The Book of Counted Sorrows

Although a miserable failure in vaudeville, Langford Crispin was a huge and immediate hit in films, which was a new and exciting art form that had not yet been taken over by the dreaded Stupid Mafia – a criminal conspiracy of the intellectually challenged – which had fully seized control of the movie business by the late 1960s. Langford was nominated for an Academy Award in 1930, for All Quiet on the Western Front. If you have seen this classic movie, Langford’s astonishing portrayal of Lew Ayres’ brother, Jinky, will stay with you forever. Jinky, a carefree circus clown, trades in his polka-dot jumpsuit for a uniform and his giant floppy shoes for combat boots, to go off to Europe and fight for his country and for the dignity of humanity. In the brutal trench warfare against the Germans, on blasted landscapes smoky with mustard gas, Jinky learns to his surprise that war really is hell -and that a unicycle is more difficult to pilot through bomb craters than around Barnum Bailey’s center ring. Nevertheless, through the unremitting horror, he holds fast to his sense of humor, and even as he is dying, he manages to squeeze the hand-pump bulb that operates the squirting flower in the lapel of his torn battle jacket, thoroughly wetting the startled face of the medic who is trying without success to staunch his wounds.

Langford was again nominated for best actor for his role in in Cimarron, 1931, the epic adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel, in which he starred with Richard Dix and the lovely Irene Dunne. In this tale of a pioneer family determined to build an empire in early Oklahoma, Langford played Richard Dix’s gentle brother, Soupy, who wants only to spread Christian fellowship and a proper appreciation of flower arrangement to the crude communities of the primitive prairie. His sweetness and innocence are ultimately met with mockery, gunfire, and a blazing wagon loaded with dynamite.

Langford was first seen reading The Book of Counted Sorrows between takes on the set of Cimarron, during filming in 1930. By the time he was making Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the brilliant Fredric March, in 1931, he kept the book always within reach and carried it with him wherever he went, when not actually before a camera. If his hands were full of parcels, he carried the book on his head, balanced with the confidence of a man who had begun his vaudeville career juggling flaming snakes. If his hands were full of parcels, and if something was already balanced on his head – such as a basket of bread or a big water jug, or a dwarf (his vaudeville friend, Tiny Johnson, shorter than a yardstick, enjoyed the view from this high perch) – then Langford carried the precious book in his teeth. If his hands were filled with parcels and if a water jug or a cheerful dwarf was balanced on his head, and if also he was involved in a conversation, then he carried the book between his knees, which required him to walk funny and drew stares from strangers, but he was not a man who ever cared what others thought of him.

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you will remember Langford as Fredric March’s half brother. Jerry Jekyll, who was on the lam, pursued by the London constabulary for roughing up a group of children carolers when they insisted on singing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” instead of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, which he had requested in return for a donation of a shiny half pence. By the end of the film, Jerry learns all the wrong lessons from the disgrace and death of his arrogant brother. Vowing to achieve a scientific breakthrough even more dazzling than that of the late Dr. Jekyll, Jerry flees to Europe, changing his name to Victor Frankenstein, with the intent to prove that sundry parts of various dead people can, through the miracle of electrical shock, be assembled into a presentable new person capable of providing cheap but nevertheless high-quality domestic labor.

In 1932, Langford Crispin’s performance as Jerry Jekyll brought him the Academy Award for the best supporting actor. He was the first winner ever to thank “all the little people,” and when he spoke this phrase, which countless winners would use after him, he doffed his enormous top hat to reveal an actual little person, Tiny Johnson, sitting on his head. In our time, this stunt might seem politically incorrect or at least insensitive, and perhaps tasteless to some. In those long-ago days, however, the entertainment community wasn’t as refined as it has become in this most genteel age of Charlie Sheen, Howard Stern, Eminem, and Freddy the Farting Chimp. With perhaps the exception of Mary Pickford and Francis the Talking Mule, entertainers in those days were largely an unseemly, unrefined, unpolished, uncouth, undulant, unplumbed, unzipped, undone, uncaged, unearthed, unbonneted rabble. When Langford removed his top hat to reveal Tiny Johnson perched on his pate, the crowd at the Academy Awards show roared with laughter, howled and stamped their feet, and hooted and spat copiously.

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