Frank Capra got his first feature film directing job from Harry Langdon, a silent film comic who was some kind of combination of Charlie Chaplin's innocent face and Buster Keaton's stonelike reaction to most stimuli. The end result is a combination of comic sensibilities that makes for an amusingly entertaining little gem of a film from the late silent era that still entertains nearly a hundred years later. Largely built on comic setpieces with less of an eye towards narrative cohesiveness than getting the audience to laugh with the next gag in the next setting, The Strong Man was a small delight.
During The Great War, Paul (Langdon) is a Belgian foot soldier who is corresponding with a young American girl he's never met in real life named Mary Brown (Priscilla Bonner). They've fallen in love, but when Paul gets personally kidnapped by the German Zandow (Arthur Thalasso) (apparently, this version of WWI included personal kidnappings and borderline slave labor afterwards, but okay). Because of that, Paul loses all contact with Mary and can only hope to contact her again when Zandow takes him to America as part of his circus act as the world's strongest man. This, of course, leads to Paul asking nearly every woman he meets who remotely resembles the picture he has if they're Mary.
As previously mentioned, this film is really built on individual comic sequences rather than one cohesive story, so when Paul ends up in New York, latching onto Lily (Gertrude Astor), a young, attractive woman attached to the underworld element after she drops a wad of cash into his pocket to evade the police, its about the comic possibilities of Lily trying to get the money back, not tying it to what comes later. It would have been stronger had it tied to what came later, but it's amusing enough to watch Lily circle around him in public, take him back to her apartment with promises that she's Mary, and then just cutting the money out of his coat pocket to get it.
Anyway, Zandow's show takes them to a small town that's been overrun by the criminal element (it would have been easy to bring Lily back here somehow, but the film never follows through) and is the home to the Reverend Holy Joe (William Mong) who also happens to be the father to Mary, who is blind because it makes her more sympathetic. Paul finds Mary, they connect, but the town is just too overrun with the criminal element who have completely taken over. Into this, Paul must help Zandow with his performance in the town's large hall.
The centerpiece of the film is the final twenty minutes or so as Paul has to take the stage in place of the strong man who gets bonked on the head. He has to find ways around the fact that he's not that strong to entertain the rowdy crowd and protect his own life, culminating with him using the cannon to fire into the crowd, all while Holy Joe leads a prayer march through the town to end at the hall, the chaos inside looking like it's being caused by the praying outside. It's a wonderful comic contradiction that Capra uses alongside some rather sophisticated camera work, especially when Paul ends up in a trapeze, and even some large set destruction both inside and out.
Could it have come together better? No doubt. There's a lackadaisical approach to plotting that really shows that the emphasis was on individual setpieces rather than the story as a whole, but Langdon is a winning personality with an innocence about him that allows him to float from one sequence to the next. There's enough of a throughline in the little romance between Paul and Mary to form some kind of connective tissue, even though it's pretty scant.
So early in Capra's career, it's hard to tell how much of this is him and how much is Langdon, who produced the film, but he at least starts out with a winning little comedy.
During The Great War, Paul (Langdon) is a Belgian foot soldier who is corresponding with a young American girl he's never met in real life named Mary Brown (Priscilla Bonner). They've fallen in love, but when Paul gets personally kidnapped by the German Zandow (Arthur Thalasso) (apparently, this version of WWI included personal kidnappings and borderline slave labor afterwards, but okay). Because of that, Paul loses all contact with Mary and can only hope to contact her again when Zandow takes him to America as part of his circus act as the world's strongest man. This, of course, leads to Paul asking nearly every woman he meets who remotely resembles the picture he has if they're Mary.
As previously mentioned, this film is really built on individual comic sequences rather than one cohesive story, so when Paul ends up in New York, latching onto Lily (Gertrude Astor), a young, attractive woman attached to the underworld element after she drops a wad of cash into his pocket to evade the police, its about the comic possibilities of Lily trying to get the money back, not tying it to what comes later. It would have been stronger had it tied to what came later, but it's amusing enough to watch Lily circle around him in public, take him back to her apartment with promises that she's Mary, and then just cutting the money out of his coat pocket to get it.
Anyway, Zandow's show takes them to a small town that's been overrun by the criminal element (it would have been easy to bring Lily back here somehow, but the film never follows through) and is the home to the Reverend Holy Joe (William Mong) who also happens to be the father to Mary, who is blind because it makes her more sympathetic. Paul finds Mary, they connect, but the town is just too overrun with the criminal element who have completely taken over. Into this, Paul must help Zandow with his performance in the town's large hall.
The centerpiece of the film is the final twenty minutes or so as Paul has to take the stage in place of the strong man who gets bonked on the head. He has to find ways around the fact that he's not that strong to entertain the rowdy crowd and protect his own life, culminating with him using the cannon to fire into the crowd, all while Holy Joe leads a prayer march through the town to end at the hall, the chaos inside looking like it's being caused by the praying outside. It's a wonderful comic contradiction that Capra uses alongside some rather sophisticated camera work, especially when Paul ends up in a trapeze, and even some large set destruction both inside and out.
Could it have come together better? No doubt. There's a lackadaisical approach to plotting that really shows that the emphasis was on individual setpieces rather than the story as a whole, but Langdon is a winning personality with an innocence about him that allows him to float from one sequence to the next. There's enough of a throughline in the little romance between Paul and Mary to form some kind of connective tissue, even though it's pretty scant.
So early in Capra's career, it's hard to tell how much of this is him and how much is Langdon, who produced the film, but he at least starts out with a winning little comedy.