A three-reeler written by [Arthur] Ripley and Capra, Saturday Afternoon is one of Langdon’s most rueful and cynical comedies. The opening title reads: “In 1864 when Lincoln declares all men free and equal, did he, or did he not, intend to include husbands?” Langdon plays a meek husband who is “blissfully ignorant that he is henpecked,” the script notes, until “one day he discovers that the world thinks he is a big joke, as the result of which he sets out to assert himself and cease to be henpecked”. Harry’s wife (chillingly played by Alice Ward) contemptuously suggests he have a fling, so he and Vernon Dent step out for a double date with flappers Ruth Hiatt and Peggy Montgomery. “The result of this is disastrous to him and at last he is very happy to return to his wife and her hen-pecking, full knowing that he had to have such a wife to be happy”.

Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Simon & Schuster, New York 1992 (revised edition, St Martin’s Griffin, New York 2000)