Silents are Golden: The One-Of-A-Kind Harry Langdon

Silents are Golden: The one and only Harry Langdon

For a long time, most silent comedians were pretty much the same “guy.” Their looks may vary, and some had more clearly “dumb” personalities than others, but virtually all of them had a similar level of excitable, leaping, insidious energy. Over-the-top reactions and lots of racing suited the fast-paced mayhem and pursuit scenes that were the norm in the 1910s. The 1920s saw comedy take hold, but it took a very unique and deliberately slow performer to popularize a very different kind of comedy. Enter the talented Harry Langdon, considered by some to be one of the ‘Big Four’ of silent comedy after Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd.

Born in 1884 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the baby-faced Langdon has been in show business since a young age, appearing on touring medical shows and public companies. He married colleague Rose Musolff in 1903 and the two eventually entered vaudeville, where Langdon developed a sketch entitled “Johnny’s New Car”. Taken at a time when cars were just becoming a part of everyday life (and often the subject of jokes), the sketch featured gentle husband Harry and sly wife Rose in their new car, which of course broke down. Harry tries to fix the unwieldy machine (a fragile wooden replica of a real car), but once one part is fixed, another either falls off, breaks, or explodes. The Langdons performed the sketch thousands of times over the years, modifying and perfecting it over time, working their way up to high-end vaudeville houses.

Initially skeptical about the longevity of films, Langdon eventually accepted a contract from Mack Sennett in 1924. His deliberately slow style and innocent, confused demeanor were in stark contrast to Sennett’s usual energy. The studio’s writers were skeptical of the re-imagining – as Frank Capra recalled: “…Here was this childlike character who took five minutes to blink. Nobody wanted him. But Sennett kept saying, “You all know what he’s got. He has something.'”

Langdon definitely had that “something,” though it took a while to shine. Start with picking peaches (1924), his first few films had him dressed sharply, if rather conventionally, and accompanied Sennett’s usual slapstick style. But over time, Langdon’s comedies began to revolve around his unique style of slow blinks, delayed reactions, and lighthearted social awkwardness.

With his white pancake makeup and dark liner, Langdon looked like he’d escaped a comic strip — or maybe a more apt description “wandered from a comic strip and got lost.” He wore a distinctive battered hat, ill-fitting coat and pants, and a silk tie that he tied like a shoelace. While other comedians might overreact when startled, Langdon stopped and then jumped a second late. While most comedians ran from danger, Langdon was more apt to blink blankly and then wave a benevolent wave at danger. Writer Walter Kerr probably best described Langdon’s enigmatic, childlike personality: “A five year old and not a five year old. A twelve year old and not a twelve year old. A fully grown, functioning man and not a fully grown, functioning man. Langdon wasn’t and wasn’t all three at once, and hardly a seam showed.”

When Langdon was allowed to be fully Langdon, the results were some of the finest comedy shorts of the 1920s. A favorite is Saturday afternoon (1925), about a henpecked Harry whose boyfriend convinces him to sneak off on a date with two pretty girls. The costar was Vernon Dent, a powerful comedian who often played villainous characters. The dependable Dent and the flighty Langdon were a good match on screen and would work together many more times in the future.

Langdon grew in popularity and his style influenced those around him. Stan Laurel is probably the most obvious example, having started out in comedy shorts as the usual energetic go-getter but noticeably slowing down his performance style in his late ’20s, adding Langdonesque blinks and childlike responses. Buster Keaton also began to play more with long takes and hesitant movements – just to name two well-known personalities.

By 1925 it was a given that such a popular comedian would break into feature films, and Langdon became a producer at his own company, the Harry Langdon Corporation. His first feature-length comedy was The strong man (1926), also the first feature film directed by Frank Capra, and followed it tramp, tramp, tramp (1926) and Long trousers (1927). Capra later insisted that Langdon had started to get a swollen head and wanted to add more Chaplinesque pathos to his films in a way that Capra felt was his character. Anyway, Capra was fired and Langdon took over the director’s chair.

His directorial debut was Three is a crowd (1927), an enchanting tale about Harry who takes in a young woman about to have a baby (despite possessing very little himself) and is followed by the less successful one The Chaser and the lost heart problems (both 1928). By this time his popularity was waning, perhaps because so many Langdon films had flooded the market and he would return to comedy shorts.

Langdon’s transition to talkie was rocky, as his speaking style was often oddly rambling and monotonous, and some of his childish character’s quirks could seem uncomfortably odd in “normal” life (as opposed to the slightly understated world of silent comedy). He adapted, however, and appeared in dozens of sound shorts and a few low-budget films throughout the ’30s and ’40s, eventually specializing in feckless hero characters. By this point, the similarities between him and Stan Laurel were so pronounced that Langdon stepped in to play alongside Oliver Hardy when Laurel was going through a contract dispute with Roach Zenobia (1939).

Langdon died of a brain hemorrhage in 1944, leaving behind his wife Mabel (he had remarried twice more after divorcing Rose in 1928) and ten-year-old son Harry Jr., while becoming an obscure figure in cinema in the decades that followed after his death his films have been beautifully restored in recent years. Thankfully, each year they seem to be gaining the enigmatic little comedian new fans and a new appreciation of his format in the silent comedy.

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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.

Lea Stans is a born and raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely credits to Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion on her website, Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterly and has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.