Silent but deadly
Harry Langdon time again. This time via The Forgotten, over at The Daily Notebook. Seems Richard Brody is right — Langdon was a talented director.
Harry Langdon time again. This time via The Forgotten, over at The Daily Notebook. Seems Richard Brody is right — Langdon was a talented director.
June 22, 2012 at 1:48 am
Love The Chaser. The entire sequence of Harry trying to kill himself after enduring the advances of various lecherous deliverymen is easily one of the highlights of silent comedy for me. The suicide note ending with ‘PS, Don’t trust the iceman!” always slays me. And the whole film is amazingly well-directed by Langdon, who really perfected his craft after Three’s A Crowd, which makes it a shame that his third film as a director, Heart Trouble, is apparently lost. I honestly don’t even mind the slapdash structure of The Chaser. It just adds to the overall strangeness.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Long Pants is also worth a look. There’s a particularly dark bit with Harry taking his intended bride into the woods to kill her that’s just as good as the suicide bit in The Chaser.
June 22, 2012 at 9:37 am
I seem to be experiencing Langdon’s oeuvre tail-end first. Look forward to Long Pants. Perhaps his films are underrated because people didn’t know how to appreciate the strangeness.