Long Pants

By the time silent comedian Harry Langdon made his third feature the strain behind the camera was beginning to show on screen: the storyline was more contrived; the gags more forced; and the premise even thinner than usual for a silent comedy. What's left to give the film any distinction is the compelling perversity of Langdon's character: an immature, innocent small town boy more than willing to be corrupted by an alluring big city siren.

As always Langdon's comic style was a curious mix of adolescent longings, adult responsibilities, and almost infantile facial tics and gestures, all of which worked best when the camera simply stood back and watched him improvise. This may not have involved anything more than an occasional, tentative change of posture or expression, and the process was so intuitive not even Langdon could define it. He later fell out with Frank Capra and tried to direct himself, with disastrous results, the worst (in the long run) being the sad fact that a unique and once unforgettable talent is today all but forgotten.

Harry Langdon's brief career as a top-ranked silent comic stands as a good definition of "meteoric." He was a late bloomer, already pushing 40 (though eerily baby-faced) when he was signed to make shorts for the Mack Sennett Studio in 1923, but his rise to popularity was rapid, and within three years he was starring in feature films while highbrow critics such as Robert E. Sherwood sang his praises. And yet, within two more years he was floundering, and by the '30s Harry was just another aging trouper, slogging his way through low-budget talkies, often re-workings of his best silent material.

Clues to this sudden and mysterious downfall are not hard to find: one need look no further than the opening credits of his films. Although he was a gifted performer, Langdon owed much of his success to the creative team assisting him on the Sennett lot, Harry Edwards, Arthur Ripley and Frank Capra, who helped him shape his child-man persona and seemingly understood the character better than Langdon did himself. Capra exaggerated his own role in later years, but he did know how to efficiently craft funny, satisfying comedies. This becomes clear when one compares Langdon's first three feature films, all of which involved Capra as either writer or director, to the features made after Capra was fired (i.e. just after Long Pants finished production), when Langdon took over the directing chores himself, with wobbly results. The conclusion is inescapable: Harry's best work was crafted by a team.

Long Pants is the third of the features generally said to be Langdon's best, and the last one made before the descent into sentimentality and weirdness that drove audiences away. But frankly I've never been able to enjoy this film much, and in viewing it again it looks to me like Harry was already losing it, Capra or no Capra, despite the occasional funny moments. The introductory sequence is promising, but once the story proper gets rolling the enterprise goes awry.

Harry is presented as something of a freak, an aging boy-man in short pants who lives vicariously through romance novels but still lives at home with his parents. When his father brings home a pair of long trousers -- apparently, Harry's first pair -- the mother states that keeping him at home in shorts has kept him out of trouble. The uncomfortable implication is that Harry is "special" and can't handle the pressures of the world outside the family home. Once Harry dons his long pants, ventures outside, and starts interacting with others, we suspect that Mom was right: the Harry we find here isn't merely a simple soul, he's disturbingly stunted, almost moronic. We get the queasy feeling we're being encouraged to laugh at a simpleton.

This queasiness kicks in early, when Harry instantly falls in love with bad girl Bebe, who is passing through town, and decides that he must therefore kill Priscilla, the sweet hometown girl his parents want him to marry. As Mark Twain demonstrated there is legitimate (if dark) humor in examining the thought processes of an immature mind, so when Harry fantasizes about taking Priscilla out to the woods and shooting her, well, it's dark all right, but not necessarily fatal to successful comedy. However, the mood changes when Harry actually attempts to carry out the murder. We're supposed to find humor in Harry's clumsiness, in his ineptitude as an assassin, while dim-bulb Priscilla remains doggedly unaware of what he's trying to do. It's one thing when Laurel & Hardy fail at building a house or fixing a boat, we can all relate to that, but it's something else again to watch while this pasty-faced man-child attempts to bump off his girlfriend -- who, it would appear, is almost as mentally limited as he is. In a word, it's icky.

To make matters worse, all of Harry's choices in this story are motivated by an unworthy object: the girl he's fallen for, Bebe, isn't just naughty, she's a career criminal and a drug smuggler, as revealed in a letter she receives in her introductory scene. (One genuinely funny touch, probably unintended, is her correspondent's fastidiousness in using quotation marks when referring to the "snow.") Everything Harry does is motivated by his delusional love for Bebe, a result of his excruciatingly limited experience of the world. Was Harry's Mom right in locking him up?

During the 'failed murder' sequence another of the film's flaws surfaces: many of the gags feel labored, with unusual props suddenly appearing in unlikely places, apparently just to give Harry the opportunity to be funny, extend a sequence, or conclude it. Items such as guns, light bulbs, changes of clothing, a ventriloquist dummy, and even an alligator turn up at the darnedest times, but our enjoyment is undercut by the knowledge that a team of gag writers obviously worked overtime to think up these gags. It's also worth mentioning that the editing of Long Pants is curiously sloppy, and I'm referring not to the rough jumps that are common in older films when bits of film are missing, but rather to the jarring moments which result when the images or movements in a medium or long shot don't quite match after an edit because the shots weren't properly trimmed. There are several of these moments I noticed, but then, the firing of director Frank Capra just after principle photography was concluded might have had something to do with this film's somewhat rushed look.

For Harry Langdon at his best I recommend The Strong Man, or the better short comedies made for Sennett. But for me, Long Pants stands as a strange and unsatisfying milestone in the unhappy career of Harry Langdon, who could have achieved so much more with the proper guidance.

It's debatable whether Frank Capra could have prolonged Harry Langdon's career much further beyond this strange effort had they not split acrimoniously. For my money, there's about thirty minutes of material stretched to twice that length here, and it looks like they were attempting to inject a little shock value to liven things up. It might have worked back in 1926, but there's nothing shocking today in that scene in which Harry unsuccessfully attempts to murder his bride-to-be, just something... creepy. It makes you realise what an effective horror character that pancake-white baby-faced man-child would have made if he had chosen a different genre...

The story is as daft as they come, but there's nothing wrong with that - most comedies from the silent era have fairly nonsensical plots, and it shows an awareness of the vaguely unsettling aspect of Harry's character in that murder sub-plot. But what it lacks are any real laughs to speak of. Combine this with a deadly tendency to stretch scenes by repeating the same moves over and over - particularly in that attempted murder scene, and when Harry attempts various tricks to lure what he believes to be a policeman (but which is actually a ventriloquist's dummy) away from the case in which he has hidden the woman he idolises.

Langdon had a few neat tricks, and his hesitant, childlike shyness is initially endearing, but all too soon the appeal wears thin and his material is exposed as the threadbare stuff that it really is.

In his rustic country home, baby-faced Harry Langdon (as Harry Shelby) acquires his first pair of "Long Pants" - and they go immediately to his head. Quickly, Mr. Langdon is reading Eugene O'Neill's "Desire under the Elms" and showing off his pants for bewitching city woman Alma Bennett (as Bebe Blair). The drug-smuggling siren meets a bicycling Langdon when her fancy car suffers a flat tire. She throws him for a loop with a kiss. These scenes are all well and good Langdon.

Langdon is expected to court childhood sweetheart Priscilla Bonner (as Priscilla), but cannot stop fantasizing about Ms. Bennett. The pretense works well for most of the early running, but slacks off during the second half. Langdon plotting to kill Ms. Bonner, and some later scenes, do not fit as well as others. After peaking with "The Strong Man" (1926), Langdon seemed to be getting a little too big for his britches, even firing Frank Capra due to difficulties putting on "Long Pants".

****** Long Pants (3/26/27) Frank Capra ~ Harry Langdon, Alma Bennett, Priscilla Bonner, Gladys Brockwell

A boy grows up to the age to wear long pants and is supposed to be married to a girl of his parents choosing, but when he finds a criminal vamp on the run, he falls for her and decides to free her from jail and become her partner. He's a tad slow but eventually realizes his mistake and returns home,

This is a really weird movie that you will either love or hate. Langdon had an odd persona of man-baby and here they push it to dark places, ie) him about to murder his fiancé. BUT that darkness is totally unique in silent comedy and makes this something to see. I found the major issue to be with some of the direction and editing. Wide shots, choppiness, etc, Langdon worked best in long, uninterrupted takes. Overall though, this is worth seeing, especially if you like Langdon's oddball character.