Word: langdon
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...Church (not Rome, but H-E) rounds out the weekend with a far less perfect, but still fascinating movie, Hallelujah, I'm a Bum! If you're interested in the Depression film, hit this. And if you're interested in Harry Langdon, hit this. And if you're interested in the musical comedy form, likewise. Rodgers and Hart did the music and lyrics, and the whole picture is done in talking rhyme, which you will either find maddening or charming. Wonderful montage touches from a usually staid director, Lewis Milestone. It's all right to confuse this with Hallelujah, because...
...from talking with many people who visited me backstage that this was only because most of them had been unfamiliar with the term. What they had not realized was that here in America they had seen some of the greatest pantomimists of the century--Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy...those superb artists who created in the silent movie era, without benefit of the spoken word, a whole world of human prototypes in humorous, pathetic, tragic or hilarious situations in life--with which their audiences identified themselves...
Brought up on the greatest artists of the silent screen--Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon--Marcel Marceau was enchanted at an early age by the challenge of imitating the animate as well as the inanimate. He calls Chaplin his greatest inspiration: "To be capable of expressing a wealth of emotion in one look, one gesture, to be able to interpret the slightest nuance of the soul--was not that a prodigious ambition...
Tati has obviously - perhaps too obviously - learned from the old masters. Keaton's mechanical virtuosity is on view, or at least attempted, as are Chaplin's timing and resilience and Langdon's scrambled innocence. Tati absorbs and assimilates each skill like a diligent pupil taking great care with his lessons, and that is the way they are applied. Watching Tati is like listening to the brightest kid in the class run through his homework, dogged, letter perfect and without inspiration. His movies since M. Hulot's debut have been very like the best scene in that...
ORSON WELLES I: Keston in The General, Langdon in Saturday Afternoon, and Chaplin in The Rink...