow-paced and would be almost entirely forgettable if it weer not for the marked "noir" element (the attempted murder of the wife) which is presumably the work of Ripley. After the break with Capra, Langdon's own first film, Three's a Crowd is, to my mind, Langdon's masterpiece. Here we have all the vulnerability, the surreal, the dark but a central character who, however inarticulate and forlorn, is anything but an idiot. Alas, as we know, the film was never appreciated at its real value at the time and failed dismally at the box office.

This film, if one comes to it after Three's a Crowd, is a major disappointment. It is also a very personal film but the idea of a divorce-judge obliging husband and wife to exchange roles is just silly and the depiction of it equally lacks any kind of credibility. Nor is the theme new (it had been used more plausibly by Charley Chase in one of his "Jimmy Jump" comedies in 1924). Moreover the Langdon character seems to have relapsed back into the idiocy from which it had been reclaimed. After the successive failure of his three Firs National features (the third, Heart Trouble, is a lost film), Langdon was doomed to continue playing the imbecile in a perfectly ghastly series of sound shorts for Hal Roach.

Harry Langdon was a uniquely gifted silent clown with a style all his own. Several of the short comedies he made for Mack Sennett in the mid-1920s retain their quirky charm, and the first two features he starred in hold up quite well, but as soon as Harry took over the reins and started producing and directing his own movies he fumbled the job, and managed to wreck his career with dizzying speed. In Three's a Crowd, Langdon's first solo job, he took a promising premise and squandered it through awkward timing, weak gags, and sticky sentimentality, but his second self-produced effort The Chaser makes its predecessor look like a masterpiece. This time, Harry took a story idea that's wrong-headed and distasteful from the start, and created a movie which I for one find impossible to enjoy.

The introductory title cards suggest that this is a battle of the sexes comedy with a male bias, i.e. the Innocent Husband versus those Unreasonable Harpies who make his life hell. Other comedians have ventured into this dicey territory and created something worthwhile (think of Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, W. C. Fields, etc.) but Harry's first mistake here was to stack the deck so thoroughly in his own favor. We're commanded to feel sorry for him from the get-go. During the film's opening sequence Harry's wife and mother-in-law take turns chewing him out over the phone, while he sits motionless, listening. The poor guy's crime, it turns out, is that he's been staying out at his lodge every night until 8:30, and the womenfolk are furious. Isn't that just like a woman, being so unfair? Once he comes home the situation escalates between Harry and his mother-in-law to an alarming degree, to the point where she becomes crazed and pulls a gun on him. All three principles wind up in court, but Harry gets all the blame, and is slapped with a truly bizarre sentence by the judge. Get this: in order to "realize his responsibilities" as a husband, Harry must stay at home in a dress for 30 days doing housework while his wife dons men's clothing and goes off to some unspecified office to be the breadwinner.

Okay, no one should expect gender issue 'correctness' from a comedy made in 1928, but this is just twisted. And it gets worse: although Harry's emasculation consists of little more than being forced to make breakfast for his gruff, male-attired wife (admittedly while he's wearing a skirt), his misery is emphasized at the expense of any humor. When Harry sadly looks outside, the barred window he's gazing through is clearly meant to resemble that of a jail-house. Oh, but there's saucy comedy relief to perk things along: every peddler, milkman and ice man who appears at the door instantly assumes that Harry is the lady of the house -- although he looks like his usual self from the waist up -- and makes a pass at him. Yuck! Before long, naturally enough, Harry is ready to end it all and attempts suicide, but instead of taking poison he accidentally takes cod liver oil. After he races to the toilet the camera lingers for a very long moment on the darkened hallway, giving us lots of time to ponder the physical effect of the laxative. Is it my imagination, or has our star comedian lost his hold on the average viewer by this point? And it gets even worse! When Harry's wife arrives on the scene she mistakenly believes that her husband has actually killed himself, and the camera lingers on a seemingly endless close-up of the woman as she sobs miserably, making her mascara run. (Many years later, leading lady Gladys McConnell revealed that the mascara gag was her idea, and expressed regret that it was used.) I guess the mascara smeared under her eyes was supposed to get a laugh.

Along about this point I think Mr. Langdon must have recognized that his movie was sinking fast, so he turned the second half into a retread of one of his best Sennett comedies, Saturday Afternoon. Rotund Bud Jamison (filling in for rotund Vernon Dent) shows up, rescues Harry from his drudgery, gets him back into manly slacks and takes him off to the golf course. It's a relief to us all, but the ensuing routines feel uninspired and a little desperate. And then, to demonstrate that wearing that skirt didn't turn him into a sissy, Harry encounters some girls frolicking in a park, kisses a few at random and makes them swoon. How? Why? By this point it doesn't much matter. Towards the end, when Harry's car plummets down a slope he crashes through a billboard advertising a movie called "Over the Hill," but the gag takes on an unhappy double meaning as we consider the trajectory of the star's career.

The nicest thing I can say in conclusion is that Langdon's failures are just as quirky and off-the-wall as his successes, but his successes sure are a lot more fun to watch. After sitting through this ill-begotten misfire you'll want to rush back to The Strong Man to remind yourself how Harry Langdon earned his reputation as a great clown in the first place.

The Chaser is, admittedly, not all of a piece. It has some successful parts, several misfires and lacks the quality of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the most coherent of Harry Langdon's features and one that balances a dramatic narrative with comic invention. The Chaser appears to be several short films welded together (as does The Strong Man). However this device of patching several two-reelers together for a features is much the formula for other comedians' feature films of the period (Laurel & Hardy among them). After all, the guys who wrote scenarios for feature-length films were the same guys who devised the one- and two-reelers. Because Harry Langdon came to Hollywood years after Ben Turpin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Olver Hardy, Stanley Laurel, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton had established themselves, critics inevitably compared Langdon to some of them: most notably Chaplin. Rather than emulate Chaplin, Harry Langdon sought to preserve his established comic character that he developed in vaudeville. His soured view of the world was more akin to W. C. Fields' than Chaplin's. Congratulations to previous reviewers, Chris Peterson and, especially, Rodrigo Valenzuela, for reviewing The Chaser with unbiased minds and for keeping up with contemporary research and for knowing something about the circumstances under which The Chaser was made. 1) First National Pictures, being acquired by Warners, was keeping everyone on tight budgets. Vitaphone (also part of the Warner Brothers/First National/Vitaphone family) had released the first commercially viable sound shorts in 1926, when there were only about 100 theatres equipped for sound. However, as Jack Warner expected, that number doubled in a year and by 1928 most of the better motion picture exhibitors were "okay for sound," and Warners was counting on sound features to make them a major studio. Unlike Chaplin and Lloyd, both Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon did not "own" themselves, and were forced to continue making silent comedies for several years into the sound era. MGM and Warners saved the expense of making sound movies for musicals and what they deemed "prestige dramas." 2) Harry Langdon spent more than 20 years in vaudeville. By the time he came to movies in 1924, just a few years before the sound revolution, he had been a headliner in big-time vaudeville for years. He did not need anyone, especially a relative greenhorn like Frank Capra, to "invent" a comic characterization for him. Harry's hen-pecked, slow-to-react comedic persona was well developed as is evidenced by descriptions of his vaude act, "Johnny's New Car." 3) Frank Capra was good at devising gags for Mack Sennett and Harry Langdon. Capra became a great movie director after he left Harry Langdon's employ, but he was as ambitious and self-serving as he was gifted. GHis autobiography is suspect and was his chance to settle old scores. Capra saw Langdon as a tool to propel him into prominence. But Capra clashed with Arthur Ripley, Harry Edwards and Harry Langdon. Between First National's cuts to Harry Langdon's production company's budgets and dissension in the creative process, someone had to go, and it was Capra who fought with Harry and Harry's other writers and directors. Also, Capra, as is apparent by his later films, was not in tune with Langdon's established comic character and the dark side of humanity explored by Langdon and his more sympatico writers/directors. 4) Langdon, indeed, did allow his long-time unhappy marriage (his wife had been in Harry's vaude act) to influence his choice of material. Most artists do mine their own lives for material. That Harry did not do as dispassionately or fairly as some may wish is subject to debate. I, for one, would have preferred more objectivity on Harry's part. Still, The Chaser is a fairly good comedy, no worse than all but the few best of the late 1920s.