Around the age of thirteen, I started getting interested in girls and in silent movies. I don't think there was a connection. But I was reading everything I could find about the era of silent film and especially the comedies. It was not easy to see such films until I began going to a wonderful place on Fairfax Avenue called The Silent Movie Theater. I wrote about that wonderful place here.
Almost everything I read about silent comedies told me that the four outstanding comedians of that era were Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. What I was able to see of the first three validated their presence on such a list but I wasn't able to see anything that convinced me of Langdon's worthiness. A half-dozen other comedians — especially Laurel and Hardy — made better silent comedies than the Langdon flicks that were available. I have since seen what critics said were his best films and I'm still not convinced.
Langdon certainly had the shortest stint at the top, box office-wise. All his best comedies were made in about four years and then things went off the rails. The great director Frank Capra — who wrote and/or directed some of those best films — claimed that the plunge was because Langdon had stopped working with the great director Frank Capra. Well, maybe.
Capra was a Guest of Honor at one of the first San Diego Cons — the one in 1974, the same one where I first met Charles Schulz. I had lunch with both men on different days and it just dawned on me that I should tell the story about My Lunch With Capra. I'll get to it soon. But over that lunch, I asked Mr. Capra about Langdon and from his point-of-view, Langdon was a man of modest talents who only produced great work when he did exactly as Frank Capra told him…and that was also true of Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Peter Falk, Cary Grant and everyone else who ever appeared in a Frank Capra motion picture. I was more than a little skeptical of Mr. Capra's assertions.
But Langdon did go rather rapidly from being a major motion picture star to being a minor one who also worked as a gagman on the films of others. Here's an early two-reel talkie he made for the Hal Roach studio in 1930 — a considerable comedown for a man who, a few years earlier had been making high-grossing feature films for his own company. This is one of eight shorts he made for Roach in a series that did not merit continuance beyond the eight. If you watch it, I think you'll see why…