Long Pants (Silent)

Forgotten funnyman Harry Langdon stars in this surreal, dark silent comedy directed by the legendary Frank Capra. Harry plays a strange, childlike man whose parents have kept him in short pants his entire life. On the day they finally consent to let him wear long pants, the newly-confident manchild meets a vamp named Bebe, who has just delivered some "snow" for her crook boyfriend. Delusional, Harry thinks the Vamp has the hots for him, and tells his parents. They think he means his next-door neighbor Priscilla, and arrange for the two to be married. Still thinking the Vamp is his destiny, Harry tries to kill Priscilla on their wedding day, but instead winds up getting caught in a bear trap. Learning that Bebe was nabbed smuggling cocaine, Harry attempts to mount a jailbreak, setting into motion a bizarre chain of events that may finally bring him to his senses - if that's even possible…

Harry Langdon got his start making two-reel silent comedies for Mack Sennett (many of which are collected on the three-volume Harry Langdon Comedy Classics series, available from Alpha Video) in which he developed his unique manchild persona. Tiring of two-reelers, Langdon left Sennett to make features for First National, taking his collaborators Arthur Ripley and Frank Capra with him. The first two pictures - Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), which co-starred a young Joan Crawford, and The Strong Man (1926) - were hits. For Long Pants, Ripley wrote a story just as dark as his later film noirs like The Chase (1946) but many, including Buster Keaton, thought Langdon went too far in showing his character attempting murder. After Long Pants, success went to Harry's head, and he fired Capra, choosing to direct his films himself beginning with Three's a Crowd (1927). Results were mixed, to say the least, and before long Harry was back making two-reel comedies for Educational Pictures. Though he was wallowing in B-movies when he died in 1944, in the following decades proper context for his work has led many to declare Langdon just as important as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd when it comes to silent comedy. As David Bowie once said, "It's terribly important that Harry Langdon, the silent comedian, cannot be taken on his own; you have to put him alongside that which went on around him, like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and Chaplin."