Richard M Roberts wrote:Actually, no, Capra’s women were always pushovers to be redeemed, and fell way too quickly. Barbara Stanwyck in LADIES OF LEISURE, THE MIRACLE WOMAN, FORBIDDEN, THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN and MEET JOHN DOE, can’t hold a candle to Barbara Stanwyck in most of her Warner vehicles like BABYFACE. And casting Jean Arthur as anything hard-boiled is like casting a kitten to play a cougar. Capra’s women may be smart and street-wise, but they’re always looking to be redeemed, and know deep-down that they’re missing that most important thing they need ---a GOOD MAN---to bring them back from the brink. Capra was always pushing for the small-town values, God and Country, and it took a Robert Riskin to put any teeth into his City Characters. That’s why things got trickier and tricklier in the Capra oeurve’ when Riskin left.
So Capra was "misogynist lite." Either way, the independent women get short shrift. I like your Jean Arthur observation. Note that when given a lead actress with some teeth - Kathrine Hepburn and Bette Davis leap to mind - the end result was usually lesser Capra.
I think you’ve misread those Langdon sketch scripts if you can’t see either traces of misogyny or Langdon’s screen character emerging in his stage routines. Granted, it’s easy to do, these are merely scripts for copyright purposes, not performance, and apart from dialogue, the visual comedy and stage instructions are not indicated with much detail, certainly not as much as, say, the same copyright versions of W. C. Fields’ stage sketches, but the reviews of Langdon’s stage work always seem to praise his pantomime, and little of that is indicated in the scripts. Yet even in the dialogue, Langdon’s words seem to be written in that silly sort of babbling style we hear in his sound films (and can see him doing in his silent films even if we can’t hear it). I read Langdon’s dialogue in JOHNNYS NEW CAR and I can hear him saying it.
Misogyny, not so much beyond what you call "standard comedy tropes." Langdon's screen character, of course I see it. All of those same observations are made in the book; the bit about his dialogue style is on page 70, second paragraph after the script excerpt.
As well the misogyny we see is the standard comedy tropes of the time, expensive girl-friends, henpecked husbands or boyfriends, but it’s there, and no matter what you think about Langdon’s stage work, it’s there in spades in all of his film work after, with or without Capra, Ripley, or Edwards, and seems to rear it’s ugly and very funny head especially in films in which he had larger degrees of control, like the Roach and Educational shorts, and Columbia Comedies like HIS MARRIAGE MIX-UP, with a story by Vernon Dent (and gee, you think he and Langdon worked together on that?) right up to PISTOL PACKIN NITWITS, with another story by Langdon and Harry Edwards in the Directors chair.
Can't argue with that... but the die was pretty much cast by that point. The Educationals are pretty mild in that respect; Nell O'Day was quite charming. The Columbias go to extremes in all areas, with conflict provided mainly by outsized caricatures. They're like evil twins of the Sennett comedies, missing the realm of silence (along with the brilliant stock company) that assures us this is fantasy. If the Columbias are a "cartoon universe," it's a Bob Clampett cartoon minus wit. (Yeah, I don't much like the Columbias. So sue me.) I've no doubt Langdon worked with Dent on HIS MARRIAGE MIX-UP (pretty sure we said that - or at least implied it - in the filmography entry), but that story was mainly cribbed from two of the Sennett films they did together.
All the comics did variations on each others work, but what’s brilliant in this gag is that Langdon makes it completely his own, and on his terms. Chaplins version is both slightly sarcastic and realistic, a baby could have fallen out a window. Langdon’s version ties in so much more with his own surreal universe and lack of touch with it, where do pregnant women drop from when somebody loses them? The danger comes later when his basically cartoon character is actually caring for woman and child, and this sudden realism inserted into Langdon’s Cartoon Universe turns away gag situations as the audience becomes too concerned for the safety of woman and child at the mercy of a comic character designed to be completely ineffectual.
Chaplin's version works not because of any realism; nobody's going to laugh if there's even an implication that a baby fell out the window. It works because of how Chaplin sets it up. Not only is trash dumped on him from above as he strolls along the alley, it's dumped on him while he's being overly fastidious: removing his shabby gloves and selecting just the right half-smoked butt from his cigarette case. He notices the baby, takes a closer look, then looks up at the windows. Big laugh: "They saw the joke!"
There's NO such set-up in THREE'S A CROWD. Langdon assumes we know everything we need to about him and goes right for the laugh. He doesn't yet know this is the same woman he's been admiring for nearly a year, and when he finds it out, he becomes even more ineffectual, and it goes on for so long that you either marvel at his daring or you want to reach through the screen and throttle him: FOR GOD'S SAKE, GET THAT WOMAN OUT OF THE SNOW!
Langdon the filmmaker wanted to do something with more depth than "the Cartoon Universe" and more linear than the episodic TRAMP, TRAMP, TRAMP and THE STRONG MAN while still being funny. The tragedy of his career is that he never figured out how to pull it off. Capra was unwilling to help solve the problem and had to go; Ripley had the story construction chops but his idea of comedy - like the dream sequence in THREE'S A CROWD - was entirely too dark and bizarre for the mainstream. Thankfully Langdon got away from all that and went right back to just being funny while at Roach, Educational, PRC, Monogram... and once in a (great) while, Columbia.
Michael