Long Pants

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.

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.

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!

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.