Harry Langdon

Blurred by time and blotched by Hollywood myth-making, the general outlines of comedy superstar Harry Langdon's life may seem all too familiar: widely acclaimed as a vaudeville headliner, he met with near-instant success in Hollywood, only to fall from the pinnacle of stardom just before the advent of talkies; for the rest of his life he slogged along through lesser films and roles, a trouper to the end. Up to a point, Langdon's story sounds like that of many other Silent Era movie idols - say, for instance, Buster Keaton's. Harry and Buster, although they are commonly regarded as primarily silent comedians, both appeared in many more talking films than silents. Both angered Hollywood's mighty and suffered the consequences. And both came close to being forgotten. Here, the parallels cease: Buster lived long enough to be rediscovered by a new audience, escaping obscurity. Like a fairytale prince under a spell, awaiting the kiss of wakefulness, Harry still waits for his time to come round again.
Born and raised in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Harry Langdon was never the poverty-stricken waif of legend. A self-employed painter, Harry's dad, William Worley Langdon, kept food on the table and a roof over the heads of his fair-sized family for nearly 40 years. If young Harry sold newspapers on the streets of metropolitan Omaha as a boy, it wasn't because he had to help support his family. It was to see the shows in that city's substantial theater district, and to earn money for staging his own neighborhood dramatic productions. Lavinia Langdon, Harry's mother, worked on behalf of the Salvation Army when she wasn't tending to children and keeping up the house - but if she was ever, as some have claimed, a "Salvation Army officer," her descendants have yet to locate the records that would prove it. Mrs. Langdon probably had her hands full with Harry, who seems to have been stage-struck from the get-go. According to published stories, young Harry burned his father's celluloid collars to generate smoke for a stage locomotive; at his mother's insistence, he donned girl's clothes when the minstrel troupes came to town, lest he run off and join them; and he dragged home an endless succession of clocks and other prizes won in amateur contests in the local theaters.
Eventually, Mrs. Langdon's fears were realized. Still at a tender age - most likely in his early teens, though accounts vary - Harry ran away from home to join Dr. Belcher's Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show. He returned home a few months later, but he'd established his independence. Over the next few years, Langdon left his parents' home repeatedly, joining up with the Gus Sun Minstrels and various medicine shows and small circuses. The boy played many parts - blackface minstrel, lightning sketch artist, gymnast, trapeze artist, musician. For a while, he did a hair-raising balancing act, rocking back and forth on a stack of chairs and bottles. In 1903, Harry married Rose Musolff, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Rose, too, was a performer, and Harry soon came up with an act they could do together. A persistent misconception about the Langdons' vaudeville career is that they always did the same routine, a one-gag trick-car act. But over the two decades they spent performing, often in the country's most prestigious variety houses, Harry and Rose did a great deal more than simply repeat "Johnny's New Car" ad nauseam. In 1907-08, Harry was doing his own interpretation of the Yankee Doodle Dandy boy made famous in George M. Cohan's "Little Johnny Jones." Rose, billed as "The Show Girl," would perform solo, warbling to the crowds; she's credited by some with popularizing the song, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" (ca. 1905). Even the car act was always changing: sometimes they had one car on stage, other times as many as three; sometimes Harry and Rose performed alone, but on other occasions Harry's younger brother Tully, or one of Rose's relations, would join them. Billed as "A Night on the Boulevard" in 1906 (and already an ambitious, full-stage production), the act evolved into "Johnny's New Car" through the teens and ended up, in the 1920s, as one element of a three-part act called "After the Ball." In every way, the Langdons' act was consistent with vaude's other name, "variety." (Harry also played in a Broadway musical called "Jim Jam Jems.")
Many still believe that Langdon got his start in pictures with Mack Sennett, or - as the Old Man himself liked to say - that he came to Sennett direct from "the knockabout stage," "with no money and no fame" and (it was certainly implied) no moviemaking experience. Nothing could be farther from the truth! In early 1923, when Harry Langdon was a big-time vaudeville headliner (with both money and fame), he decided to get into pictures. According to Harold Lloyd, who had seen the Langdons' act in Los Angeles, Harry spoke first with Hal Roach, but Roach wouldn't meet his price. He then turned, not to Sennett, but to wunderkind movie mogul Sol Lesser, signing a contract with Principal Pictures. Through the summer and early fall of 1923, Langdon cut his celluloid teeth as the star in an uncertain number of two-reel comedy shorts - there were at least three, The Sky Scraper (aka The Greenhorn), A Tough Tenderfoot, and A Perfect Nuisance, all directed by Alf Goulding. These films were not just planned, but actually made: the "Exhibitors Herald" was full of news about them at the time, and years later, two of the three - renamed Horace Greely Jr. and The White Wing's Bride - were released and distributed by Pathé.
In October 1923, a general crisis of confidence among the major filmmakers, and possibly financial problems at Principal, resulted in a shakeup; Langdon found himself traded off, his contract snapped up by Sennett. But when Harry signed with Mack in November 1923, he was no obscure vaudeville trouper fresh from the tank towns. Rather, he was a much-ballyhooed Hollywood veteran who'd sweated under the hot sun on a movie lot, going through his paces in take after take. He'd earned respect, and he got it. Sennett gave his new acquisition great latitude, time to find his own style, his own team to craft his shorts, even (alone of all the comics on the lot) an orchestra to set the right mood during shooting. The Old Man expected great things of Harry. The first short film Langdon made for Sennett, Smile Please, had been intended for another player; it's been suggested, with some truth, that any comic on the lot could have done as well as Harry did in this mish-mash of special-effect gags - only in the second reel, where Langdon is a harried photographer struggling to get an unprepossessing family's portrait taken, does the pace slow enough for him to work his magic. It was much the same with the next few pictures; Harry was all but smothered under the weight of tired gags, out-of-control plots, situations better suited to other comedians (in Picking Peaches he clings to a ladder, Lloyd-like, high above the city streets), and Sennett bathing beauties. Somewhere around The First Hundred Years and The Luck o' the Foolish (August-September 1924), things began to change: the pace slowed, the stories became more coherent, and the focus was squarely on Harry's unique character with all his timid hesitancies and naïve responses. What made the difference? In part, it may have been the direction. From The Luck o' the Foolish on, Harry Edwards directed every one of Langdon's remaining films for Sennett. Maybe it was partly the consistency that came with gradual formation of a "Langdon team." Rounding out that team were Arthur Ripley, listed in the credits beginning with Boobs in the Wood (February 1925), and Frank Capra, beginning with Plain Clothes (March 1925). And maybe it was just a matter of Langdon finding his film legs. Harry's popularity grew with each succeeding short, and the team began producing longer comedies, including three-reelers like There He Goes and Soldier Man. All the great comics of the era - among them Chaplin, Arbuckle, Normand, Lloyd, and Keaton - had made the transition to feature-length pictures, and now Langdon was running to catch up. With His First Flame, he did so (though it was not released immediately). In just two years on the Sennett lot, he'd vaulted to the top ranks of silent comedy stardom.
Sooner or later, almost everyone who achieved stardom working for Sennett left him, and Harry was no exception. Eager to show what he could do as an independent producer, he signed a contract with First National (now represented by his onetime boss, Sol Lesser!) that required him to produce two feature-length films per year, at a set price per picture. (Thus, his "independence" was always more fancied than real.) Langdon had brought along several members of his Sennett team, and they got to work at once on his first independent feature, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp. Built around a cross-country walking race, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) offered not so much a connected story as a series of vignettes that let Harry do what he did best - mooning over a girl's picture and acting the fool when he meets her face to face; hopping along one-legged behind a train, an escaped prisoner, after he's thrown his ball-and-chain aboard; struggling to bathe during a tornado, then scaring off the storm by heaving bricks at it; and finally, when all's ended well, playing his most clueless self as his own baby. The film was well received, but it ran over budget. Rightly or wrongly, common practice at the time was to blame the director for such failings: whether Harry Edwards left on his own or was forced out (accounts vary), Langdon found himself looking for a new director. He gave the job to former gagman Frank Capra. The next picture, The Strong Man (1926), was a well-publicized success. As the weakling assistant to a vaudeville strong man, Harry single-handedly smashed the gambling den, saved the town, and (of course) married the girl. It was a feel-good film if ever there was one. Behind the scenes, feelings weren't so good. Relations had grown strained between Ripley, the writer, and Capra, his former protégé. During the making of Long Pants (1927), Langdon increasingly sided with his writer and against his director. As if that were not enough, it now became clear just how onerous First National's terms really were. (At the time, Chaplin was taking two to three years to turn out a feature, Lloyd about a year; only Keaton was on a schedule like Langdon's.) Long Pants was completed behind schedule and over budget, and Langdon - who had to make up the difference out of his own pocket - fired Capra. Already the star, and president of the Harry Langdon Corporation, now he would occupy the director's chair himself.
Capra partisans have pointed to the commercial failure of Langdon's final three pictures for First National - Three's a Crowd, The Chaser, and Heart Trouble - to bolster their claims that firing their man was a fatal mistake and that Langdon couldn't direct. Both points could certainly be argued, and the controversy is unlikely ever to be settled. What seems clear from the two surviving silent features directed by Langdon (Heart Trouble is widely considered a lost film) is that if Ripley was inclined toward the dark and grim, Langdon's artistic vision made a good match. Three's a Crowd is a black comedy in which Harry, desperate for a family of his own, loses all. In The Chaser, he spends most of his time in drag, and his best gags revolve around suicide. This wasn't what the public wanted to see in 1927-28, and the reviews were scathing. It's been suggested that Heart Trouble may have marked the beginnings of a comeback, but too late - First National chose not to renew Langdon's contract
And then came the talkies! After a brief return to the stage, Langdon signed with Hal Roach in 1929 to do short comedies. Ads for the new Langdon series made much of Harry's voice, crediting him with "a comic manner of speech that is irresistibly funny." For the most part, he spoke in a kind of falsetto, possibly (according to his relatives) as a result of having been treated by a horse doctor for a near-fatal childhood illness; however, in films like The King, his last short for Roach, he ranged from reedy squeak to booming bass. For the rest of his life, Langdon continued in the movies, sometimes in small parts, but much more often as a featured performer. Fully two-thirds of all the films he appeared in were talking films: his career certainly did not end with the Silent Era. He played in a number of feature films, sometimes for major studios (Universal, Warner Bros., United Artists) and other times for "poverty-row" companies (Monogram, Producers Releasing Corp.). Between feature appearances, he starred in a great many short comedies, primarily for Educational-Fox, Paramount, and Columbia. A few of these films reprised some of the best bits from his silent-film heyday; however, the great majority were fresh and original - and, frankly, a great deal better than the critics have suggested.
One indisputable fact about Harry Langdon is that he died much too early for his own good. In 1920 his father, William Worley Langdon, had collapsed and died of a cerebral hemorrhage the day before the family, their bags all packed, meant to move from Council Bluffs to sunny California. When Harry suffered the same illness in 1944 - it's been published far and wide that he collapsed while rehearsing a dance number for the Republic feature Swingin' on a Rainbow, but widow Mabel Langdon says he fell ill during work on the Columbia short Pistol-Packin' Nitwits - he displayed his dad's same bad timing, the worst mistake an old-time vaudevillian could make: James Agee wrote his famous Life article, Chaplin and Lloyd received belated Oscars, Keaton found new fans via television and fresh renown at the Cannes Film Festival. Through it all, Harry lay dead, struck down too soon to enjoy the renewed attention lavished on his fellow clowns.
Now, at last, there are signs of a long-overdue renewed appreciation for Harry. Not big, blinking neon signs, but subtle hints here and there. Over the last few years, several of his great silent features have been reissued on video. The Harry Langdon Society has emerged to promote greater appreciation of Langdon's comic genius. And in 1997, his hometown of Council Bluffs celebrated its first-ever official Harry Langdon Day, following up in 1999 with the dedication of Harry Langdon Boulevard. There's a long way to go before Harry Langdon regains the place in film history, and in moviegoers' hearts, that his unique talents deserve. As the narrator asked in one of Robert Youngson's silent-comedy compilation films, "Who will replace Harry Langdon? Over the years, the answer has become clear: Nobody."