Soldier Man (1926) User Reviews

A pretty good and rather long short comedy

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 20 August 2008]

This is a Harry Langdon short film made for Mack Sennett and is included with the "Harry Langdon: Lost and Found" four DVD set.

During most of the 1920s, Harry Langdon made two-reel shorts that were about 20 minutes in length. However, this film is over thirty--making it a long short film. Because of the length, he was able to create a more detailed and almost full-length style film.

The first portion is probably the best as you see that Harry is the only soldier in WWI who has no idea that the war had ended! When a farmer is using dynamite to blow up old stumps, Harry thinks the German army is after him. I really liked the scene where Harry thought the cow had been blown apart--it was very original. I really wish more time had been spent on this, as I found myself laughing quite a bit.

Eventually, his travels take him to a far-off European land where the worthless King Strudel is about to be kidnapped. But, like the story of "The Prisoner of Zenda", Harry is the spitting image of the king and the king's #1 man decides to have Harry pose as the monarch. The problem is that everyone seems to hate the king and the queen is even plotting to kill the guy. How Harry resolves all this is pretty cute.

While not great, this is a very good and polished silent comedy--and among Langdon's best.

A delightful spoof on The Prisoner of Zenda

[JohnHowardReid · 8/10 · 30 November 2017]

Harry Langdon (an American soldier, unaccounted for), Harry Langdon (King Strudel of Bomania), Natalie Kingston (the queen), Vernon Dent (Mustache), Frank Whitson (General von Snootzer).

Director: HARRY EDWARDS. Screenplay: Arthur Ripley, Frank Capra. Titles: A. H. Giebler. Photography: William Williams. Film editor: William Hornbeck. Special photography: Ernie Crockett. Production supervisor: John A. Waldron. Producer: Mack Sennett.

Copyright 28 April 1926 by Pathé Exchange, Inc. 30 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: After making his escape from a German POW camp on Armistice Day, an American soldier finds himself in Bomania. As it happens, he is an exact double for the king, a notorious tippler, who is kidnapped by revolutionaries.

COMMENT: A delightful spoof on The Prisoner of Zenda with Harry Langdon (of all people!) as both prisoner and impersonator. (Is this the only time in Langdon's silent career that he played a character role? He does it rather well too, proving that his range was actually wider than that of a mere baby-faced comic). However, despite the special photography credit, there are no scenes with both Langdons on screen at once. But you can't have everything!

True, I thought that some of the early humor with the exploding dynamite misfired but once we get into the Zenda plot, the comedy really picks up. I love the scene where Langdon minces in behind the courtiers and wonders what's going on. A parade or something? The extended eating joke is also played out most amusingly ("Do they ring a bell or blow a whistle for lunch?") and I really enjoyed his beautifully timed tussle with the suit of armor.

Langdon's glorious swan-dive from the throne into the arms of his palace attendants and the admirably zig-zag way he wanders off for the royal nap, keep us hoping for a return match which, alas, doesn't transpire, but there are three wonderful compensations for Strudel's absence. One, of course, is baby-faced Langdon himself. Two is Vernon Dent as the instigator of the ring-in. And three is the lovely Natalie Kingston as the queen who decides she loves to be insulted after all! (AVAILABLE on DVD through Grapevine: 7/10).

Worth fighting for

[hte-trasme · 9/10 · 7 December 2009]

A lot has been made of the similarities between the film comedy characters of Harry Langdon and Stan Laurel. While both uniquely and individually wonderful, one can see a pretty clear lineage. "Soldier Man" starts with an opening gag premise that wouldn't work very well for almost any other characters -- Harry is a soldier from World War One who has not realized years later that it is over -- which would be repeated years later for Laurel in "Block-Heads," a feature Langdon would co- wrote.

"Soldier Man" goes in a very different direction than "Block-Heads" will, though. Instead of being discovered and reunited with Oliver Hardy at on old soldiers' home, we get a wonderful gag sequence in which a series of coincidences and confusions allow Harry to think he is still fighting the war -- and being fought back at. These gags, involving some ingenious and grotesque bits with a scarecrow and a complex visual joke that has to do with a blown-up co that becomes pre-butchered meat, make great use, of course, of Harry Langdon's signature slow, confused reactions, but here, in a rarer occurrence even in Langdon's own shorts, the comedy is not just in these between-the-lines reactions that make up his performance. His character has really been developed to complete fruition here and that means that gags are now being written not just for generic comedians or to give Harry a chance to do his thing, but custom-tailored to the way his character behaves. It all feels right and works well. This new development makes itself felt also in the very funny and in-character title cards that Harry is given throughout the film.

Another sign of this is the fact that this short, while its premise would have fit into the twenty minutes of a standard two-reel short, is given three in which to develop. The producers knew that so much of the comedy could come between the parts written in the script from Harry's still and slow expressions.

In the second part of the film we move to a old standard trope, in which Harry resembles exactly the country's alcoholic king; he plays the king in just a few shots but impressively projects a very convincingly different alcoholic despot. In this part of the comedy the "plot" elements remain almost totally separate from anything Harry does. They remain fairly unobtrusive (though still they seems a little unnecessary), which allows us to follow the pure comedy of Harry Langdon attempting to be a king.

Of course, he doesn't understand a thing about how to do it. In some ways making Harry Langdon have to play king is a perfect idea because the decisiveness and power that a king is supposed to project are the exact opposite of the complete ineffectualness and uncertainly that define his character. So we can sit back and watch Harry at his best, unable to take his concentration away from a bowl of fruit, interacting with a suit of army he thinks is alive, jumping with fright at a wig that falls off a man's head, ordering a man beheaded because he thinks he is supposed to and then becoming horrified when he realizes what beheading is, and more.

The ending is of a kind that is often used in films (I won't reveal it for those who haven't watched it yet), and it almost always feels like a complete cop-out. Here, though, it is topped by such a sweet gag twist that all is forgiven.

This is Harry at his purely funniest, in material that is clearly and happily designed just for him.

Harry Just Doesn't Understand

[boblipton · 10/10 · 9 March 2005]

....well, anything. And everything. People are a constant mystery to him. Not that he's been paying attention, but still. People are strange things, and so are non-people. Harry can get into discussions with inanimate objects with as much personal satisfaction as with people -- more, I would imagine, since he has a chance of outarguing them. Not a certainty, of course....

Harry plays a World War One prisoner of war who escapes from the Germans on Armistice Day -- they were busy celebrating something and he took his opportunity. He wanders into Bomania -- wherever that may be, but it's all the same to Harry -- where he is an exact double for the King. So Harry plays a clueless Prisoner of Zenda.

There are some lovely gag sequences built into this short: Harry gets into an argument with a cow and blows it up into rib roasts -- sure to infuriate any PETA members in the neighborhood. He loses an argument with a suit of armor. Gorgeous Natalie Kingston plays the Queen and there is a very sweet-tempered happy ending.

Langdon's career was riding high at this point and he was about to make two excellent features: THE STRONG MAN and TRAMP TRAMP TRAMP. His screen persona, the elfin-faced naif, is not to everyone's taste and may not be to yours. Take a look at this top notch short subject and see if you like him.

The last man standing

[robert-temple-1 · 10/10 · 29 December 2012]

This is another hilarious Mack Sennett short film starring Harry Langdon, with story and titles by Frank Capra. The story begins amusingly: Harry is the last American soldier left behind in Europe at the end of World War I. He is still wandering around the former battlefield, dazed, with his helmet and gun, wondering where everybody is. He had been captured by the Germans and then escaped 'because they were all busy celebrating something' (i.e., the end of the War). Meanwhile, King Strudel the 13th of Bomania, is feeling threatened because of the fall of his cousin Wilhelm (the Kaiser). King Strudel is a drunken degenerate who is hated by his entire Court, and not least by his wife. He does have one redeeming feature, however, he is the twin of our hero, as both characters are played by Langdon. A scheming courtier kidnaps the king and conceals him, but a loyal courtier stumbles across Langdon in his uniform and realizes he can act as the double of the king. So Langdon becomes King Strudel in order to sign the Treaty of Peace which the real Strudel had refused to sign. Endless comic situations ensue, and this film is truly hilarious. The film is considerably longer than the usual 20 minutes for a short, but I did not time it, and its duration is not recorded on IMDb. One reviewer says it is over 30 minutes, and that is certainly true. Another Langdon gem!

uneven but promising comedy

[kekseksa · 8 August 2016]

The emergence of Harry Langdon in 1924 was an important moment in the history of comedy and the baby-faced comic would enjoy an immediate and phenomenal success (which, alas for Langdon, would also prove ephemeral). Unlike the other great comics of the silent era (Linder, Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd), Langdon was not really able to write his own material or mould his own distinctive character. In these early days, he was lucky in having an expert team behind him but, after some excellent shorts in 1924-1925 written (principally) by Arthur Ripley and directed mostly by Harry Edwards, they start to lose their rhythm (coinciding seemingly with the arrival in the writing-team of Frank Capra. This short has some good ideas but they are a bit hit-and-miss and the two parts of the story, the soldier who doesn't know the war has ended (the best part) and the parody of Rupert of Hentzau, do not fit together well and make the film a rather uneven pleasure.

With regard to the parody, The Priosner of Zenda (Hope's first Ruritanian novel) had been well filmed by Rex Ingram in 1922. The sequel Rupert of Hentzau had been filmed in 1923 (Selznick) but seems to have been a particularly bad film (I have not seen it and it may be lost). It had already been parodied (very feebly as Rupert of Hee Haw in 1924 by Stan Laurel). To judge from the parodies, it evidently emphasised the Ruritanian King's fondness for alcohol (not an important element in the book) which tended to render the story ridiculous as well as to providing a topical note during prohibition (which gets a specific mention in this Langdon film).

It is a better parody than Laurel's but most of the humour derives from the character's constant search for food (nothing to do with the parody as such and the only linking element between the two parts of the plot). The kissing scene is also parody, this time of a film of the same year, The Sea Beast, and works rather well. Millard Webb's The Sea Beast (a romanticised travesty of Melville's Moby Dick) was a huge hit and its most famous scene had the heroine, played by Dolores Costello, faint after being kissed by co-star (and real-life lover and future husband) John Barrymore, who plays Ahab. This film too attracted a good deal of attention from comics (the kiss and faint gag would recur periodically). The Sidney Smith film She Beast (1926 or 1927), where the hero has a domineering wife but dreams of sailing the seas with an all-female crew, is also a vague parody.

Animal-lovers will be glad to hear that Langdon does not blow up a cow, as stated by another reviewer; he merely thinks he has The cow has in fact long gone by the time the explosion occurs and the ribs come (proximately, at least) from an unattended basket of shopping.