User Reviews

This isn't a bad comedy short, though the style seems to be a little more like a Three Stooges or even Laurel and Hardy short than a Langdon one, as there is more action and the character Harry plays isn't much like the one he played in silent days. Like many of the Stooges' films, Vernon Dent is on hand to act along side Langdon. Dent actually made tons of Langdon films in the 20s and 30s before he worked with the Stooges, but here the chemistry between Dent and Langdon is unusual--not bad, just unusual compared to their other films. Dent and Langdon play more like a team--Harry is not his usual solo star.

Dent is in trouble with his boss at the newspaper and the boss demands photos to impress the readers. However, Dent can give him nothing. On a lark, he asks Langdon (who is NOT one of the paper's photographers) to come along and help him get a story and pictures about a local gangster's girlfriend. Oddly, when the portly Dent and the mouse of a man Langdon arrive, the lady and her friend attack them with kisses. Wow, these ladies must be really desperate!! When the gang returns, Dent and Langdon make their escape in a rather funny fashion (along with an interesting transition to the next scene).

Later, the paper gets a tip that a robbery is about to occur, so they send these two knuckleheads to cover the action. You'd think with such a big story they'd have someone better on hand to cover it! Maybe they just thought they were expendable. Regardless, Harry is caught in the middle of a rather stupid gun fight but miraculously at the end, he's not only captured the crook but gets the girl and the reward! Reasonably well made, but far from subtle. This is worth seeing but don't expect much of the old Harry Langdon style or magic.

When talkies came along and swept away the silent cinema many of the reigning stars were dismayed, naturally enough, but some of them publicly welcomed the change and said so in the press. Whether this was sincere or mere bravado surely varied, depending on who was talking. I don't know if Harry Langdon's opinion about the new technology was ever recorded. By the time talkies came along Langdon was no longer a top star, and his views were no longer sought by reporters. Langdon didn't live long enough to be "rediscovered" and interviewed in later life, but Buster Keaton did, and he told more than one interviewer how he would have used sound if he'd retained control of his own film unit: he would have avoided wisecracks, restricted dialog to the essential minimum, and kept right on performing his characteristic physical comedy, backed with appropriate music and sound effects. Both Langdon and Keaton worked at Educational Pictures in the '30s, and although their creative control was limited (and so were their budgets!) we can find approximations of what Buster described in the best films both of these gifted comedians made at the studio. The Big Flash is the first of the two-reel comedies Harry made under his Educational contract, and it displays more than a hint of the style he perfected at the Sennett Studio in the mid-1920s. Happily, it also pairs him with Vernon Dent, his frequent co-star from Sennett days.

The story is set in a newspaper office where Klaus (Dent) works as a janitor. The editor-in-chief wants photos of a notorious crook named Brick Dugan and his moll, Nadine. When Klaus learns that the assistant janitor (Harry) is a talented amateur shutter-bug, and that he happens to have a compromising snapshot of the boss, Klaus uses the threat of blackmail to improve his position at the paper. As a "reward," Klaus and his assistant are assigned the job of getting exclusive photos, first of Nadine and then of Brick himself—while he's in the act of robbing a jewelry store, no less. Meanwhile Klaus and Harry are rivals for the affections of Betty, a secretary who works for the paper. In the end, and despite much ineptitude along the way, Harry wins the day and the girl.

This plot could easily have been used to for a silent comedy. (And perhaps it was, although I don't recognize it as a remake of any earlier short.) Even with the addition of sound, Langdon's personal brand of visual comedy carries the film. He looks and behaves much as he did in the Sennett shorts, as when he mops the hallway using a highly idiosyncratic method, splashing tiny dollops of water onto the floor with his hands, mopping dirt under a rug, etc. Dialog is kept to a minimum, and there are plenty of gags that would work just as well with the sound off. Harry has a memorable scene with Nadine, the crook's sexy girlfriend, showing his characteristic degree of alarm and wariness when she attempts to vamp him. (Actress Lita Chevret flashes so much leg in this scene I began to wonder if the title referred to her.) There's an initially mysterious bit involving popcorn kernels in Harry's pocket, but a nice payoff: when Nadine kisses Harry, the unpopped popcorn in his pocket pops. Harry freezes into a statue, dazed, teeters dangerously back and forth, then collapses. It's a prime Langdon bit. Later, handed a tommy-gun, Harry accidentally fires it off, spraying his surroundings with bullets, and terrifying everyone—again, shtick he could do back in the silent days, and did.

If you enjoy Harry Langdon's silent work you'll probably enjoy The Big Flash, which, low budget notwithstanding, offers a number of satisfying comic moments. Nice to see and hear Vernon Dent too, as he was always Harry's best foil. And here's a shout-out to the unheralded and very attractive Lita Chevret, who makes me wish I'd been around in 1932. I understand Harry's reaction completely.

THE BIG FLASH, a Harry Langdon snappy short, not the best thing he has ever done, tells about the race for a scoop in the newspapers' world; I like Langdon a bit less than Keaton and Lloyd, but much enough to know that he has seen been better scripts than what he's been offered here. The girls in this movie are pretty, even pretty to hot—but the teasing scene, when the devourer of men seduces poor Langdon, is crude; but in better hand, better directed and filmed and paced, this would have made a nice comedy. Yet—some gags are good and lively if standard, the movie looks endearing, and is a must for all of us Langdon fans.

Two humble workers in a newspapers redaction are assigned to get a scoop; one of them is an electrician, a brute, who usurped Langdon's merited advancement for his photographic skills and is his rival in love. The second is Langdon himself, the usurped, the shy, the merry, the rivaled. Lacking the supreme refinement and subtlety of Keaton, and the vigor of Chaplin or the manic energy of Lloyd, Langdon resembles more Laurel (and Hardy) in his less sophisticated approach. (--In addition to the slapstick hexagon—Linder, Lloyd, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Keaton and Langdon—I like very much Fatty as well, and maybe even Bevan …. The silent slapstick is very much worth exploring.--) So—the script is good, Langdon is good, the babes are hot, but the directing and pace stink. Perhaps the slapstick is best when served silent, what do you think? The slapstick is possible only as silent cinema, I guess. Movies like this make me think that the slapstick was designed solely for the silent cinema and attempts to update it end in relative misery. Do you agree?