Kino Video deserves credit for mass-issuing the work of an oft-overlooked silent-film comedian whose appeal to modern audiences is limited: Harry Langdon's odd, disconcerting child-man persona will seem utterly alien to cynical viewers in a post-Saturday Night Live age. A doughy, pear-shaped twerp with a round, porcelain face and a toddler's gait, Langdon's character is almost entirely helpless—so weak that he sometimes half-kneels as he stands—and is pure, aching sweetness. Langdon may have distant descendants in latter-day weirdo child-men like Paul Reubens' Pee Wee Herman and Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean. But where they transform their surroundings to reflect their eccentricities, Langdon is alarmingly passive, and when finally moved to react, he does so in maddeningly slow, pathetic ways that somehow work to his advantage. Langdon offered a marked contrast to his contemporary screen rivals Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, who won moviegoers with little-boy charm of their own, but were far more swift and cunning when faced with adversity. Not surprisingly, Langdon was most often cast as an oblivious innocent adrift in a corrupt world, a formula that made him terrifically popular in the mid-1920s. Of the three features Kino has released, The Strong Man (1927) is the best. Here, Langdon plays a Belgian World War I veteran who searches for his blind American pen-pal girlfriend (by asking every woman he meets if she is Mary Brown), and mostly through accident and chance rescues her town from crooks and bootleggers. Crisply timed and almost perfectly paced, it is also notable as Frank Capra's directorial debut. Less successful is Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), though it contains several fine moments and features a cyclone sequence with gusting gales and tumbling building facades that anticipate Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. by almost two years. (An unrecognizable Joan Crawford is featured in her first film role, as Langdon's leading lady.) Long Pants (1927), also directed by Capra, was a peculiar change of pace for Langdon, and possibly an attempt to poke fun at his baby-faced image by casting him as a would-be lady-killer; sporting little of the ingenuity of The Strong Man, it was a box-office failure that set off the comedian's quick decline into obscurity. An acquired taste, Harry Langdon's gentle absurdities and slow rhythms take some getting used to, but patient viewers will be rewarded.