Long Pants (1927)
Directed by
Frank Capra
Writing credits
Robert Eddy (adaptation)
Tay Garnett
Genre: Comedy
Plot Summary: Harry Shelby (Harry Langdon) has been kept in knee pants for years by his overprotective parents, but...
User Rating: 7.1/10 (47 votes)
Credited cast:
Harry Langdon .... Harry Shelby
Gladys Brockwell .... His Mother
Alan Roscoe .... His Father (as Al Roscoe)
Priscilla Bonner .... His Bride (Priscilla)
Alma Bennett .... His Downfall (Bebe Blair)
Betty Francisco .... His Finish
Runtime: 60 min
Country: USA
Color: Black and White
Sound Mix: Silent
Certification: Portugal:17 (director's cut)
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 like Robert E. Sherwood sang his praises. Yet within just two more years he was floundering, and by the '30s Harry was just another aging trouper, slogging his way through low-budget remakes of his best silent work.
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, Harry Langdon owed his success to the writer-director duo Sennett had assigned him, Harry Edwards and Frank Capra, who created Harry's child-man persona and apparently understood the character better than Langdon did himself. Capra in particular seems to have functioned as Quality Control, restraining Langdon's self-indulgent impulses that went unchecked later on. This becomes clear when one compares Langdon's first three feature films, all of which involved Capra as either writer or director, to the silent features made after Capra was fired (just after LONG PANTS), when Langdon took over the directing chores himself-- disastrously. The conclusion is inescapable: the Langdon child-man persona was the work of a team, only one of whom was the man audiences saw on the screen.
LONG PANTS is the third of Langdon's "great" features, and the last one made before the fast descent into sentimentality, sloppiness, and general weirdness which 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 moment. The introductory sequence is promising, but once the story proper gets rolling it feels misguided from the word go.
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. And once Harry dons his long pants, ventures outside, and starts interacting with others, we reluctantly suspect that Mom was right: the Harry Langdon of this film isn't merely a simple soul, he's disturbingly stunted, almost moronic. He's not charmingly dumb, he's infantile, and we get the creepy feeling that we're being encouraged to laugh at a retarded person.
Queasiness kicks in early, when Harry instantaneously falls in love with bad girl Bebe, who is just passing through town, and decides that he must therefore kill Priscilla, the sweet hometown girl his parents want him to marry. When Harry fantasizes about taking Priscilla out to the woods and shooting her, well, you may not rock with laughter, but as Mark Twain demonstrated there is legitimate (if dark) humor in examining the thought processes of an immature mind: this is reminiscent of Tom Sawyer glorying in fantasies of his own funeral. However, the mood changes when Harry actually attempts to carry out the murder. We're expected 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, but it's something else again to watch this pasty-faced simpleton try to kill his girlfriend-- who it appears, 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, or did she cause this?
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 any humor is sharply undercut by the knowledge that a team of gag writers was obviously working 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 because the film wasn't properly trimmed in the editing room. There are at least a couple 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 unfinished look.
For Harry Langdon at his best see THE STRONG MAN, or the better two-reelers made for Sennett. But LONG PANTS, sadly, 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.
Datos tecnicos:
Long Pants (Capra, 1926) (w. Harry Langdon) Grand-RiPXvId.avi
Tamaño....: 700 MB (or 716,986 KB or 734,193,664 bytes)
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Codec.....: 0x0055(MP3) ID'd as MPEG-1 Layer 3
Bitrate...: 122 kb/s (61/ch, stereo) VBR LAME3.90.°
Long.Pants.(Capra,.1926).(w..Harry.Langdon).Grand-RiPXvId.avi 
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