Yeah, are full of melancholy, just as I would be happy to have read a good book. There are only two chapters and then I finish Harry Langdon: His Life and Films of William Schelly , wonderful biography of the comic actor eternal child. Even this was because the book is a translation in English, but English is a very basic easy to understand, so this time I had rarely need of the assistance of vocabulary.
Harry Langdon. How many times I've seen his movies and I thought how it was original. Muti, of course, because his sound was rather neglected period and has not yet released on DVD, except in a few stocks. I now turn to recall an image of this lovely child. In Saturday Afternoon had the harpy wife, poor soul anxious to freedom but ignorant of the ability to find it. Even a trip with a friend became a sort of tragedy for him, locked inside a tiny trunk. HIS FIRST FLAME, so as to accommodate the wishes of his uncle who wanted eternal bachelor, because, he said, women were something to escape from. REMEMBER WHEN, an underdog, a poor wretch who does watch the show the children of his own childhood orphanage, and losing his job for it. He had hidden in his jacket fifteen chickens a few hours before. A thief, a vagabond and a wanderer starving constantly frustrated by the circumstances. Langdon's figure is less marked than Charlie Chaplin, the lonely outsider par excellence, but it's the same cry. Cry because it is an alien, "The Little Elf" as they called the Americans, other than that provided for social psychology. Her face resembles that of a moon that is tired of being up there and wanted to capriciously take human form. But Langdon is not really human. He believes in what he is told. Imagine the good, true and beautiful is inside his heart is also in reality. When is disappointed, it is frightening. In him there is no desire for success, sexual desire, real and conscious view of itself. In some ways Harry Langdon did not know to exist. The tangible form of his body is not something essential in his mind. In THE SEA SQUAWK dresses as a woman because it can not be recognized by a villain who intends to harm him. His disguise is less funny than that of his contemporaries, like Chaplin, Laurel, Ben Turpin and other man-because he has never been. The strength of that sequence is it. The grace of androgynous Langdon is priceless. Smile and laugh more in the shoes of a man of success than in those of a blonde lady sought. This is unique. How unique are his films. I could write for hours about his short, medium and feature films and maybe I'll do it again. Now I remember a picture. The film is Three's A Crowd, we are still in the initial phase of the narrative. We see a puppet piece that flies, then this puppet will return at the end in a tragic (and wonderful) shot. That puppet is him. The plot and the story I'm not here to tell because they do not need words. I am convinced that if Langdon had been less inexperienced-was his first film-would have sped up the action in some places and made more correct certain fittings. And the film would be was a masterpiece because it contains unusual symbols peaks for the films of that period. Not everything is as it seems and there is no need for explanations. Even as I write I can not help but move with emotion. Harry Langdon could become a great writer of comedies, like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, if he had had full opportunity to develop his potential and was not opposed by the dominant desire of realism that the speech would have required also its shape.
Well, so far I had seen his work, but now I am going to finish the biography Schelly. Reading it was like to really know who this man was fragile, sometimes dominated by the circumstances and deeply naive.
Sorry. My mind moves to nostalgia when I think back to when I started reading it. The death of the reading process is combined with the death of Langdon, in his order that will be told in these two chapters that remain. I'll cry again, and again, and maybe it will be an opportunity to once again review his films.
Why cinema is life and preserves life. And Langdon had kept that secret celluloid that his character did not even know you had. What makes the human being only to the aspiration of humanity untouched unconscious.
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