When cable TV came along in the 1970s a lot of long-forgotten material from Hollywood's past was exhumed and put on display once more. I recall a station somewhere in the Midwest that regularly played short films from the '30s, especially two-reel comedies produced by Educational Pictures. Good silent comedies were made by this outfit in the 1920s, but by the '30s the studio had fallen on hard times, and it became something of a haven for comedians from the silent era who were past their prime. I saw several of Buster Keaton's talkie shorts on cable and found some of them quite enjoyable, and not nearly as bad as their latter-day reputation suggested, but I felt that the comedies Harry Langdon made for Educational (or at least the ones that turned up on TV) didn't hold up as well as Buster's. Langdon's high, piping voice certainly suited his child-man appearance, but for best results his characterization seemed to require silence; the addition of realistic sound sometimes made an already strange figure seem even stranger. Still, Harry had his moments in talkies, and Knight Duty is probably his best effort from this period, the one that most closely captures the spirit of his best Sennett shorts from the 1920s.
Like so many silent comedies this film begins in a park. Harry sleeps there, and quickly runs afoul of a big cop played by his frequent co-star Vernon Dent. Dent wears a Keystone Cop outfit that looks outdated in the '30s, and has a cute running gag in which his hat is repeatedly knocked over his ears. Quite accidentally Harry manages to come to the aid of a young woman whose purse has been stolen, but the necessity of his fleeing the law prevents them from becoming better acquainted. Soon after, Harry has a nice routine that's very much like his silent work: when his hat falls off near a sprinkler he tries to retrieve it, but gets sprayed. Harry darts back and forth, approaches his hat like a tightrope walker, tries kinking the hose to stop the flow, and eventually snags the hat. It's pure Langdon, no one else could have pulled off this sort of thing so well, but it would have played better with some bouncy LeRoy Shield-style music on the soundtrack. Unfortunately this is one area where the studio's limited financial resources hurt the results.
In his attempt to flee the cop Harry stows away on the back of a truck transporting wax statues to a museum. He manages to get knocked unconscious, is carried into the museum with the statues, and awakens there in a dazed condition. (Although in Harry's case, "dazed" is a matter of degree.) The rest of the film unfolds there, as our hero encounters cops, crooks, and a lot of sinister-looking wax figures. A hastily contrived plot concerning a stolen ruby drives the action. Needless to say the setting is ripe for visual comedy, and it seems to have inspired Langdon and his crew to rise to the occasion with a procession of good gags: dummies are mistaken for people and vice versa, Harry disappears into a magician's box, mistakes a mirror for a doorway, decapitates a dummy cop and is almost decapitated himself, etc. He eventually finds that the pretty girl from the park is the museum director's daughter, and rescues her again—more or less by accident, of course.
Langdon is supported by a solid cast of comedy veterans, including Eddie Baker and Billy Engle, and there's a distinct feeling that everyone is making a special effort to lift this short above the general run of the studio's output. Under the circumstances, they did pretty well. If only the sets hadn't been quite so shabby, and if only a good musical track had been supplied, this short would almost rank with the concurrent short comedy work of Laurel & Hardy and W.C. Fields. As it is, Knight Duty provides a fair measure of entertainment, and also demonstrates that under the right circumstances Harry Langdon could work successfully with sound. And yet, I have to confess that I'm tempted to watch it again with the sound off, while playing some ragtime or hot jazz from Langdon's heyday, the 1920s.