Long Pants

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.