Sa dernière culotte

I personally like Langdon's 'Long Pants' and feel that it is the best of the three films presented on Kino's 'The Forgotten Clown' disc. Contrary to some writers on the subject, I am inclined to believe that 'The Strong Man' is really the weak film. 'The Strong Man' begins poorly with an overlong scene of Langdon doing nearly nothing. 'Tramp Tramp Tramp' is a silly film with little substance, but it offers clean light-hearted entertainment. The relationship between Joan Crawford and Langdon should have been strengthened to bring out dramatic tension, and to make it connect with the final cyclone scene. 'Long Pants' is in several ways, a unique film. A boy caught up in his imagination gets his first pair of long pants. A rapid transformation occurs that delivers him from boyhood innocence into the actual world of his fantasies. With these new pants, he can't quite control himself, and soon thereafter, he meets up with a mysterious woman of questionable character who introduces the boy-man to the seedier parts of life. Langdon already has a finance, but she lacks the erotic nature the other possesses. But the pants do nothing more than to provide an allusion of manhood. As he allows himself to be seduced by the vixen flapper, his thoughts turn to doing away with his bride-to-be in a funny, yet slightly disturbing scene in the forest. But it's all in jest.

Frank Capra didn't care for the direction comedian Harry Langdon was steering his on-screen character. In March 1927's "Long Pants," Langdon decided to take a sharp turn reshaping his childlike persona. The actor saw an opportunity to take a few traits of his Harry Shelby, an innocent boy living with his parents, and create a dark side to him. Director Capra instinctively felt this was a wrong career move for Langdon and laid out his criticism in front of the actor. As filming progressed, the comedian's ego, with the press calling him the next Charlie Chaplin, was becoming more difficult to deal with, according to Capra in his biography detailing the events. Once the filming of "Long Pants" ended, Langdon decided to cut Capra's three-year working relationship and sent the director walking.

During "Long Pants'" production, Langdon mainly got what he wanted. Working alongside screenwriter Arthur Ripley, a future writer/director of dark 1940s film noirs, the comedian shaped the plot to give his character a devious dimension. His parents present him with a pair of long pants, signifying he's shedding his childhood clothes of shorts with high socks. Pushed to marry his childhood sweetheart Priscilla (Priscilla Bonner), Langdon is smitten with another woman, Bebe Blair (Alma Bennett), whom he happened to meet as he's riding his bicycle while she's stranded in her car with the chauffeur busy changing a flat tire. Alma, girlfriend of a mob figure, makes kissy with the pesky comedian to send him on his merry way. The morning of his wedding to Priscilla, Langdon decides to kill his bride-to-be with a revolver and pursue Alma. Because of several roadblocks, he's not able to murder her. The wedding is called off since all he can think of is Alma. He discovers she's in jail and springs her from there. Later, Langdon's sucked into the mob world where he finds himself in a cross fire shooting between an admirer of Alma's and another mobster.

The public wasn't buying the dark comedy of "Long Pants," resulting in a big-time flop for Langdon and The First National Pictures studio. Modern critic Maria Schneider wrote the picture "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."

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.

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

Making a comedy movie isn't just about firing off jokes for an hour or two. The audience needs a bit more of an experience. That's why the greatest screen comics of olden times were also great storytellers, and created for themselves comedy characters who were likable as well as funny. Harry Langdon was one of a small number of slapstick comedians from the silent era who made the leap from shorts to full-length features. However, unlike his mightier contemporaries Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Langdon's screen persona simply didn't have the weight to take on such an endeavour.

Long Pants sees the baby-faced comic step into Harold Lloyd territory as a shy youngster making his first awkward steps with the ladies. Here the similarities end though. Even with his cherubic features, the forty-three year old Langdon was perhaps pushing it a bit as a teen getting his first pair of eponymous pants. Furthermore whereas Lloyd had a sort of geeky charm, Langdon is at best bland, and at worst a little bizarre, here verging on the outright disturbing. After Harold falls for a vampish femme fatale, he has to finish things with the sweet and innocent girl-next-door he was previously engaged to. Some people would do this with a note, others with a sit-down talk. Langdon decides to lure the girl in to the woods with the intention of killing her. This sort of thing may be acceptable if you're the guitarist in a Norwegian black metal band, but not if you're a supposedly sympathetic comedy character. Langdon doesn't actually succeed in bumping her off, and his bungled attempt to do so is actually one of the vaguely funnier moments in Long Pants, but regardless of that we're being asked to root for some kind of Jeffrey Dahmer type, and the audience will be lost.

The other big problem with Harry Langdon is that he simply isn't very funny. He doesn't have that ability to conjure up comedy from his environment or his props, and the gags don't exactly flow. Granted, a lot of Langdon's style is in his reactions and his funny ways of doing things, but even in this area Langdon is second-rate, doing poor copies of Chaplin's mannerisms and Keaton's deadpan expressions. Of course, a lot of the fault here lies with the writers of Long Pants, and its director Frank Capra. Capra was always a massive egotist, later shown in the way he tried to claim complete authorship for his greatest pictures, but back at this stage it comes out in his camera-work. For Long Pants he uses all sorts of showy techniques, mobile point-of-view shots, god shots looking down over action, all quite unnecessary for silent comedy. It looks like the work of some green film student trying to get himself noticed. Compared to his even weaker direction for Langdon's The Strong Man, Capra at least seems to be learning the rudiments of physical comedy direction, a good set-up being the one where a cop is in the foreground making a telephone call, while Harry completely oblivious is cracking open a crate behind him. He is also now allowing scenes to play out without lots of cutting. It's just a shame Langdon isn't really worthy of such lengthy attention.

Unlike the moderate successes of The Strong Man and its predecessor, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (which is actually in my view the best, or rather least worst Langdon picture), Long Pants was a box-office flop. As oppose to Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, whose stars only began to fade once the talkies came along, it's fairly clear Langdon was a fad who disappeared as quickly as he emerged. And the main reason I have consistently compared him to those three is that he is occasionally touted as the "fourth" genius of silent comedy, a title he is a long way off meriting. In the recent resurge of interest he has enjoyed, he has been branded as "The Forgotten Clown" and "Chaplin-esque", or had his links to Frank Capra emphasised, even though the two Capra-directed Langdon pictures are hardly representative of the director's entire output. Many avid buffs will no doubt want to check Langdon out if only out of curiosity, but those who are purely fans of good quality comedy would be better off steering clear.