To Frank Capra, The Strong Man was “more than a comedy”. In the early frames of his first feature as a director, he declared his artistic independence with a direct evocation of his primal experience – his rebirth as an American. Harry Langdon plays Paul Bergot, a Belgian doughboy who emigrates to America on a giant steamer, passes under the protective gaze of the Statue of Liberty, and disembarks on Ellis Island. The title preceding the sequence calls Paul one of the “immigrants seeking a newer Rainbow in the Land of Promise”. It is worth nothing that this film is the only one Capra made with Langdon in which Langdon’s character is not named “Harry” or “The Boy” but has a separate identity. This may have been Capra’s way of bringing the character closer to himself and infusing him with an unaccustomed depth. Though Ripley received solo story credit, with the adaptation credited to Tim Whelan, Tay Garnett, James Langdon, and Hal Conklin (Bob Eddy and Clarence Hennecke contributing without credit), Capra clearly was the dominant personality on The Strong Man. This moral fable, whose working title was The Yes Man, treats in comic terms several of the key elements of Capra’s life: the gullible immigrant’s harsh exposure to the corruption of big-city America as he pounds the streets looking for work; the shock of his first sexual encounter with a rapacious older woman; his entry into show business, as the assistant to a vaudeville strong man, and his sudden rise to stardom in the unmerited role of the strong man; his attempts to overcome the pervasive corruption which has penetrated even the archetypal American small town, Cloverdale (read: Hollywood); and his romantic yearnings for a pure, wholesome woman through whose love the weakling can find the power to become The Strong Man.

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