Langdon/First National, 1927. Director: Frank Capra. Scenario: Arthur Ripley, Robert Eddy. Camera: Elgin Lessley, Glenn Kershner. Cast: Harry Langdon, Alma Bennett, Priscilla Bonner, Gladys Brockwell, Al Roscoe.
Like many another silent-film devotee, I was impacted at an early age by the discovery of James Agee’s classic essay “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Originally written in 1949 for Life magazine, Agee’s essay was an eloquent evocation of the world of silent comedies, and singled out four of the top comedians for individual tributes. For me—and, I’ve since learned, for countless other impressionable young minds—his words opened up a vast, rich, unsuspected world, and established those four comics as a kind of Mount Rushmore of silent comedy. Three of the four are, indeed, undisputed masters of the form: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. A full appreciation of the fourth, Harry Langdon, is more challenging. I’ve never featured a Langdon film in this column before. Now, especially since Langdon will be seen onscreen this month at the Kansas Silent Film Festival, I think it’s time.
For those unfamiliar with Langdon and his films, the key to his work was an absolutely unique comic persona. He was, simply put, a child in an adult’s body. Chaplin, in many of his films, indulged in sentiment and pathos; Langdon went several steps further. To watch his films is like watching a toddler turned loose in traffic. Wide-eyed, timid, hesitant, little Harry tries to make his way in an adult world of pitfalls and dangers that he is utterly unable to comprehend, let alone navigate. Much of Langdon’s comedy stems from this contrast: between the plot situation and Harry’s childlike reaction to it. This odd dynamic makes some viewers uncomfortable, but when Langdon’s talent was allied with topnotch writers and directors, it produced some true cinematic classics.
To the viewer who wants to experience Langdon’s work for the first time, my advice is to start with one or more of his two-reel shorts (such as the one to be shown in Kansas this month) or his first two independent features, both produced in 1926. Tramp, Tramp, Tramp and, in particular, The Strong Man are polished gems of comedy, featuring Langdon at his most palatable, and are widely celebrated by film societies and Langdon aficionados. Both are recommended without reservation as achievements in the art of silent comedy. But this column is all about the overlooked and less familiar films, and I’m choosing to focus on Langdon’s third independent feature, Long Pants. Produced by the same team that had crafted the earlier classics, Long Pants builds on the foundation of those films and takes the Langdon character into new, bizarre, and sometimes dark territory. It’s a fascinating and ultimately rewarding classic in its own right.
In this film, the age of the “Harry” character, never really clear in any of his films, is unusually ambiguous. On one hand, as the title suggests, he’s literally a little boy dressed in short pants, and is about to receive his first pair of long pants for his birthday—we don’t know which one. His favorite pastime is borrowing books of romantic fiction from his small-town library, escaping to his room to read them, and daydreaming of himself as a dashing romantic hero in those stories. On the other hand, he seems to be of more or less marriageable age, and it’s generally understood by himself, his family, and the townspeople that he will eventually marry the nice local girl (Priscilla Bonner) who loves him. That all changes when he accidentally encounters a dark, seductive beauty from the city and is entranced with her. The newcomer is played by Alma Bennett, and within minutes Harry has decided she’s the woman for him.
But, of course, he has no idea what he’s getting into. Any adult woman would be too much for Harry to handle, but Alma is particularly bad news. Not only is she not the romantic heroine he imagines, she’s a hardened criminal, a cocaine smuggler on the lam from the law. She’s out for revenge on the gang members who set the police on her trail, and she’s handy with a gun. In due course she’s captured and jailed, but then proceeds to crash out of prison, whereupon Harry chivalrously comes to her aid. Of course Alma has no use for this helpless little yokel, but she takes him in tow anyway to assist her in evading recapture.
All this is only the premise of this six-reel feature. On this framework, Langdon and the filmmakers construct a series of often brilliant comic set-pieces. Once Harry has fixed his sights on Alma, he obviously can’t marry Priscilla. What to do? Why, of course Priscilla must be killed—on their wedding day!—leading to an extended sequence that is better seen than described.
Later, following Alma’s prison break, Harry spends the better part of a reel trying to decoy a policeman away from her hiding place on the street, only to learn at last what the audience already knows: the policeman is only a mannequin, propped up outside a stage door.
The team behind the camera is particularly notable here. The director is none other than Frank Capra, still at the beginning of what would be his own stellar directorial career. Capra had already directed The Strong Man, and both films reveal his filmmaking instincts already fully functional. But Long Pants is not a characteristically sunny Capra picture. On the contrary, it has a decidedly dark streak, usually attributed to writer Arthur Ripley, another key member of the team. The chief cameraman is Elgin Lessley, a master of the craft who worked throughout the 1920s with both Langdon and Buster Keaton. Long Pants is a relatively little-known film, even within the Langdon canon, overshadowed as it is by his more accessible features. But the viewer who follows Langdon and his creative partners down this quirky path will be rewarded with a skillfully crafted cinematic gem, yet another exemplar of the art of silent comedy.
