Strong Man

Harry Langdon plays Paul Bergot, an easily befuddled lad in over his head serving with the Belgian Army during World War I. As part of a program meant to improve the soldiers' morale, he receives letters regularly from a Mary Brown, an American girl he will probably never meet (and may not even exist.) After the Armistice, Paul journeys to America to find his "Mary" but gets sidetracked working as an assistant to Zandow the Great, a sideshow strong man. When Zandow becomes incapacitated after a night of excessive drinking, meek, puny Harry is forced to impersonate the strong man in front of an audience of paying customers…an audience that includes a blind "Mary." Convinced she is his long sought after penpal, Paul must now keep up the deception to impress the woman he adores.

Harry Langdon got his start making two-reel silent comedies for Mack Sennett (many of which are collected on the three-volume Harry Langdon Comedy Classics series, available from Alpha Video) in which he developed his unique "Little Elf" persona. Tiring of two-reelers, Langdon left Sennett to make features for First National, taking his collaborators, screenwriter Arthur Ripley and director Frank Capra, with him. The first picture - Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), co-starring a young Joan Crawford - was a hit, and the second, The Strong Man, was even better received, with Photoplay calling it "a grand and glorious laugh from start to finish." (Decades later, praise for The Strong Man has not diminished, with Joe Franklin even saying it was "the best film its director, Frank Capra, ever made"!) However, during a dispute while making their next film, Long Pants (1927), Harry sided with Ripley over his director, and Capra wrote to the Hollywood trades badmouthing Langdon, calling him a controlling, conceited egotist. In retaliation, Harry fired Capra, choosing to direct his films himself beginning with Three's a Crowd (1927). Results were mixed, to say the least. It was clear that Langdon needed Capra, and before long Harry was back making two-reel comedies for Educational Pictures. Though he was wallowing in B-movies when he died in 1944, in the following decades proper context for his work has led many to declare Langdon just as important as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd when it comes to silent comedy. As David Bowie once said, "It's terribly important that Harry Langdon, the silent comedian, cannot be taken on his own; you have to put him alongside that which went on around him, like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and Chaplin." (1926)

Upplagd i sortimentet: 18 februari, 2025