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 have said in other reviews of Langdon that I am not a great admirer of Capra and think that Langdon's best work on the whole was done with Harry Edwards directing at Sennett in 1924-1925 before Capra joined the team as a gag-man.

Of the First National features, I think the best is Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, directed by Edwards. The Strong Man is a badly paced film that tries to place Langdon in a dramatic context that does not really fit his performance-style and for which the script is not sufficiently strong. Moreover the whole film is in doubtful taste (the blind daughter, the "pseudo-miracle" with which the film ends). While the inspiration is obviously Chaplin, Chaplin's elements of social commentary were much more lightly sketched and often irreverent and, although he too was inclined to be sentimental, he was never falsely and manipulatively so in the Capra manner.

This film is also in very doubtful taste (even Keaton was shocked by the idea of the baby-faced comedian trying to murder his wife) but not this time in the service of false sentimentality. What sets Long Pants apart (and is its redeeming feature) is that it is a black comedy, a relatively rare bird in the Hollywood skies at that time and in a black comedy bad taste works and the scene of the attempted murder is quite the best in the film - in truth it is the sole real interest of the film.

The slow pace is again a fault as in The Strong Man and the scenes that one reviewers considers the highlights - the bicycle stunts and the policeman-dummy - are exactly the one that I would point to as extremely drawn out and tedious (and not very funny in the first place).

So I rate neither of the Capra-directed films very highly (nor for that matter the later Sennett shorts with which Capra was involved) but this film has a real interest that The Strong Man lacked and reveals a dark side of Capra that he was usually careful to camouflage.

Langdon's career after Capra was a disaster but, like Keaton, he was never likely to have been a success in the era of the "talkies". Both men had coarse and ugly voices, which would not necessarily in itself have mattered (think of Eugene Palette), except that the voices were in both cases a complete mismatch with the silent screen-image of the artists. Chaplin had a weak, reedy little voice (he had enormous theatre experience but very little of it vocal) but it was a much better fit with the "little tramp" character, especially as it had evolved in the feature films. Langdon had the additional problem that an ageing baby face is not at all a pretty sight. Alas, nobody loves a fairy (or an elf who has turned into a gnome) when they are forty!

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

Frank Capra's second and last film with Harry Langdon marks the beginning of the end of Langdon's career as a creative force in the final years of the silent era. He would fire Capra to direct after this, and the combination of the financial failure of Long Pants along with the poor reception to Langdon's own directed films meant a quick and steep decline into obscurity for the silent film comedian. The film itself is a minor entertainment, more cohesive but less funny than The Strong Man, and it meant that Capra was free to go off and get a job with Harry Cohn at Columbia.

Harry Shelby (Langdon) is a young man still in short pants to keep him innocent by his parents. When he finally gets his eponymous long pants, he's ready to go out into the world and make it known that he is an adult. He has something of a sweetheart in Priscilla (Priscilla Bonner), an ingenue in their little rural community. But, Harry is resistant because he's a big man now, and when Bebe Blair (Alma Bennett) rolls into town in her fancy car with a chauffeur who has to stop to change a tire, Harry is going to prove himself a man. To entertain herself slightly for the moment around the hicks, Bebe gives him a kiss before dropping a letter from her own beau on the ground by accident that promises to marry her at a better time, for she is attached to the underworld and on the run from the police. This letter is the only solace for Harry after her sudden departure, a feeling he holds onto with conviction until his wedding day with Priscilla when he sees Bebe's picture in the newspaper detailing her capture when he decides that he's going to save her and marry her instead of Priscilla.

So, the story is pretty decently laid out, it's just kind of thin. Based on a one minute meeting, Harry is willing to throw away everything in pursuit of a woman he knows is a criminal. Sure, men like to get excited by exotic women, and Bebe would be just that kind of woman, but in a fifty minute long film, the actual establishing of Harry's wanting of Bebe and dismissal of Priscilla (while being willing to marry her at all at the same time). Instead, of course, the point of the throughline is a series of gags, and those gags are pretty good. There's even a bit where Harry tries to build up the courage to shoot Priscilla in the forest before he bugs off to try and find Bebe, and he fails, of course. Buster Keaton found this bit in bad taste, and I'm honestly not in disagreement. It's kind of funny, but it's held back by the fact that it's so thoroughly morbid and doesn't seem to realize it.

The highlight is Harry getting Priscilla out of jail by hiding her in a box and then carting her around the city, getting into small hijinks with an alligator and a stuffed policeman. It's an extended sequence near the middle of the film, and it's pretty fun.

The finale is all about Harry discovering that the underworld that he's inviting himself into isn't for him with Bebe chasing down her beau, Glenn (Glenn Tyron) and friend (Betty Francisco) who have decided to shack up together in Bebe's absence. I think I'm more down on Long Pants than The Strong Man mostly because of this ending. There's some comic business chasing people around with a gun, but it's so much smaller and less anarchic than the ending of the previous film. It gets smaller instead of larger, and it's just not that funny. It's kind of funny, but not that funny.

And that's ultimately my issue. Long Pants has a slightly stronger story, but its comedy isn't as good. I think that balances out to a slightly less entertaining time at the movies, but at least we have the bit with the alligator.

It's not great cinema, but it's okay for a laugh or two.