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.

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.

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.

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.

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."