The Chaser (1928) watch online HD

It seems very de rigueur to hate "The Chaser", so I went into this with expectations suitably lowered. Plus, while I loved Langdon's "The Strong Man", "Tramp Tramp Tramp" had suffered from long stretches of not being funny at all, so my trepidation towards Langdon features was quite high. Nevertheless, "The Chaser" sounded so fascinating from other reviews that I had a morbid curiosity to see it.

Perhaps I have a twisted sense of humour, but I thought the first two-thirds of the film were great. There are some fabulous routines here: the sequence at the start with the phone, the section where Harry can't get away from the business end of his wife's revolver, and the charming routine where a nonplussed Harry tries to get his chicken to lay an egg for his wife's breakfast.

I found the bits where the tradesmen keep mistaking the obviously-not-female Harry for a housewife very funny, which built into a traditional 1-2-3 comedic structure with classic twist payoff. The suicide scene is acted brilliantly by Langdon, as Harry alternates between his determination to do away with himself and his fear of pain and death. The legendary shot of Harry lying on the floor waiting to die didn't seem too long at all - in fact, given that Langdon's most famous routines are praised precisely because of his lack of action, it seems odd to criticize this gag for exactly the same thing. On the other hand, I will agree that the crying wife bit goes on for too long, and it's not helped by the obvious jump-cut in the middle of it.

It's shortly after that point that the film goes horribly wrong. Having spent four reels being a mildly sophisticated black comedy, the film takes a dog-leg left turn and becomes a hokey bit of slapstick set on a golf course. There doesn't seem to be much here that's relevant to the original premise of the film; or indeed particularly funny. It also shares the same cliffhanger cheat with "Tramp Tramp Tramp" whereby a sheer cliff suddenly turns into a lengthy incline once Harry goes over the edge. Boo hiss!

One wonders what caused this huge deviation from the main thrust of the film. It scarcely seems credible that it was scripted this way. In fact, it would only take one or two changed shots to join the end of reel 4 (where Harry is kissed by the milkman) onto the "happy" ending starting from where Harry is inundated with flour. Perhaps the final two reels were added after a preview to try and add a more traditional slapstick finale to an unconventional film. Maybe Landgon and his team ran out of inspiration on the set, didn't get as much footage from the original scenario as they expected, and had to pad the film out to length.

Up until the golf course shenanigans, I was thinking that this could well be my favourite of the Langdon features. It's badly let down by the last 20 minutes, but the rest of the film is well worth seeing. "The Chaser" may well have been massively out of step with the public's taste in 1928, but for my money the main storyline of the film holds up well, and I only wish that Langdon and co had had the courage of their conviction to stay on-plot though the entire film.

It's definitely a film that deserves a major re-evaluation. I urge you to take a look at the film (especialy now it's out on DVD in a mostly nice crisp print) and judge for yourself. Who knows - like me, you might even get a laugh out of it!

Harry Langdon was a uniquely gifted silent clown with a style all his own. Several of the short comedies he made for Mack Sennett in the mid-1920s retain their quirky charm, and the first two features he starred in hold up quite well, but as soon as Harry took over the reins and started producing and directing his own movies he fumbled the job, and managed to wreck his career with dizzying speed. In Three's a Crowd, Langdon's first solo job, he took a promising premise and squandered it through awkward timing, weak gags, and sticky sentimentality, but his second self-produced effort The Chaser makes its predecessor look like a masterpiece. This time, Harry took a story idea that's wrong-headed and distasteful from the start, and created a movie which I for one find impossible to enjoy.

The introductory title cards suggest that this is a battle of the sexes comedy with a male bias, i.e. the Innocent Husband versus those Unreasonable Harpies who make his life hell. Other comedians have ventured into this dicey territory and created something worthwhile (think of Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, W. C. Fields, etc.) but Harry's first mistake here was to stack the deck so thoroughly in his own favor. We're commanded to feel sorry for him from the get-go. During the film's opening sequence Harry's wife and mother-in-law take turns chewing him out over the phone, while he sits motionless, listening. The poor guy's crime, it turns out, is that he's been staying out at his lodge every night until 8:30, and the womenfolk are furious. Isn't that just like a woman, being so unfair? Once he comes home the situation escalates between Harry and his mother-in-law to an alarming degree, to the point where she becomes crazed and pulls a gun on him. All three principles wind up in court, but Harry gets all the blame, and is slapped with a truly bizarre sentence by the judge. Get this: in order to "realize his responsibilities" as a husband, Harry must stay at home in a dress for 30 days doing housework while his wife dons men's clothing and goes off to some unspecified office to be the breadwinner.

Okay, no one should expect gender issue 'correctness' from a comedy made in 1928, but this is just twisted. And it gets worse: although Harry's emasculation consists of little more than being forced to make breakfast for his gruff, male-attired wife (admittedly while he's wearing a skirt), his misery is emphasized at the expense of any humor. When Harry sadly looks outside, the barred window he's gazing through is clearly meant to resemble that of a jail-house. Oh, but there's saucy comedy relief to perk things along: every peddler, milkman and ice man who appears at the door instantly assumes that Harry is the lady of the house -- although he looks like his usual self from the waist up -- and makes a pass at him. Yuck! Before long, naturally enough, Harry is ready to end it all and attempts suicide, but instead of taking poison he accidentally takes cod liver oil. After he races to the toilet the camera lingers for a very long moment on the darkened hallway, giving us lots of time to ponder the physical effect of the laxative. Is it my imagination, or has our star comedian lost his hold on the average viewer by this point? And it gets even worse! When Harry's wife arrives on the scene she mistakenly believes that her husband has actually killed himself, and the camera lingers on a seemingly endless close-up of the woman as she sobs miserably, making her mascara run. (Many years later, leading lady Gladys McConnell revealed that the mascara gag was her idea, and expressed regret that it was used.) I guess the mascara smeared under her eyes was supposed to get a laugh.

Along about this point I think Mr. Langdon must have recognized that his movie was sinking fast, so he turned the second half into a retread of one of his best Sennett comedies, Saturday Afternoon. Rotund Bud Jamison (filling in for rotund Vernon Dent) shows up, rescues Harry from his drudgery, gets him back into manly slacks and takes him off to the golf course. It's a relief to us all, but the ensuing routines feel uninspired and a little desperate. And then, to demonstrate that wearing that skirt didn't turn him into a sissy, Harry encounters some girls frolicking in a park, kisses a few at random and makes them swoon. How? Why? By this point it doesn't much matter. Towards the end, when Harry's car plummets down a slope he crashes through a billboard advertising a movie called "Over the Hill," but the gag takes on an unhappy double meaning as we consider the trajectory of the star's career.

The nicest thing I can say in conclusion is that Langdon's failures are just as quirky and off-the-wall as his successes, but his successes sure are a lot more fun to watch. After sitting through this ill-begotten misfire you'll want to rush back to The Strong Man to remind yourself how Harry Langdon earned his reputation as a great clown in the first place.

Capra partisans have pointed to the commercial failure of Langdon's final three pictures for First National - Three's a Crowd, The Chaser, and Heart Trouble - to bolster their claims that firing their man was a fatal mistake and that Langdon couldn't direct. Both points could certainly be argued, and the controversy is unlikely ever to be settled. What seems clear from the two surviving silent features directed by Langdon (Heart Trouble is widely considered a lost film) is that if Ripley was inclined toward the dark and grim, Langdon's artistic vision made a good match. Three's a Crowd is a black comedy in which Harry, desperate for a family of his own, loses all. In The Chaser, he spends most of his time in drag, and his best gags revolve around suicide. This wasn't what the public wanted to see in 1927-28, and the reviews were scathing. It's been suggested that Heart Trouble may have marked the beginnings of a comeback, but too late - First National chose not to renew Langdon's contract.

The Chaser is, admittedly, not all of a piece. It has some successful parts, several misfires and lacks the quality of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the most coherent of Harry Langdon's features and one that balances a dramatic narrative with comic invention. The Chaser appears to be several short films welded together (as does The Strong Man). However this device of patching several two-reelers together for a features is much the formula for other comedians' feature films of the period (Laurel & Hardy among them). After all, the guys who wrote scenarios for feature-length films were the same guys who devised the one- and two-reelers. Because Harry Langdon came to Hollywood years after Ben Turpin, Roscoe Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Olver Hardy, Stanley Laurel, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton had established themselves, critics inevitably compared Langdon to some of them: most notably Chaplin. Rather than emulate Chaplin, Harry Langdon sought to preserve his established comic character that he developed in vaudeville. His soured view of the world was more akin to W. C. Fields' than Chaplin's. Congratulations to previous reviewers, Chris Peterson and, especially, Rodrigo Valenzuela, for reviewing The Chaser with unbiased minds and for keeping up with contemporary research and for knowing something about the circumstances under which The Chaser was made. 1) First National Pictures, being acquired by Warners, was keeping everyone on tight budgets. Vitaphone (also part of the Warner Brothers/First National/Vitaphone family) had released the first commercially viable sound shorts in 1926, when there were only about 100 theatres equipped for sound. However, as Jack Warner expected, that number doubled in a year and by 1928 most of the better motion picture exhibitors were "okay for sound," and Warners was counting on sound features to make them a major studio. Unlike Chaplin and Lloyd, both Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon did not "own" themselves, and were forced to continue making silent comedies for several years into the sound era. MGM and Warners saved the expense of making sound movies for musicals and what they deemed "prestige dramas." 2) Harry Langdon spent more than 20 years in vaudeville. By the time he came to movies in 1924, just a few years before the sound revolution, he had been a headliner in big-time vaudeville for years. He did not need anyone, especially a relative greenhorn like Frank Capra, to "invent" a comic characterization for him. Harry's hen-pecked, slow-to-react comedic persona was well developed as is evidenced by descriptions of his vaude act, "Johnny's New Car." 3) Frank Capra was good at devising gags for Mack Sennett and Harry Langdon. Capra became a great movie director after he left Harry Langdon's employ, but he was as ambitious and self-serving as he was gifted. GHis autobiography is suspect and was his chance to settle old scores. Capra saw Langdon as a tool to propel him into prominence. But Capra clashed with Arthur Ripley, Harry Edwards and Harry Langdon. Between First National's cuts to Harry Langdon's production company's budgets and dissension in the creative process, someone had to go, and it was Capra who fought with Harry and Harry's other writers and directors. Also, Capra, as is apparent by his later films, was not in tune with Langdon's established comic character and the dark side of humanity explored by Langdon and his more sympatico writers/directors. 4) Langdon, indeed, did allow his long-time unhappy marriage (his wife had been in Harry's vaude act) to influence his choice of material. Most artists do mine their own lives for material. That Harry did not do as dispassionately or fairly as some may wish is subject to debate. I, for one, would have preferred more objectivity on Harry's part. Still, The Chaser is a fairly good comedy, no worse than all but the few best of the late 1920s.

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.

The first of these films, THREE'S A CROWD is indeed a very grim and pathetically unfunny film. It might just be the most maudlin silent comedy ever made and makes Chaplin's THE CIRCUS seem positively upbeat and a barrel of laughs by comparison. I love THE CIRCUS but it is an extremely sad and downbeat film--THREE'S A CROWD is light-years worse and unlike THE CIRCUS isn't so beautiful or artistic--plus, THE CIRCUS had laughs.

However, THE CHASER isn't filled with pathos nor is maudlin--at least not to the degree THREE'S A CROWD is. Aside from the suicide aspect of the film (that is played strictly for laughs), it's a somewhat conventional domestic comedy and isn't all that different from Harry's earlier films. While it's not quite as funny, there are still lots of cute scenes and laughs so that fans of Langdon should enjoy it. Unlike one review (which gave it a 2), it IS a good film and worth seeing but it's NOT like another review (which gave it a 10). Both reviews, in my opinion, seemed to have an agenda--to either bust or prove the notion that all the Langdon-directed films were bad.

The plot, though silly, was also rather cute. Harry is a carousing husband (something he was in several of his previous shorts) and when his wife seeks a divorce, the judge instead sentences Harry to spend 30 days dressed like and acting like the housewife!! This is all pretty cute to watch as he tries, in vain, to do his wife's many household duties. About the only serious negative is that you never really get to see the nosy mother-in-law get her true comeuppance. This left the film with a bit of an unsatisfying ending.

A few nice laughs and an avoidance of career-destroying pathos, this film isn't great but certainly cannot be legitimately blamed for wrecking Langdon's career. That award squarely belongs to THREE'S A CROWD!

Frank Cullen's review here contains an interesting discussion of Capra's role in the career of Harry Langdon, most of which I agree with entirely. But his vaudeville experience did not translate to the screen quite as readily as Mr. Cullen supposes (it did not so so even for Chaplin or Keaton) and it is evident from the earliest films that Langdon had no very clear idea about his screen persona when he started in 1923. The film made in that year for Sol Lesser, Horace Greely Jr., as far as one can make out from the very abbreviated Pathé-Baby (Pathex) version that survives, is a very conventional and forgettable comic western where Langdon displays none of the distinctive characteristics that would bring him fame a year later. Picking Peaches (seemingly the earliest of the shorts made for Sennett and not directed by Edwards)is a poor piece of work, combining tasteless slapstick with equally tasteless sexual innuendo. The later Langdon character is quite absent from the lecherous shoe-clerk, dapper and articulate but not in the least amusing, that he plays in this film, largely intended to show off the Sennett "bathing beauties". "The lecher" reappears in equally undistinguished fashion (this time a photographer)in Smile Please! (also not directed by Edwards and essentially still an overextended "Keystone" comedy).

Several of the other 1924 comedies appear to be lost but in Shanghaied Lovers, although a little more of an innocent than in the previous efforts, there is still little to distinguish him from other comics of the time and the slapstick is very standard fare. The First Hundred Years is another rambling farce of the late Sennett variety and once again Langdon's characterisation is entirely conventional. The first momentary signs of a more vulnerable, childlike character come in His New Mama but this too is not sustained and the film soon degenerates into yet another outing for the "bathing beauties" in which Langdon's role is negligible and then another typical "Keystone" slapstick chase-ending.

So the Langdon character did not appear fully-fledged on the screen after being first honed in vaudeville. It was unquestionably created during the course of the shorts made during 1924-1926. This was equally clearly not the work of Capra but rather of director Harry Edwards, who rapidly became Langdon's sole director, and writer Arthur Ripley. The real change comes with The Luck of the Foolish, the first of a whole series of first-rate shorts that Edwards-Ripley-Langdon would produce in the next year or so. One or two are are less good but The Luck of the Foolish, The Hansom Cabman, All Night Long, His Marriage Wow and Remember When? are all outstanding. For one thing the cinematography improves immensely (with Ernie Crockett providing "special effects") and the direction takes on a much more coherent form. A surreal element is frequently introduced along with an increasingly darker side to the comedy. But there is also a progressive development in the Langdon character towards inarticulacy (accompanied by a set of very distinctive hand gestures) and childlike simplicity.

The inarticulacy (which continues even in the early sound films and is crucial to the films he himself directed) is almost certainly an innovation due to Langdon himself. The "noir" elements and certain recurrent themes (wartime reminiscence) are more probably the contribution of Ripley.

And this is I think the crucial turning-point in Langdon's career, the moment that will bring him his greatest success and equally his eventual tragic decline. Because the balance involved in the Langdon character that now emerges is an extremely delicate one. Take it too far and the character can easily become a simple imbecile of little enduring comic or dramatic interest. And the shorts begin to unravel somewhat during 1926, with more writers introduced (too many cooks?) and notably with the arrival amongst them of Frank Capra. Increasingly the plots seem to bypass Langdon himself, who is increasingly portrayed as an imbecile. And this process culminates, after the move to First National, with Capra's The Strong Man. This starts well enough (a typical Ripley wartime reminiscence, used also in Soldier Man and extensively in All Night Long) but then turns into a slow-paced sentimental drama (entirely in the Capra manner) where Langdon seems to have little to do but act the idiot.

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the first of the First National features with Harry Edwards still directing is an excellent comedy, if a little uneven, with some classic episodes. Long Pants, the second feature directed by Capra, is again very slow-paced and would be almost entirely forgettable if it weer not for the marked "noir" element (the attempted murder of the wife) which is presumably the work of Ripley. After the break with Capra, Langdon's own first film, Three's a Crowd is, to my mind, Langdon's masterpiece. Here we have all the vulnerability, the surreal, the dark but a central character who, however inarticulate and forlorn, is anything but an idiot. Alas, as we know, the film was never appreciated at its real value at the time and failed dismally at the box office.

This film, if one comes to it after Three's a Crowd, is a major disappointment. It is also a very personal film but the idea of a divorce-judge obliging husband and wife to exchange roles is just silly and the depiction of it equally lacks any kind of credibility. Nor is the theme new (it had been used more plausibly by Charley Chase in one of his "Jimmy Jump" comedies in 1924). Moreover the Langdon character seems to have relapsed back into the idiocy from which it had been reclaimed. After the successive failure of his three Firs National features (the third, Heart Trouble, is a lost film), Langdon was doomed to continue playing the imbecile in a perfectly ghastly series of sound shorts for Hal Roach.

I just watched this movie. I'm a big fan of silent comedies & I've really enjoyed some of Langdon's other movies, but WOW this one was bad. It's the worst silent comedy I've ever seen. - Langdon was certainly a capable comedian, so I can only image that he was severely depressed or something. The humor is often very dark or completely out of step with the audience.

The movie is only an hour long, but it was still tough to get through. It goes wrong when the judge sentences Harry to wear a dress & take on his wife's role in the house. Langdon doesn't wear a drag outfit like Arbuckle would have. He doesn't disguise himself as a woman. He just put on a dress. He's obviously a man, but somehow every man he runs into thinks he's a beautiful woman & makes a pass at him?! It doesn't make any sense, but that's what they do. Does Harry learn something about how men treat women? No, Harry just decides to kill himself.

The suicide scenes are almost funny, but that's always going to alienate half of your audience. It's bleak humor. - And the whole thing ends with a 10 second shot of an empty room. Harry runs out of shot, the camera remains, and we wait for something else, but never get it.

The next uncomfortable moment comes when his wife returns & believes that Harry has killed himself. His wife begins to weep at his suicide. So what does Langdon do with this scene? He tries to get a laugh out of her eye make-up running from the tears?!! We're supposed to laugh at a weeping woman! - To add to this odd scene, the woman wipes her eyes & then her nose giving herself a slight smudged mustache. She continues to weep & look at the camera with the smudged make-up. -

Harry later goes on a golfing outing. Again, we have some morbid humor when they seem to disturb a grave. - Then, out of nowhere, Harry inexplicably gains the ability to make women faint with his kiss. - And then, what does he do with the gag? Nothing! One matronly woman tries to beat him up, does he even consider disarming her with his new skill. No. When he & his wife reconcile, does he end the movie by kissing the woman he loves? No. They just forget the whole thing.

This is failure on all counts. A bizarre movie. Langdon's worst.

Harry Langdon was a very peculiar genius, with his own odd rhythms and his own odd character. He was, in his day, enormously influential. It was his slow pace, his willingness to let the audience get ahead of his baby-faced naif, that so influenced Stan Laurel that he, too, began to slow his pace, creating the Mr. Laurel all fans of old movies love and cherish.

But that slow pacing calls for an extremely careful balance, and here the edifice topples over, so that when I saw this movie in a theater with a crowd of Langdon fans, I fell asleep.... and there was no laughter to wake me up.

When I awoke, there was Harry in a house dress with a milk man trying to seduce him..... and Harry was playing his bewildered, inert screen self.... and it suddenly occurred to me that if he didn't care, there was no reason I should, so I stood up and walked outside into the sunlight.

Lest you think it is because I simply don't get Langdon, well, I don't think that's the case. It's just that every once in a while something comes along to snap our suspension of disbelief in a work of fiction, and this was one of those times. I can look at the cheap shorts he turned out in the early 1930s and enjoy him playing with a rubber hose. But this feature simply doesn't work. Alas.

Well, you're all wrong.

The only real trouble with this film is in the editing. Cut down to 45 minutes, it is really a very amusing movie.

There are many, many shots that are repetitive or simply unnecessary; for example, the repeated shots of the women scolding the telephone make the characters ghastly and unbearable, but remove a few of these shots and the characters become less hideous and more laughable. What would really make it work funny would be if each shot of the women were a little faster, if you catch my drift...

A lot of shots are too long and can have a few seconds removed at the beginning or end with no damage to continuity, and a number of intertitles can be deleted with no loss of understanding. The wife crying can be faded out before the jump-cut and the thing with the mascara. The entire sequence of the morning newspaper headlines about Man Commits Suicide, and the ensuing shots of the judge can be removed. Generally, I would NOT shorten shots of Harry doing his schtick (the whole purpose of watching this film is to see Harry do his schtick).

And of course you can just take out the whole bathing-beauty section: when Harry and Bud think they've awakened the dead, they run off in a panic... with the help of a dissolve, they could end up in the car with Harry putting his dress back on (an important visual), and then a wipe could take us from there to Harry hiding in the rumble seat. Every vestige of the stupid and meaningless bathing beauties scene could thus be excised to streamline the film, and the two characters still have plenty of motivation to dash off the golf course.

Once the film is cut down this way, it becomes a very respectable 7 stars out of 10: not bad at all. At this point the only real criticism I would have is that I just wish the story were something a little less domestic and that lent itself more to physical comedy.

I was prepared to hate this film as much as I hated another film he produced, but it was not quite as bad. In this film, Harry is a carouser and is sentenced to perform his wife's duty. She puts on a coat and tie, but it also wearing a skirt. Harry should have been allowed to wear long pants under his apron. Aftr being kissed by a repo and ice man, he decides to kill himself. He then changes his mind. Only his wife doesn't know that. She brings the girls from work home to see just how his wife is doing that. However, the wife does not find him. One of her friends finds a suicide note by an overturned bottle of poison. They decide to leave and the wife cries. In fact, she looks kind of scary as the mascara runs. Later his mother-in-law reassures her that she bets Harry will turn out very much alive. After some scenes involving a golf game and several girls in bathing suits playing elsewhere in the park (at least some of this should have been cut), he winds up covered in flour back at his house. The mother-in-law sees him screams and runs out. The wife, however, is glad to see him again and that provides a happy ending, which is why I give it a "3" instead of a "2" like his other film from this period.