Biography

Langdon first performed when he ran away from home at the age of 12-13 to join a travelling medicine show. In 1903 he scored a lasting success in vaudeville with an act called "Johnny's New Car" which he performed for twenty years. In 1923, he signed with Principal Pictures as a series star, but transferred to the Mack Sennett Studio when Mack Sennett bought the contract. Early in his film career, he had the good fortune to work regularly with the young Frank Capra. The two developed a unique character of an innocent man-child who found himself in dramatic and hazardous circumstances with only providence and good luck making him come out on top. This character clicked with the public and Langdon enjoyed a streak of artistic and commercial successes using it with Capra's direction. Unfortunately, he began to take the praise of his talent too seriously and broke with Capra so he could hog all the glory himself with his films. This proved to be a disastrous mistake as his first film "Three's a Crowd", a sickeningly sentimental film that plainly showed that he did not even approach the talent and skill of Capra which was needed to keep his character style viable. It has been also speculated the public was getting tired of Langdon's character, which contributed to Langdon's first solo film being an artistic and commercial failure. That film was the first in a series of bombs that ruined Langdon's career and relegated him to minor films from third string companies for the rest of his life.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Kenneth Chisholm < chisken@pop.eclec.com>

Langdon was 12 years old when he ran away to join the circus. Soon he was involved in medicine shows, circuses and Vaudeville where he spent the next 20 years developing an act called "Harry's New Car". With Vaudeville, he would play and perfect the act in town after tank town, year after year. By 1923, Langdon had been picked up by Mack Sennett and Sennett gave Langdon to the writers to develop something from his character. Luckily for everyone involved, director Harry Edwards and the writers Frank Capra and Arthur Ripley were able to create the perfect story lines for the pantomime of the baby faced 40 year old comic. His film style of comedy would consist of indecision and helplessness, and the two reel films that he made would make him a star. One of his best performances was as the henpecked husband who comes back after a spree with a buddy and hopes to tell his wife off in Saturday Afternoon (1926). In 1926, Harry left Sennett to form his own company, the Harry Langdon Corporation, which had a six picture deal with First National. Harry took Edwards, Capra, and Ripley with him to his new company and the first picture made was _Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926/I)_ which became a big hit. The girl in the picture was named Joan Crawford and Harry would be walking across the country to win her hand. The next two films The Strong Man (1926) and Long Pants (1927) were directed by Capra. With 3 big successful films, and an ego to match, Langdon fired Capra and put himself into the director's chair. The problem was that Langdon was as naive as his character about what made his character popular and how to film it. His next three films were disasters as to plot, character and editing and were, worst of all, not funny. With the end of his six film commitment came the end of his popularity and Langdon was soon bankrupt. In 1929, he would sign with Hal Roach to stage a comeback in sound, but after 8 unremarkable shorts, he would be fired. In 1932, he was making cheap two reelers which were no where near the quality that he made under Capra. In 1934, at age 50, langdon would sign with Columbia where he would stay for the next 10 years. At Columbia, he would work in shorts, most of which were rehashes of his earlier films. He would also work once more at the Hal Roach Studio where he became a writer for the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy. By this time, he was a much nicer person as the setbacks has deflated his ego years before. Attempts to team Langdon with other performers such as Charley Rogers were tried and then dropped. If anything, he was finding his place as a character actor in a number of Columbia shorts and Monogram features. The small sad man with the white baby face and the jacket that was too small would die from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1944 as a shadow of what might have been. Langdon had been married four times.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Tony Fontana < tony.fontana@spacebbs.com>

There was a fourth major silent movie comedian in the 1920s, who many feel ranks up there with Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, but who now is sadly forgotten. His name was Harry Langdon and he was born on June 15, 1884, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to a self-employed painter, William, and a Salvation Army volunteer, Lavinia. In his youth the stage-struck Harry hawked newspapers across the Missouri River in neighboring Omaha, Nebraska, to earn money to attend the theater and to stage his own tyro-theatricals. He soon began winning a succession of amateur contests in the area's theaters.

In his early teens Langdon joined Dr. Belcher's Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show and went on the road, his first professional gig. Langdon subsequently toured with the Gus Sun Minstrels and other medicine shows and small-time circuses, in which he was employed as a musician, a blackface minstrel, a gymnast, a tumbler and a trapeze artist.

Harry married fellow performer Rose Musolff in 1903, and the Langdons paired up on the vaudeville circuit, achieving fame with their "Johnny's New Car" trick-auto act. They toured the vaudeville circuits for the next 20 years, working their way up to the country's premier venues. As a solo act, still exploiting the automobile -theme that had made their fortune, Rose Langdon as "The Show Girl" popularized the early 20th-century ditty "In My Merry Oldsmobile." By 1906 the Langdons had expanded their act into a full-stage production, billed as "A Night on the Boulevard." It was the genesis of their subsequent three-part act "After the Ball" that played the vaudeville houses in the 1920s. Harry by then had become genuinely established as a show-business personality, playing in the Broadway musical "Jim Jam Jems." The revue, which played 105 performances between October 4, 1920, and New Year's Day, 1921, also featured Joe E. Brown, who went on to become a Top Ten box office star in the 1930s, and Frank Fay, the man who would create the role of Elwood P. Dowd in "Harvey" on Broadway and who was once married to Barbara Stanwyck. Langdon had made his Broadway debut in an 1899 revival of William Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale."

Flush with success, in 1923 Langdon decided to try his luck at motion pictures, entering into negotiations with Hollywood comedy producer Hal Roach. When Roach would not meet his demands, Langdon signed a contract with Sol Lesser's Principal Pictures. He first starred in two-reel comedies directed by Alfred J. Goulding, but in October of 1923 he was released by the financially troubled Principal. He was not unemployed for long, with Mack Sennett signing the baby-faced clown to a Keystone Studio contract a month later.

Sennett gave the seasoned vaudeville veteran a great deal of artistic freedom to develop his own style. He was assigned his own production team to make his shorts, of which Smile Please (1924) was his first. Featuring Langdon as a harassed photographer, it was, like the shorts that followed in his first year with Sennett, hobbled by its reliance on the worn-out Sennett style of bathing beauties, special effects and frantically paced sight gags. Langdon's peculiar genius as a performer did not materialize until The First 100 Years (1924) and The Luck o' the Foolish (1924), as the Langdon unit began to coalesce, a quickening that was accelerated when Harry Edwards took over as director with the latter film. The unit, which included screenwriter Arthur Ripley, slowed down the rhythm of Langdon's shorts and began focusing on Harry's character, a timid, naive soul who hesitated when confronting conflict. From then on Edwards directed all of Langdon's shorts at Sennett. In early 1925 Frank Capra began working with the unit as a gag writer, first credited on the short Plain Clothes (1925).

As Harry's career progressed at Sennett, his box-office success increased and the unit moved from two- to three-reelers. Langdon, determined to follow the example of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, then made his first feature-length comedy, His First Flame (1927). After serving a two-year apprenticeship, it was time to leave Sennett, as a star had been born.

Langdon signed a three-year contract with Sol Lesser's First National Pictures to annually produce two feature-length comedies at a fixed fee per film. His first comedy for First National, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), was made with members of his Sennett unit who stuck with him, including Harry Edwards and Ripley. It featured the child-man Harry as the ultimate manifestation of his naive persona, playing himself as his own baby. The film did well but ran over budget and Harry Edwards was sacked. For his next picture, The Strong Man (1926), Langdon hired Capra to direct. The movie, in which Harry as the weakling assistant of a vaudeville strong man wreaks havoc but gets the girl in the end, was a hit, but trouble was brewing among members of the Langdon company. During the production of his next picture, Long Pants (1927), Capra had a falling out with Langdon. Writer Ripley's dark sensibility did not mesh well with that of the more optimistic Capra, and Langdon usually sided with Ripley. The picture fell behind schedule and went over budget, and since Langdon was paid a fixed fee for each film, this represented a financial loss to his own Harry Langdon Corp. Stung by the financial setback, and desiring to further emulate the great Chaplin, Langdon made a fateful decision: He sacked Capra and decided to direct himself.

Langdon's next three movies for First National were failures. The two surviving films are dark and grim: the black comedy Three's a Crowd (1927), in which Harry's character "The Odd Fellow" loses everything he desires, and The Chaser (1928), which touched on the subject of suicide. It was the late years of the Jazz Age, a time of unprecedented prosperity and boundless bonhomie, and the critics--and more importantly the ticket-buying public--rejected Harry. In 1928 First National did not pick up his contract. Harry Langdon Corp. was bankrupt. To further add to Langdon's woes, the talkies made their debut while his career was going into a steep decline, rivaling the one that would soon overtake the stock market and put the Good Times of the 1920s to sleep, for good.

Langdon went back on the vaudeville circuit, but in 1929 he was hired by the Hal Roach Studios to make shorts. The talkies were not kind to Langdon, whose voice allegedly was damaged by a quack treating him for a childhood illness. In the talkies he typically spoke in falsetto, but his squeaky voice sometimes would break into a basso profondo on the soundtrack. Langdon's days as a star, already in eclipse, were over. After eight shorts, Roach fired him.

Though his fame, muted as it is, comes from his silent feature-films, most of Langdon's acting was during the Sound Era. After his career flameout he continued to appear in movies, both in lead and bit parts, for the majors and for "Poverty Rrow" studios, primarily Columbia and Monogram. He even worked for Hal Roach as a writer for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and subbed for Laurel in a 1939 film, Zenobia (1939), as Hardy's sidekick.

However sharply Harry Langdon had transitioned from major-studio stardom to Poverty Row has-been, his classic comedies and those he wrote for Laurel and Hardy continued to influence the knock-about comedians that came afterwards, notably The Three Stooges. The Stooges, in the time-honored tradition of comedy careerists, purloined some of the best bits of his films for their own hugely popular shorts (and even used Langdon's favorite director, Harry Edwards, in a few of them).

The 60-year-old, four-times-married, thrice-divorced Langdon died of a cerebral hemorrhage while working at the studio three days before Christmas in 1944, a full generation before the rediscovery and re-appreciation of the silent-era clowns Keaton and Lloyd. There has been a renewal of interest in Langdon as his great silent comedies, including those directed by Capra, have come out on video, but his reputation does not come near matching that of Keaton or Lloyd, let alone Chaplin.

However, The Sad Clown Harry is still remembered by aficionados of silent comedy, if not rightly honored as the fourth greatest comedian of his age. On the positive side, the shunning of which darkened Langdon's star, his hometown of Council Bluffs celebrated Harry Langdon Day in 1997, and dedicated Harry Langdon Boulevard in 1999, honoring one of its most distinguished, if not honored, sons.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)