The Strong Man

Second of the three features on the strength of which Langdon was briefly hailed as another Chaplin, here playing a Belgian soldier happily resorting to his catapult instead of a machine-gun in the World War I trenches, then heading for America after the armistice (as assiastant to a brutish strong man) in quest of the pen pal he has fallen for, unaware that she is blind. Pathos aside, there are some really very funny gags, and - if you can stand Langdon's somewhat obscene persona as an overgrown, pudding-faced baby - a beautifully constructed sequence in which he is subjected to ferociously close pursuit by a vamp, hungering not for his body as he assumes but for the loot hidden in his pocket. Capra's first feature, incidentally.