Three's a Crowd (1927) User Reviews

Misjudged

[vox-sane · 6/10 · 23 July 2008]

Spoilers below! I describe the entire film!

Harry Langdon was one of the great silent comics. He arrived later than Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, following twenty years of success in Vaudeville. His act earned many fans -- including Harold Lloyd, who recommended that his friend and producer, Hal Roach, sign Langdon to a film contract.

In the end, Roach didn't sign Langdon. The successful comic took other bids, and Langdon began his movie career elsewhere.

Over a series of shorts, Langdon gradually honed his movie character. He looked young for his age and he used heavy white make-up to provide himself with a child-like appearance. He gradually developed more child-like mannerisms, until he became like a child in a man's body.

Unfortunately, Langdon's film persona did not prove nearly so elastic as personas of his peers. Keaton's "stone face" (unsmiling but not inexpressive) and Lloyd's bespectacled boy next door fit on almost any rung of the social ladder. They played rich and poor, city and urban alike (see Keaton's historical comedy "The General" and Lloyd's pastoral "The Kid Brother", both of which came out the same year as "Three's a Crowd.")

Langdon's childish character fit nicely in short films; but after a few notable feature films ("The Strong Man" and "Tramp Tramp Tramp"), his finely-honed character's bag of tricks was running low.

With two good films behind him that played to audience expectations in their admirable presentation of his film persona, Langdon may have felt compelled to make his character explore darker and more uncertain regions.

His next feature, "Long Pants", was about an aspiring womanizer who takes the local girl who loves him out in the woods to shoot her to freely pursue the drug-smuggling vamp he lusts for. The movie is extremely funny, though in places Langdon does show his ability to milk a joke too far.

Langdon followed "Long Pants" with his directorial debut, "Three's a Crowd" (Hereinafter "TAC"). So many reviewers have focused on what "TAC" is not, they've done a disservice to what "TAC" is.

**SPOILER ALERT** Here's the movie in a nutshell: Harry is a poor chap working for a low-rent moving company. Though he wants a family, Harry doesn't know how to get one. The film introduces Harry in an amusing vignette of gags that builds to a great set-piece of Harry hanging by a rug from a trap door beneath a very high apartment. In keeping with his character, Harry cannot comprehend the physics of his situation. He keeps climbing up the rug and opening the trap door; and every time the trap door opens, more of the rug slides out and Harry comes closer to falling. It's a good sequence and the image of Langdon hanging by a rug should be iconic.

With Harry's character set up, the weather turns bitter. A woman wandering away from an alcoholic husband is lost in the snow. Harry finds her when she collapses and puts her to bed. When he discovers she's about to have a baby, he rushes out and rustles up every doctor and midwife in town. When the baby is born, Harry believes he has discovered an instant family.

Then he finds a picture of the woman's husband. He's very handsome, and Harry starts to beat the picture up. Having consulted a palmist, Harry is persuaded that he deserves this family and the woman will come to love him.

Though the term "pathos" is overused for the movie, Langdon continues to build his gag sequences -- such as baking a peach pie in a diaper. Langdon always had great eye movements, and his look when he discovers this mistake is a classic moment.

Harry climbs into a crib with the baby and rocks it to sleep -- and himself with it. While he sleeps, Harry dreams that the woman's husband arrives like a stereotypical silent-movie villain to steal Harry's family away. Harry tries to stop him, and they two wind up in a boxing match for possession of the family. After a set-up about a growing boxing glove, Harry loses the bout almost immediately.

When he wakes up, the husband does arrive to take his family home. He's turned over a new leaf. He shakes Harry's hand for caring for his family, then he takes his wife and child away in a fine automobile (circa 1927). Harry has their gratitude and their promise of a reward and continued friendship for all he's done. But Harry, selfishly, doesn't want to see his instant family taken from him.

Harry wanders out into the street to the Palmist's shop. He's about to throw his trademark brick through the storefront window, but he tosses it away instead -- knocking loose a huge, metal drum, which crashes through the Palmist's shop, utterly destroying it. So the movie ends

**END SPOILER**

Though some of the direction is rough, the film has nice moments, as when Harry blows out a kerosene lamp -- and all the street-lamps fade, too. And "Three's a Crowd" lacks any sequence with an overlong milking of a joke, as in "Long Pants" when Langdon tried to get a ventriloquist's dummy to chase him.

"TAC" wasn't the instant classic Langdon wanted. It failed at the box office. And unlike other failures in their day (Keaton's "The General" -- or even "Citizen Kane") critical opinion has not changed in more than 80 years since the film's release. He did remain true to the character he had developed over the years; but perhaps he strayed too far from situations to which his audience were conditioned. "TAC" is worth seeing as part of the continuing development of an artist looking for new ways to peddle his wares. It needs to be accepted on its own uncompromising terms, though it should be seen after his shorts and his other features.

Likeable, if not a must-see

[I_Ailurophile · 7/10 · 12 July 2022]

Even at their most unremarkable, there's generally something irrepressibly charming about silent films, and in some capacities this one is a good example. The sense of humor and entertainment is sometimes very simple and even quaint, more passive amusement than robust fun. We see passing reflections of notions like abusive labor practices or the necessary resourcefulness of the working class, showing that even almost 100 years later, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And sometimes we see elements of early film-making, or attempts at gags, that just haven't aged well, such as the use of blackface, which even at its most "innocent" is rather distasteful unless the context is emphatic mockery of the concept. Yet for all in 'Three's a crowd' that doesn't necessarily immediately inspire, there's also a lot to enjoy. It's not the most essential film of the 1920s, but this is still a pretty good time.

Star and director Harry Langdon sometimes gets mentioned alongside silent luminaries like Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, and at his best one can see why. He has a propensity for physical comedy, stunts, and sacrificing his body that lends to a great deal of humor, in addition to the sight gags and situational comedy that rounds out any given picture. One sees glimmers of this intelligence in 'Three's a crowd,' and it's duly enjoyable. Would that it were applied more consistently, or that the writing, direction, and sequencing were tighter and more mindful to better facilitate the storytelling and merriment. This is hardly to say that this particular feature is bad - only, this would seem to be Langdon's first outing as a director, and broadly speaking it kind of shows. Case in point - though the narrative is complete, the ending mostly just kind of peters out, and the last impression we have of the movie is arguably at one of its weakest points.

Though it's no one's fault, it's also worth noting the apparent deterioration over time of the surviving print before it was digitized. There are a few considerable stretches in which the image quality is so heavily degraded that the visual presentation is all but entirely nullified - a deeply unfortunate reality of watching pictures from so long ago. Still, through every shortcoming of the movie as it was and the movie as we see it, there was no intent here except light-hearted entertainment. Save for that it is a surviving title of the earliest years of cinema, there's nothing about 'Three's a crowd' that stands out so much as to demand viewership, but it fairly succeeds in its modest goal, and anyone who appreciates older films will surely find this to their liking, too. Moreover, one can only admire the hard work that went into the production, including set design and decoration, hair and makeup, and even the basic orchestration of scenes that are filled with silliness of one type or another. The climax is notably imaginative and done well, including some sharp editing. Everyone involved put in fine work to make this a reality, and though it may not get name-dropped the way some of its brethren do, or deserve to, Langdon's directorial debut is nevertheless suitably enjoyable.

If you're not already a fan of the silent era then there won't be anything here to change your mind. For those enamored of film history, however, this is satisfying enough and worthwhile if you come across it. Likeable if not a must-see, 'Three's a crowd' is a decent way to pass an hour.

Langdon's Directs First Movie After Capra Leaves

[springfieldrental · 7/10 · 1 April 2022]

Langdon decided to direct his next film all by himself after Frank Capra left. Adapting August 1927's "Three's A Crowd" from another Arthur Ripley story, the film is about a wife, Gladys (Gladys McConnell), along with her baby, who leaves her husband because of his excessive drinking. Langdon serves as a simpleton living in a shoddy one-room apartment who dreams of being a father to a family. He discovers a passed out Gladys and the baby in a raging blizzard and brings them to his place. A fortune teller Harry approaches sees the husband not looking for her. Langdon dreams of Gladys wanting to remain with him while he enters a boxing match to fight the imaginary ex.

Once again, the Langdon movie was didn't spark any magic at the box office. The public couldn't quite wrap its hands around the deadpan look of a puerile adult exhibiting both childish antics with grown-up ambitions. Modern critics today are split assessing "Three's A Crowd," with reviewer Alfred Eaker claiming, "The bleakness of Three's a Crowd is worthy of Beckett, rivals the best of Chaplin, and stands apart as THE unjustly maligned, hopelessly misunderstood, dark horse masterpiece of silent cinema. Fans of silent comedy have often expressed disappointment in this film, citing that it is simply not funny. It is not a comedy, but the purest expression of Langdon's standout art, which refuses to be pigeonholed."

Although Langdon's popularity never equaled his peak in 1926, the comedian continued appearing in films well into the 1940s, albeit in low-budget productions. He worked on set almost right up to his death of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 22, 1944 at the age of 60.

Big ambitions, small results

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 8 May 2002]

A child-like man lives alone in an old house, in a slum neighbourhood that seems to be otherwise deserted. One night, in a snowstorm, he finds a young woman and her baby. He brings them home to his hovel, and takes responsibility for the woman and her child. The child-like man falls in love with the woman, and he imagines himself as her husband and the baby's father. But then the baby's real father shows up...

That's the plot of "Three's a Crowd", starring Harry Langdon in an "auteur" film that he also produced and directed. Langdon is traditionally considered one of the four great comedians of the silent screen, a few paces behind Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Unlike those three comedy geniuses, Langdon never really understood the character he played on screen, even though he had created this character in vaudeville. Langdon played an extremely infantile man, a gigantic innocent baby who was nonetheless capable of adult passions whenever he met a pretty girl. Harry Langdon's best work was in movies written and directed by people who understood Langdon's baby-man character better than Langdon himself: most notably Harry Edwards, Arthur Ripley and Frank Capra. (Capra got his comedy training in Langdon's slapstick comedies.) After these men helped Harry Langdon achieve stardom and box-office success, Langdon got a big head and decided that - like Chaplin, whom Langdon envied to the point of obsession - he could make all the decisions himself, sharing credit with nobody.

"Three's a Crowd" is the unfortunate result of Langdon's ego trip. Based on the success of his previous films directed by Edwards and Capra, Langdon was able to get sizeable financial backing for "Three's a Crowd", his first attempt to be his own producer and director. Unfortunately, Langdon squandered most of his production budget before filming started. His obsession with Chaplin compelled Langdon to fill "Three's a Crowd" with lots of Chaplinesque pathos ... except that it's merely pathetic. This movie is meant to be a comedy, but it tries hard to be a tear-jerker too, and it falls between two genres. A "gag" sequence involving the long flight of stairs outside Harry's house just isn't funny at all.

There are a couple of good laughs in this movie, notably in a dream sequence involving a boxing match between Langdon and the baby's father. The exterior sets in the slum neighbourhood are impressive (except for the street-lamps), and the snowstorms look more realistic than usual for a silent film. But the laughs are very far apart.

Kevin Brownlow's excellent book about silent films, "The Parade's Gone By", describes one scene of pathos in this movie. Late at night, the woman's husband has arrived to take her home with their child. Faithful Harry picks up his lantern and escorts them down the long flight of stairs into the dark street. After the man drives away with his wife and child, Harry stands alone in the street with his lantern. Slowly, sadly, he blows out his lantern ... and, behind him, all the street-lamps go out. The way Brownlow describes this scene, it sounds a masterpiece of pathos and tragedy. Intrigued by Brownlow's description, I sought out this film and I eagerly awaited the scene with the street-lamps. What a disappointment: Langdon directs and performs this scene with no energy at all. It isn't tragic, and it isn't funny. It's just inept. Even the street-lamps look like phony props.

Long before Jerry Lewis, Harry Langdon was the first comedian to wreck his own career with his overgrown ego. "Three's a Crowd" could have been a silent-film masterpiece like "Sunrise" ... instead, it's a terribly disappointing failure, with just enough style and humour to sharpen the disappointment by reminding us of what this movie COULD have been.

Weird and flawed, but with a quirky charm of its own

[MissSimonetta · 7/10 · 23 November 2021]

THREE'S A CROWD feels like Harry Langdon's answer to THE KID. It involves a poor man taking in a woman and her baby during the dead of winter. While the film lacks the grace of THE KID and the editing is borderline atrocious, the actual acting and story are not so terrible. The ending in particular is quite emotional and dark, yet it isn't bleak or nihilistic.

How Not to Make a Silent Comedy, in several uneasy lessons

[wmorrow59 · 4/10 · 24 May 2007]

Three's a Crowd is one of those famous silent comedies -- or is "notorious" the better word? -- that has been difficult to find in any format suitable for home viewing, and hardly ever gets any public screenings. It's well known to silent comedy buffs mainly because it proved to be a career killer for its producer/director/star, Harry Langdon. Although the production values appear to be rather modest, this brief feature cost a lot of money to make, mainly because of poor planning and extensive re-takes. When it flopped at the box office Langdon never recovered his footing. His earlier features benefited from the writing and directorial skills of Harry Edwards, Arthur Ripley and Frank Capra, but by the time Three's a Crowd went into production only Ripley remained. The resulting product suggests that Langdon took on more than he could manage, and couldn't handle the demands of properly crafting a feature-length film to suit his eccentric screen persona.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the basic premise, although in outline the plot may sound a bit sticky: oddball loner Harry adopts a young woman on the run from her dissolute boyfriend, and when she gives birth he acts as caretaker for both mother and child. When the boyfriend (now suitably reformed) shows up, however, the two young lovers reconcile and depart with their child, leaving Harry alone and forlorn. With a story like that any comedian is going to need some strong laugh sequences to avoid a descent into bathos, but therein lies the biggest single problem with this film, and it's a cardinal sin for any comedy: it just isn't very funny. Gags as such are few and far between. Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd knew how to develop gag sequences with a strong hook, then build momentum to a big climax, but that never happens in Three's a Crowd. There are occasional, strange semi-gags that sort of erupt and then sputter out, often concluding on an anticlimactic note, and other bits that aren't really gags at all, just oddities. For example: after waking up in the morning Harry goes to a cabinet, takes out a kerosene lamp that has apparently been burning all night, blows it out, places it back in the cabinet and shuts the door. It's a strange moment, but that's all it is. Later, he shows up at work with a lunch pail, opens it, and reveals a cup of hot coffee already poured and sitting neatly in a saucer. Another odd moment, but not what you'd call a belly laugh.

A major problem from the opening scene onward is the director's erratic grasp of timing. There are seemingly endless shots of the star staring blankly, blinking, and puttering around to little effect, or doing the same things repeatedly, such as trying to amuse the baby with funny faces, over and over and over. On top of that, when preview screenings indicated that the film was in trouble Langdon re-cut and re-edited so extensively that certain plot points make no sense. (A sub-plot involving a carrier pigeon who delivers a love letter is confusing because footage is missing, however.) Another problem: in Langdon's earlier features Harry was pitted against strong opponents such as Vernon Dent and Gertrude Astor, but here the supporting players aren't especially colorful and don't provide much conflict. Aside from our lead comic, the strongest impression, curiously enough, is made by the set: a garret apartment at the top of an impressively long and rickety stairway that leads up the side of a building and looks like something out of a German Expressionist melodrama. It's not exactly funny, but it sure is striking. Aside from the set, the most memorable element is a dream sequence that occurs towards the end. In this bit Harry imagines himself as a boxer, complete with absurdly over-sized glove, defending his household from an interloper, i.e. the baby's father. It's an interesting scene and stands as the highlight, but even this sequence lacks punch (so to speak) and, instead of building to a strong climax, dwindles away.

Langdon's defenders assert that he was a gifted director, but his real problem was that he lacked the ability to produce his own films; i.e., to keep costs under control. The latter point may well be correct, but there is little evidence of directorial skill on display here. A quirky, offbeat sensibility most certainly, but no sense of proportion or control. Silent comedy buffs interested in Langdon's meteoric rise and fall will definitely want to see Three's a Crowd, but although it offers occasional worthwhile moments and the odd chuckle or two, the experience is ultimately a harrowing one. This isn't a comedy so much as a Post Mortem examination of what killed Langdon's career, and a textbook example of how ego can overwhelm talent.

A Success As A Langdon Film, If Not A Crowd Pleaser

[boblipton · 7/10 · 19 August 2023]

Harry Langdon dreams of having a wife and child. When pregnant Gladys McConnell runs away from her husband, Cornelius Keefe, in the hope and expectation that this will let him reconcile with his father, she collapses in front of Harry, seemingly giving im everything he hopes for.

Of course, he doesn't know quite what to do with anything, which is half of his comedy; the other half is the slapstick that goes on, not on the screen -- although there's a fine final gag to this movie that works quite well -- but behind his eyes. We get a glimpse of what goes on in his head in a dream sequence in which Keefe returns for Miss McConnell and the baby. It is as disastrous as anything the audience might imagine.

This was the third movie on Langdon's First National contract. The previous two had been successful for First National, not so much for Harry when they went over budget. Caught between disagreements on his staff, he fired Frank Capra as director, and did the directing himself. You can argue that this made it a much better Langdon movie, and I agree. I liked it a lot. It also made it less popular with the contemporary audiences.

The copy I looked at was in pretty good shape, although there were spots of outgassing from the film it was pulled from on two occasions.

It's even worse than Hollywood legend would have you believe!

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 23 November 2008]

When silent comedian Harry Langdon foolishly decided that he could be the next Chaplin by directing himself in his films (firing brilliant people like Frank Capra in the process), his career went into the toilet at an unprecedented speed. After lovely films like LONG PANTS and THE STRONG MAN, his three self-directed efforts were critical and financial failures and led to Harry lingering in Hollywood in 3rd rate comedy shorts that were a shadow of his glory from 1924-1928. However, eighty years later, fans of Langdon are left to wonder if the three disastrous self-directed films from 1927-1928 are really that bad or were the fans just fickle or foolish to dismiss his genius? Fortunately for the curious, two of the three films in question do exist and are available on DVD. I just watched both of them and think that the truth isn't as bad as legend would have it BUT the films are far from genius.

As for his second self-directed feature, THE CHASER, it's actually a pretty good film. While it isn't up to the standards of the Frank Capra-directed films, it's not bad and has enough good about it that fans of silent comedy and Langdon will enjoy it. As for his first, THREE'S A CROWD, I actually was surprised that it was even worse than I'd anticipated and can easily see how it left audiences flat and confused.

THREE'S A CROWD is much more plot-driven than other silent comedies. While there are a few small laughs, the plot is much more important and Langdon never really seemed to consider if the film would be funny. Instead, he tried very hard to make his character poignant, touching and tragic. However, this much pathos really made this film rather repugnant since it was so unfunny and tried way too hard to inject maudlin elements into the film. Despite only being 62 minutes long, the film seemed very, very long as the plot seemed to drag without jokes. While some other silent comedies did use pathos (the most obvious example is Chaplin's THE CIRCUS), none I have seen did to the degree this one did nor did they seem to eschew laughs like THREE'S A CROWD. It was almost like Langdon said to himself that with such a touching plot, injecting humor into the film would be like sacrilege.

As for the plot, Harry is somewhat like he usually is in many other films--like a child in an adult body. However, here he is even more asexual than he was in LONG PANTS as there appears to be no possibility that this man-child will ever have a wife and child. However, into this lonely existence comes a dying woman in the snow. He manages to rescue her and save her life--and soon she gives birth to a son ( a son for the asexual Harry). Harry is thrilled, as he seems to now have his dream. However, before long, her repentant husband returns and takes the child and wife--leaving Harry alone and the audience either depressed or angry because there was barely a laugh in the entire movie.

Apart from nice camera work (that is occasionally obscured by a print that is seriously degraded in some places), the film is a total bust. Unfunny and unappealing--if the third of these self-directed films (HEART TROUBLE) was anything like THREE'S A CROWD then I can see why he fell out of favor with the public. I sure would love it if they discovered this film sometime soon and released it.

It Could Still Be Saved

[frankebe · 8/10 · 27 December 2010]

There are really only two problems with Three's A Crowd, and one has nothing to do with the film: (1) the editing is often a problem (this can be fixed), and (2) it needs insightful and properly-synced music (this can also be fixed).

It seems to me that final editing was never actually done on the film. It was re-cut and then quickly released. I maintain that with refined editing to fix the "matching shots" that do not match (ex: the "Husband" gets out of bed twice), to cut down some of the sequences that go on too long (climbing up the rug, preparing the diaper for the rolling pin), and to eliminate some of the unnecessary and repetitious shots (such as of the 'goodbye note', and Gladys at the boxing ring), and cut out the entire Adventures-of-a-Doll sequence (which is damaged beyond repair anyway), an effective film results that flows along seamlessly with one exception—the pigeon. I would NOT cut down the Harry-Langdon-static-shots, which are the essence of Harry Langdon. I would, however, cut some of the unnecessary business that stretch out certain scenes too long (some of waiting-at-the-door-with-the-toys shots, people milling around inside the shack after the baby is born, repetitious business during the diaper scene, pretending to spank the baby, etc.).

After making these editing refinements, if some enterprising film-school Harry Langdon nut could find a Langdon impersonator and film the missing section where Harry sees Gladys at a distance (through his toy telescope), and sends off his pitiful love letter with his pet pigeon (who then just drops down to the window below, where his boss's wife finds it), I swear that would make this a perfect movie.

You might not like the story, but there are a whole lot of depressing films out there that have received awards; and in this case, the ending is NOT so bleak as some insist: there is a strong ray of hope at the end. Gladys tells Harry that she and her husband hope to show their gratitude. When the husband's father sees that his daughter-in-law and grandchild were saved from an icy death by good-hearted Harry, he will surely hire him as a handy man!

This is a beautiful film, engaging and haunting. The cinematography is gorgeous (ex: the horses snorting along in the first snow-fall of the year). All the characters are ultimately sympathetic, and unlike the opinion of 50% of those who have seen this movie, I find Langdon very funny; not only that, but I find his character immediately and constantly mesmerizing. The movie only needs a little refined editing at the least (and an added scene at most), and a sensitive soundtrack that is actually synchronized to the action (unlike the organ track currently on the Kino release of the movie, which is sensitive, but not well-synchronized to the picture).

As Bad as I'd Heard!

[silentmoviefan · 2/10 · 16 October 2012]

This is one film I had heard nothing whatsoever good about. Tonight I watched it myself and saw why. In a nutshell, Harry Langdon rescues a girl from the snow, takes care of her, gets people to help her deliver the child, takes care of her, the husband (the fact about that gentleman being her husband is not mentioned until close to the end) finds her and takes her home and Harry is left with nothing. Maybe that's how these things work and maybe that's how these things should work, but it left me with a rather hollow feeling. Harry Langdon I'd heard of and Cornelius Keefe I'd heard of, but Gladys McDonnell? Who is SHE? There were plenty of better-known, nice-looking actresses around, but I guess they didn't want to work on this picture. Harry's being left with nothing is not the end. There's some slapstick that occurs, but he's still left with nothing. There is some nitrate deterioration, which completely wipes out a scene. That's just the way that goes, too. This may sound cruel, but...this is one film that I wish had completely deteriorated. The world would not have missed it!

Three's the Charm

[hte-trasme · 9/10 · 26 July 2010]

It's been said, and rightly I think, that there is often but a thin line between comedy and tragedy. In this feature film, the first in which the by-then famous comedian Harry Langdon had the opportunity to direct himself, the creator of the work takes several quite daring steps that end up rather provocatively blurring or crossing that line.

Langdon was very popular when this film was released, having starred in a series of pictures that in several ways bravely flew in the face of what audiences had known as screen comedy up till then, and changed the work of his colleagues by changing the context of their work at the same time. Simultaneously, they were all extremely funny. Langdon's comedy grew more and more the antithesis of the Mack Sennett style frenetic slapstick that had been in favor, and grew more and more abstract and focused on Harry's stillness, confusedness, innocence, and inability to act in the face of an often cruel, senseless, and buffudling world. "Three's a Crowd" is enough proof for me that these influences that made the comedy of Langdon unique were Langdon's own, as they are taken here to sometimes shockingly great lengths.

"Three's a Crowd" is funny in many places, but even these places are equally poignant. In the end, the film is unforgettable, bleak, sad, whimsical, and amusing, but not something one can honestly characterize as an out-and-out comedy. That's why I think it has been seen by some as a failure over the years. It might not be an uproarious comedy, but it's not an effective horror movie either because it doesn't go for that. But to audiences for whom Harry Langdon had been the unconventional star of laugh-out-loud films before, and for whom previous blends of comedy with serious artistic intent had been conventionally artistically coherent works like those very worthy and very different films of Chaplin, it must have been difficult to swallow.

Langdon started as a stage performer, and spent years there before ever appearing in a film. This this film, it almost seems that he has created a kind of proto-Theatre of the Absurd within a silent film. The characters are even credited as One, Two, and Three, in a reference to the title but also a reflection on the universality and anonymity. Never to such a great extent has the world been formed around him to drive home his powerlessness and its senselessness. He works for a boss who keeps him on the job until past midnight, expects him to wake at five, and will spend five hours yelling at him to get up if need be. The quirky contraptions he creates to navigate his own simple understanding around the requirements of his life are amusing and equally pitiable in their necessity or futility.

Harry lives in a world where those around him make as little sense as the speaking characters in "The Bald Soprano" and where he has as little power as Didi or Gogo in "Waiting for Godot." It is sad as much as funny when he tosses his found doll in imitation of his boss' tossing his son, and I think his eventual tragedy is that he allows himself to feel like the lover of Gladys and the father of her child in a world where the only rule is that he can intentionally cause nothing to happen.

He's alone in the world in his hovel-like room; the ridiculously long, collapsing stairs to it are outside adjoining the building even though they would make more sense in it (the stairs are, I think, intentionally repeated past the point of laughter, till they become more of a motif and drive home their implications through that very repetition). When help does come from outside for him, it is so confusing and such as cacophony -- as in the gaggle of doctors who appear to help with the baby -- that it is no help at all. It's a world Harry can only attempt to make sense of with the help of a fortune teller, and that help is completely misguided.

That's a bleak, sad message for on ostensible comedy, and Langdon makes it come through while staying true to the same character. That character is the centre of everything here, as he should be, since the world here circles around him in its chaos. Gladys and the baby are not so much characters as events in Harry's life. They appear like a miracle from the heavens, disappear as suddenly, and are moved by the forces of a love affair that is entirely beyond Harry's control or even understanding.

The final scene is wonderfully appropriate and brings the conceit of the film home. Harry struggles mightily to bring himself to throw a brick through the window of the palm-reader who lied to him, but he can't do it. He tosses the brick away, and that, by chance, sends an enormous roller through the whole shop. Fortune sent him triumph that time, but it might just as easily have sent the brick bouncing back from something at his head.

Langdon's masterpiece

[kekseksa · 13 December 2016]

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.

Simply Put, Langdon's Masterpiece

[Chesterfield_Invincible · 10/10 · 8 July 2008]

Contrary to many nay-sayers, and that includes quite a few noted film historians, "Three's A Crowd", Harry Langdon's first directorial effort, is a hidden masterpiece. Now in full control of his screen character, Langdon attempts to take it in a new direction in this stunningly-photographed (kudos to Frank Evans and Elgin Lessley), UFA-like tragicomedy about loneliness and desperation (indeed, at times it looks as if it could have been filmed in Germany).

Unfourtunately, the public was not ready to accept Langdon at this level, and left him hanging. It can be safe to assume that had Langdon made his cinematic debut in "Three's A Crowd", he would have moved ahead of Lloyd in his place among "Comedy's Big Four", possibly as co-equal with Keaton.

So, whether you are a Langdon buff or not, "Three's A Crowd" should be watched on its own merits. At the same time, it stands as a sad harbinger of what could have been.

Weird and unique

[jellopuke · 8/10 · 14 May 2023]

A man who longs for a wife and child finds a pregnant woman on his doorstep, helps her back to health, only for her husband to show up.

For ages this movie was maligned because of Frank Capra's comments about Langdon that may or may not be true. What is true is that this is NOT a typical silent movie and goes into weird places and severe pathos. Anyone that claimed Langdon didn't understand his own character is wrong, it's all here, he just wanted it to be more than simply silly situations, but into an almost existential, bleakness that was totally not of the time. This movie is harsh and brutal, occasionally fully, always weird, and deserving of rediscovery. But if you only know silent comedy as slapstick, chases, and fast moving craziness, you will probably HATE this because it is the total opposite. Slow, full of long, lingering takes, and only a few big gags, it's more like a morose bitter comedy than a laugh riot. I think it's totally misunderstood and needs to be re-evaluated.

Langdon's Competent Answer to THE KID

[mbanak · 9/10 · 30 October 2017]

I don't get this. I see a masterpiece. So many others find fault. Langdon's gem is cutting-edge, funny, sentimental and refreshing. The gags and the story line are way better than Chaplin's The Kid. There are so many clever touches. I am sincerely puzzled by the mob-rule rejection of this fine work.

Let me step back and first say that, prior to this film, it looked to me like Chaplin and Lloyd were borrowing from Langdon. Example: The blind-girl story was worked by Langdon (The Strong Man) before City Lights. This film, Three's a Crowd, has a boxing scene BEFORE City Lights. We learn from Chaplin's history that he experimented with a Dream Sequence for City Lights, just as Langdon gives us here, years ahead of Chaplin. And it is very funny. Some of Langdon's gestures, in the face of disappointment, are mirrored by Chaplin 4 years later with City Lights.

At last, in Three's a Crowd, we see Langdon snatching an idea from Chaplin. The poverty-row setting. The needy child. There is an approximate borrowing of The Kid, here, but with a relationship developing with the mom as well. Instead of the over-bearing persecution complex drummed up by Chaplin for the mom, Harry simply takes her in (with a baby) and nurtures them both with joy.

Langdon continues to amaze me with his pantomime skills. There seems to be a bottomless well of expressions in this guy's tank.

I suppose a warning is in order. The character he plays is pretty lonesome, and he drifts towards connecting with two married women as the plot unfolds. I consider this an adult theme. Having said that, I urge the viewer to get a good copy of this masterpiece, as there is at least one print out there with badly damaged footage.