Harry Langdon is yet another black and white comedian that missed my radar when I was discovering a lot of the greats. The one and only Langdon film I’ve seen is Three’s a Crowd in 2019. After learning of ‘queer’ themes in his next film, The Chaser, it became too intriguing to turn down. There’s an interesting article giving its own take on the film called The Trans* Fantasy in Harry Langdon’s The Chaser, written by Sabrina Sonner, which further intrigued me to this story. Langdon’s character is both disarmingly innocent and simple, while having layers underneath. He also plays well enough as a silent clown that does silly things, a uniformity of essentially all these types of comedies. Not a quality of them all is the little ways Langdon can give deeper emotions to his role. After the proper story has started and Harry is clad in a dress, he runs up the stairs while hiking up the outfit. He runs with a youthful drive to manage with what’s going on and solve the stairs in his own way. Most would just go up the stairs normally. When he’s upset later, he jumps up and down with a face of not knowing how to understand the situation, while his distress shines to the surface. We even learn of this character just by how still he sits, like he is a nervous child.
Langdon is great at directing. The lighting captures the tone of a given scene. Many here are damp and moody, so as to suggest the issue at hand. The camera can stare at a character like it’s digging into their soul. Some of those long takes and dry angles can make us feel like we’re trapped in a distressed person’s head. After a scene in court, we learn that something strange was ruled by the judge, with excellent buildup to what the ruling was… that Harry and his wife need to swap their gender roles for a while. The film has generally good editing, but occasional moments that look poor; as if the movie had to be rushed. At one point, all the food in Harry’s skirt disappears after a cut.
Gladys McConnell, Harry’s wife, is also a great actor, despite her limited screen time. Take the scene of her crying or her “acting like a man”, telling Harry to make her eggs. It’d be worthwhile to see more of how her character thinks and feels. She never minds or complains about acting masculine. Assuming she likes it, let’s see her enjoying herself more clearly. If she doesn’t, let’s get some of that. Confusingly, the wife never wears pants. Perhaps the reason she doesn’t is that it might seem too much like a challenge of power. Didn’t want it to seem like that’s something they should be allowed to wear. A man in a dress on the other hand is considered more silly. Harry’s wife is very stylish in the film, while he isn’t.
The first forty minutes follow Harry’s confrontation with his gender-problem, which is very compelling with a lot of sharp scenes. It’s such a shame that the last twenty minutes see a change from this. There’s an unrelated comedy sequence that feels like it was lifted from a one-reel short and thrown in. To top it off, a friend of Harry’s is introduced suddenly when he easily could’ve been included earlier. There’s also a little plot point related to the judge that has no payoff. Why include it? Afterwards there’s a section that is reminiscent of experimental films. This ending third being so out of place and strange suggests it really does have a place, it’s just under the surface. Still, the sacrifice of the story in the first two-thirds is so frustrating that the film can be a disappointment. There was so much that could’ve happened.
SPOILERS
In the beginning, Harry gets home late, so his wife and mother-in-law incorrectly believe he was having an affair with other women. His typical quiet and nervous nature makes him look guilty. The mother-in-law is so furious that she tries to shoot him. She has the line, “I’ll show you how to run around after wine, women and blondes!-” After the duo swap roles, Harry doesn’t initially seem to mind much, just trying to do what he has to. He doesn’t appear to like it, but can easily cope. His wife is far more confident, seeming to really enjoy being assertive. The duo don’t wear their familiar clothes even when no one is around to see them. Even though arguably there was no chance to, a scene of them more expressly hating this would make sense in a story that doesn’t want to challenge 1920s ideals and such a scene easily could’ve been included. They do ultimately change back, but because of outside factors.
One man, who Harry seemingly doesn’t know well, calls Harry madame and his wife his husband. He is explicitly shown to be attracted to Harry. Two other men also have romantic attraction to Harry. Harry is horrified by this and the unwanted kiss of one. In the finest scene of the whole picture, Harry looks at himself in the mirror. While the character is usually timid, here he looks angry and calls himself a sissy, not targeting the man who sexually harassed him, but himself. The lighting is dark and a little angular, as if depicting something scary, yet it’s just normal Harry; which shows how he feels. He possibly thinks he’s gay just for receiving a kiss from a man and can’t handle such a thing, not being able to handle the perception that would afflict him. From here, he seems to more mind his new feminine role. That does introduce a plot hole of why he wouldn’t just take the jail sentence instead of the gender punishment.
From this point on, the film becomes more absurdist and strange. Harry decides to kill himself. He commits to it, but circumstance saves him. It’s a little silly he would rather die than take the jail sentence, which suggests this is supposed to be a ridiculous way to solve the problem. You could say he wanted to die because of being gay, but it still comes off as too sudden. There should be more of him hating the situation first. Harry writes a letter to his wife, whom he mistakenly calls his husband, but he crosses it out and writes “wife”. To contrast, his wife never calls him her wife. After McConnell stretches her acting chops by crying and Harry is shown to be missing, one of the wife’s friend says after seeing her friend find her husband’s suicide note, “Well, goodnight, dearie – we’ve had a lovely evening!”
Probably the most complicated scene of the whole film is when Harry is kissed by a milkman and doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t in any way show a dislike of the kiss, though he didn’t ask for it. Based on how Harry was positioned, he was arguably expecting it and fine with it happening. This isn’t directly acknowledged in the story. The milkman also never appears before or after. Right after, Harry’s friend, Bud, shows up and says, “Take off those skirts! Be a man before your voice changes.” After this, we move to Harry wearing pants and the main plot being kind of dropped. Arguably Harry here is consciously rejecting the kiss that just happened by dressing male. It’s worth noting that he dressed male because he was told to. The movie unfortunately has this weird golf sequence near the end and only returns to the main plot briefly. Will Harry act like how the judge hoped he would after the film? Is there a poignant lack of resolution? Does Harry have to challenge himself or his life? No. The movie just doesn’t tie that up! At least not unless you take certain interpretations from what happens in the last third.
Bud breaking golf sticks could be intended to portray a very aggressively manly man. He’s firing off a lot of self-destructive anger. He later is with a bunch of women and fits in, as if he is a man that knows how to “treat a woman”. When the two find the group of women, the movie becomes much slower for this segment. We get surrealist static shots of Harry and characters moving slowly. Two women he kisses and/or embraces fall ill afterwards. The sickliness and slow pace is like the movie is dying. The scene is so moody and lacking in humor that it suggests some experimental edge to Langdon, like he wanted to intricately portray something, but what doesn’t come across. The lack of stronger things to infer could suggest he didn’t know how to make such a film properly.
Because of Harry being blamed for the women getting sick, the two men have to leave. After an accident, Harry in the car flies down a hill. Him going down it takes a while, but it wasn’t shown to be so long earlier. The car crashes and Harry flies into his house, a bucket of white powder that sadly wasn’t established earlier falls on him. Harry not dying from that could suggest this movie isn’t trying to tackle realism. That’s such a goofy moment that feels out of place from the initial serious comedy and later surreal sequence, though fits reasonably well with the golf portion. There could’ve been more value to the golf sequence or him falling down a steep hill. He could try and perhaps fail to act masculine or feminine, proving some kind of point. That’s not to say he had to act differently, but it could’ve made those sequences matter more in an on-the-surface way.
While probably not, there could be a sexual meaning to certain moments. Harry accepts a kiss from the milkman, but rejects it from someone that sold him items for a baby; Harry hands golf clubs to Bud, who then angrily breaks the phallic-shaped objects; women Harry kisses fall unconscious, with him not kissing his wife at the end of the film; and Harry falling into white powder at the end. All these could suggest that Harry likes receiving male affection and doesn’t fit in with women. The clubs could suggest his friend rejecting homosexuality and finding comfort with women. Harry wants to do the same but it just doesn’t work out for him. Harry handing the clubs to Bud could represent Harry making or wanting to make an advance on him, which is turned down.
Harry does some unlikable things, like kiss a woman without consent. The movie doesn’t “reward” him or clearly state he’s in the wrong. There’s an unreal feeling to how he’s depicted, sometimes childlike and sometimes broken. Based on scenes like Harry calling himself a sissy and being unable to handle his emotions, the film could be about his character confronting his homosexuality, transsexuality, or gender non conforming behavior. The film is like a dream a child might have, specifically a misogynistic one. Harry is an average married man who is accused of doing something ‘adult’ that the child may not understand. Based on how Harry didn’t do such a thing and was just watching a party, you could imagine a child thinking sex might be done by going to a party and cheating by doing that when you’re not supposed to be there.
The child then thinks he’s queer because another man kissed him and is afraid of that. When he is “treated like a woman”, he can’t handle it and tries to kill himself, with him escaping death by absurdist circumstances. The suicide could represent the extreme places a dream can go. Him referring to his wife as his husband could mean he liked the idea of having a husband, but was able to not really address that. If he liked being kissed by men, that’d be harder to push aside. Given that he does really like kissing men, his guard can be later down and can enjoy the milkman’s kiss. The golf sequence matches how dreams can diverge into something only loosely related to what came before, with some hints like Harry’s friend being very masculine and breaking the golf clubs. It also served as a distraction from Harry with the milkman. The male-attraction does creep back in. If Harry likes being alone with a man, but doesn’t want to like it, he could queue in what else but a group of women?
Harry kissing the women represents him finally actually doing the cheating, possibly because he thinks it’ll make him “a real man to just take any woman he wants”, though it doesn’t work. Him kissing women doesn’t fit him, when he tries they go sick. Harry arguably accepts his femininity when after he golfed and “acted like a man”, he crashed into his house into some powder. That incident realistically should’ve killed someone. The powder making him look like a ghost could mean that he did die, except only this need to be masculine did. What’s left is a happy ending of him in that dress and the person in his life he loves not appearing to mind. Their bond is now stronger due to self acceptance. Due to the film demonstrating that gender roles are only as valid as we humans want them to be, the return of the opening title card, “In the beginning, God created man in his own image and likeness. A little later on, he created woman.” at the end could be considered ironic due to the film challenging gender roles. Also, the car crashing through billboards can signify that these sorts of “gender crises” are unnecessary and started by culture and social expectations hitting people in the head.
On the other hand, the women Harry kisses becoming ill could also represent his internal rejection of his feminine leanings, not his heterosexual. The brain wants to “kill the femininity.” Harry getting away with kissing a woman without consent and getting in a dangerous stunt that he makes it out of okay suggests that this aggressive behavior is fine to him. He acts like, “I’m such a man that I can do unsafe things and be fine afterwards!” Despite this, Harry doesn’t act too differently for a lot of the runtime, with him not embracing or rejecting any part of himself or acting differently. He rejects what others label onto him, like “woman”. That could mean he’s unwilling to consider femininity or he is still a valid man even if society doesn’t consider him to be one. At least from a simplistic view, the worst thing that could befall someone like this would be for society to just decide he’s a woman. It doesn’t have to make sense or be true, he just is. He takes it better than you might expect from someone with “toxic” traits.
Harry being in the incident that should’ve killed him and then the powder in the dress means that what is supposed to die is him accepting his femininity. Him in embrace with his wife could mean running to those gender roles and not allowing himself to consider being gay, with the end title card referring to Christianity, which especially in 1928 wouldn’t accept gender divergence. Harry and his wife’s relationship not being healthy is suggested by the reason they reconnect after their rough patch being that she thought he killed himself. That’s not anything inherent to him as a person. She was just afraid of losing him. That can ignite good times, but their actual issues aren’t solved. That would suggest that what Harry really needs is to reject being hyper masculine, but he won’t.
Harry is not good at being a typical male or even a typical female. No matter what he wants to be, his friends want him to be, or society wants him to be, he has qualities of both. The different interpretations could suggest that he is hard to be “boxed into” an identity or that it will take a lot of work to accept himself as something, whether it be a masculine straight man or not. Instead he is more complex. Maybe he’s not gay, but bisexual; or he’s transgender but still loves and wants to be with his wife? Maybe he’s a straight man that likes wearing dresses? The film portraying Harry and especially his wife as comfortable with having elements of both shows this complexity and could hopefully mean that the intended message is that you should be allowed to explore yourself and dress how you like.
OVERVIEW
The Chaser is a film probably everyone interested in silent films, experimental films, queer films, and maybe, maybe films in general should watch. It not focusing much on its original and great, great premise to go with a loosely related segment that could be its own film is a tragedy. The “heightened realism” earlier scenes have is phenomenal. With both this film and Langdon’s previous directed feature, Three’s a Crowd, they have segments that feel out of place and like filler. Certain scenes don’t make much sense or aren’t comedic. Thus, they are ripe for analysis and are great films for thinking about. In a different time, Langdon could’ve been popular with fans of experimental films or if his stories were more fleshed out he could be more popular with silent film fans of the now. Due to the “messy” movie we have to watch, it can’t be recommended on the basis of wanting a good story, but there is more to it if you’re willing to give it a chance.
The Filme Diary 