When watching this film, ignore the conformists (Langdon owed everything to the wonderful Frank Capra and, after breaking with the great man, his ego brought about his downfall) and ignore the "where are the larfs, then" brigade (I have discussed this lamentable - and equally conformist - tendency elsewhere. This is actually a very remarkable film.
It is easy enough to see why it met with a certain incomprehension on the part of the audience and the studio and why it failed in the box-office. It is really very very different, not merely from the expected comedy routines but from almost any US comedy of the period (although it has certain similarities with Chaplin's 1923 film A Woman of Paris (which also failed at the box-office for very similar reasons but which is, to my mind, a less good and certainly less radical film).
Forget expectations of a typical farcical comedy and this film has some wonderful things in it. First of all the extraordinary set(Tati-esque avant l'heure) which has (like its equivalent in Mon Oncle)a defining relationship with the character who inhabits it. Then the poignant (but not really sentimentalisd) symbol of the discarded doll, disturbing alter ego of the Langdon character, representing both him and the child he does not have.
Then the extraordinary piece of audience entrapment where one is led to believe he is preparing a baby's nappy (diaper for those in the US)when he is in fact making a pie. I notice some viewers imagine he IS making a pie in a nappy (which would be rather silly) but it is quite clear that this is not the case and that it must in fact be frozen dough hanging on the line, using the great outdoors as a kind of refrigerator. But that some viewers should still believe what THEY THINK THEY ARE SEEING shows just how effective the entrapment is (and this too put one in ind of Tati) but it also illustrates how difficult it is to defeat slapstick expectations (the whole point of the humour here) when you are playing to an audience that is geared up to expect nothing else..
Or the very surreal dream beginning with the manic face at the window and continuing with the strange boxing-contest which is the only point at which the film approaches anything like slapstick. In one of his best films, He Did and He Didn't 1916, Arbuckle also uses a dream-sequence to isolate slapstick from an otherwise serious (and rather dark)frame-story but there are nevertheless extended scenes of slapstick in the film. Here even this slapstick is curtailed and the standard expectations of the comic boxing-match defeated.
Then there is the striking indifference to conventional morality (both the women with whom the Langdon character is involved are married). And the superb ending that seems to sum up the bleak message of the film. All in all, a very innovative and remarkable film.
While the film is clearly a very personal one for Langdon, much of the darkness of the film is no doubt due to Arthur Ripley, the writer who had been with Langdon from the outset and, along with Sennett director Harry Edwards, was most responsible for the development of the Langdon character. Ripley had no doubt been responsible for the "black" element sin Long Pants (the more interesting of the two Capra-directed films) and his work became increasingly "noir" and increasingly experimental as he went along (in the acid shorts written for W. C. Fields and in his own final films noirs.
As with these Langdon films, Ripley's later work, though appreciated by the critics, failed to find success at the box-office. US studios and US audiences had, and continued to have, problems with "noir" material (see Aldrich's withering mockery of this in The Player) unless it was very clearly kept obeyed the conventional rules of "the film noir" itself in the strictly limited sense in which this was understood in the US. As late as 1950 US audiences were seemingly unable to appreciate a masterpiece like Laughton's magnificent Night of the Hunter.
The tragedy is not that Langdon should have made this film but that it should have gone unappreciated. Had Langdon been working within the more supportive European film industry, this and his other two films (The Chaser, sadly not a good film,and the lost Heat Trouble) might well have established him as an important director. Given US conformism (nothing has changed) and the merciless box-office politics of US cinema, they ruined his career. It was a blow from which he never recovered and he was obliged to embark on the difficult adventure of the talking pictures playing a complete imbecile (Which, although typically inarticulate, he is not in the least in Three's a Crowd) in a series of embarrassingly unfunny shorts for Hal Roach.
It is easy enough to see why it met with a certain incomprehension on the part of the audience and the studio and why it failed in the box-office. It is really very very different, not merely from the expected comedy routines but from almost any US comedy of the period (although it has certain similarities with Chaplin's 1923 film A Woman of Paris (which also failed at the box-office for very similar reasons but which is, to my mind, a less good and certainly less radical film).
Forget expectations of a typical farcical comedy and this film has some wonderful things in it. First of all the extraordinary set(Tati-esque avant l'heure) which has (like its equivalent in Mon Oncle)a defining relationship with the character who inhabits it. Then the poignant (but not really sentimentalisd) symbol of the discarded doll, disturbing alter ego of the Langdon character, representing both him and the child he does not have.
Then the extraordinary piece of audience entrapment where one is led to believe he is preparing a baby's nappy (diaper for those in the US)when he is in fact making a pie. I notice some viewers imagine he IS making a pie in a nappy (which would be rather silly) but it is quite clear that this is not the case and that it must in fact be frozen dough hanging on the line, using the great outdoors as a kind of refrigerator. But that some viewers should still believe what THEY THINK THEY ARE SEEING shows just how effective the entrapment is (and this too put one in ind of Tati) but it also illustrates how difficult it is to defeat slapstick expectations (the whole point of the humour here) when you are playing to an audience that is geared up to expect nothing else..
Or the very surreal dream beginning with the manic face at the window and continuing with the strange boxing-contest which is the only point at which the film approaches anything like slapstick. In one of his best films, He Did and He Didn't 1916, Arbuckle also uses a dream-sequence to isolate slapstick from an otherwise serious (and rather dark)frame-story but there are nevertheless extended scenes of slapstick in the film. Here even this slapstick is curtailed and the standard expectations of the comic boxing-match defeated.
Then there is the striking indifference to conventional morality (both the women with whom the Langdon character is involved are married). And the superb ending that seems to sum up the bleak message of the film. All in all, a very innovative and remarkable film.
While the film is clearly a very personal one for Langdon, much of the darkness of the film is no doubt due to Arthur Ripley, the writer who had been with Langdon from the outset and, along with Sennett director Harry Edwards, was most responsible for the development of the Langdon character. Ripley had no doubt been responsible for the "black" element sin Long Pants (the more interesting of the two Capra-directed films) and his work became increasingly "noir" and increasingly experimental as he went along (in the acid shorts written for W. C. Fields and in his own final films noirs.
As with these Langdon films, Ripley's later work, though appreciated by the critics, failed to find success at the box-office. US studios and US audiences had, and continued to have, problems with "noir" material (see Aldrich's withering mockery of this in The Player) unless it was very clearly kept obeyed the conventional rules of "the film noir" itself in the strictly limited sense in which this was understood in the US. As late as 1950 US audiences were seemingly unable to appreciate a masterpiece like Laughton's magnificent Night of the Hunter.
The tragedy is not that Langdon should have made this film but that it should have gone unappreciated. Had Langdon been working within the more supportive European film industry, this and his other two films (The Chaser, sadly not a good film,and the lost Heat Trouble) might well have established him as an important director. Given US conformism (nothing has changed) and the merciless box-office politics of US cinema, they ruined his career. It was a blow from which he never recovered and he was obliged to embark on the difficult adventure of the talking pictures playing a complete imbecile (Which, although typically inarticulate, he is not in the least in Three's a Crowd) in a series of embarrassingly unfunny shorts for Hal Roach.