Long Pants

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'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.

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.

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.

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.