Review - The Strong Man

 April 18, 2022
 
The Strong Man – U.S., 1924
 

Legend has it that Charlie Chaplin shut down production of his 1931 film, City Lights, for a year due to a terrible case of creator’s block; see, he just couldn’t explain why a blind woman would mistake the Tramp for a wealthy patron. While that length of time might seem excessive, I can understand Chaplin’s desire to get it right, and perhaps part of his obsession with finding the right rationale was due to a film released just five years earlier that must have driven coherency-focused writers like Chaplin absolutely nuts. That film was Frank Capra’s The Strong Man, starring former circus, medicine show, and Vaudeville performer, Harry Langdon.
 
In The Strong Man, Langdon plays Paul Bergot, a Belgian World War I soldier stationed in No Man’s Land. When Bergot isn’t firing at unseen German soldiers, he’s gazing longingly at the picture of Mary Brown, a young woman who has confessed her love for him in a letter he must have read a million times. When he lets his guard down and resumes gazing at her picture, he is captured by a rather large strong German soldier who whisks him away presumably to a POW camp. I say presumably because the very next time we see him, he’s the assistant of this very same German soldier and traveling around the U.S. as the marquee member of a strong man act. I imagine the story of their pairing would have made for quite an interesting film.
 
Slapstick is sometimes described as a collection of humorous scenes loosely connected to a romantic subplot that hardly seems to have been given the time needed for it to blossom and engage, and The Strong Man fits this description for the most part. In addition to the scene in No Man’s Land, in which German bullets actually do Bergot a favor by exterminating the cooties crawling over him, there’s a humorous bit involving Bergot, the strong man, and some rather large luggage, a clever bit in which Bergot unsuccessfully tries to get away from a woman who hid a wad of stolen money in his coat pocket (she initially claims to be “Little Mary”), Bergot’s attempts at putting on a strong man act solo, and finally a long scene in which he defends Mary’s honor against a scoundrel intent on making Mary one of his “attractions” as punishment for her preacher father’s campaign against sin and vice. In other words, the film has enough creative elements to work wonders. There’s even an extremely clever bit in which Bergot is tossed from a wagon only to tumble down a hill and crash into the very same wagon as it continues its way down a hill.
 
My favorite of these bits is the one involving the femme fatale (Gertrude Astor) because of its extraordinary choreography. In one clever bit, the woman keeps trying to reach into Bergot’s pocket only for him to turn at the most inopportune moment. There’s also a clever moment in which Bergot has realized the woman is not Mary (for rather old-fashioned reasons) and begun to walk away after she feigns passing out (really, that happens). The only problem is that a good Samaritan just happens to be nearby and calls out that he can’t just leave her like that, which in reality, he can’t and doesn’t. The scene culminates in Bergot carrying the woman up the stairs leading to her apartment and mistaking a number of things for steps. This part of the film is comic perfection.
 
And yet the rest of film does not work nearly as well as it should, primarily because the romantic angle is a headscratcher. So, here are two characters established in early scenes as being in love, and yet apparently they’ve never met. Perhaps there was a pen pal program during the First World War that I’m unware of, but it is hard to imagine how true love could flourish under such circumstances, especially 80 years before the idea of social media existed (and I’m still not entirely sold on the idea that it can flourish there). In fact, much of what passes as narrative in the film involves Bergot searching for Mary and knowing her so poorly that he runs in the direction of anyone whose names just happens to resemble hers.
 
And then we meet her, and the romantic pairing makes even less sense. See, Mary Brown (Priscilla Bonner), like the little flower girl in City Lights is blind, which begs more than a few questions, not the least of which is Who wrote the letters? I’ll add a few more. How did they start corresponding? Who took the picture? And finally, What was her plan for their eventual meeting? Again, the film has no answers. It seems more content to make Bergot her knight in shining armor, which is fine, yet its disinterest in justifying its characters’ deep feelings, reminiscent of the way it avoids explaining how two soldiers on the opposite side of a war could end up a Vaudeville team, hurts the film, for why should viewers invest in a couple or partnership if the makers of the film had no interest in rewarding that investment?
 
Sure, the two characters share a sweetness after they actually meet, and the film’s closing moments evoke the kind of warmth and contentment that accompanies most happy endings. However, here those feelings feel unearned, a bi-product of our natural disposition to smile whenever a princess gets her Prince Charming, even as we sense how ludicrous their pairing actually is.
 
Still, The Strong Man remains a decent film. Perhaps my misgivings have more to do with the curse of looking back, for seeing things in reverse order can make progress look like reversion, stripping a film of its rightful role as a necessary step in the development of cinema. One would hope story rises above aesthetics, but sometimes it does not, and having seen an idea done better can make another rendition of it less impressive regardless of whether one can mentally put the two films in chronological order. City Lights spoiled us, and its greatness makes similar movies – whether predecessors or successors – pale in comparison. It’s unfair, but…really, who wrote the darn letter? (on DVD as part of Kino’s Harry Langdon… the Forgotten Clown)
 
3 stars