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Harry Shelby has been kept in knee pants for years by his overprotective parents, but the day finally comes when Harry is given his first pair of long pants. Almost immediately, he is expected to marry his childhood sweetheart Priscilla... but instead, Harry's first heady whiff of manhood has got him panting after Bebe, a "fast" woman from the big city. Mistakenly thinking that Bebe fancies him too, Harry risks everything to help her out when she lands in jail, only to end up in hot water himself. Through it all, sweet Priscilla waits for her man to come to his senses.
For the first five minutes, I wasn’t sure whether I was watching a Harry Langdon comedy or a horror film.
It all seems ordinary enough.
A man visits his neighborhood library. He seeks out the Romance section and accrues a tidy stack. He returns home, passing through a white picket fence and a nondescript hallway. He then climbs a ladder and ascends to the attic, trove in hand, ready to lose himself in tales of courtship and derring-do.
There’s nothing obviously eldritch or ominous.
So why does it all feel so unnerving?
The man, we will discover, is Harry Langdon, a bachelor in schoolboy shorts whose mother seems to have taken page out of the Mrs. Bates school of parenting.…
A real treat to see a movie from the 20s for the first time in too long. I love that Capra (like most directors even at the tail end of the silent period) shot so much of this in long takes where we see people's whole bodies moving in the frame. Langdon's face -- with those big cheeks of his -- is so sad, yet Capra provides us with virtually no close-ups. And Langdon's not as physical as Chaplin or Keaton or Lloyd, so the overall effect is of a small, isolated figure disappearing into his own indistinctness, a fitting emblem of the human condition. I also love that there's so little explanatory stitching between scenes: Hollywood was still making…
That was... surprisingly awesome? This film has some cool shots including the opening sequence which tells you about main character without showing a guy himself. What I did not expect is an amount of mature shit this cute Harry Langdon comedy has. Harry falls for a cocaine dealer girl, tries to shoot his bride in the woods, helps the girl escape from a prison and witnesses her beating the shit out of another girl who squealed on her, gets shot in the arm, says "fuck this" and returns home. That was just unhinged!
In the same year Borzage blitzed into prominence with the romantic drama "7th Heaven", Capra's burgeoning aspirations to romance are evoked through the opening scene of "Long Pants", where Harry Shelby (Langdon) takes several volumes of romantic fiction from the library to read secretly in his attic.
But unlike the Bohemian top floor lodgings of Borzage's "7th Heaven" where Chico and Diane lived full of gentle sentimentality and an evolving love and homeliness that others share in, Capra's top floor lodgings are full of boxes and its sole occupant lives vicariously through faux romance where it is kept a secret from those around him.
Harry Shelby is a boy in a man's body, with a rather naïve outlook on the…
Harry Langdon at his finest. There are so many moments here that are pure moments of his charm. We get Harry trying to flirt, Harry interacting with a cop; and Harry even trying to get up the nerve to commit a murder.
It’s chock full of his unique charm. The childlike nature, the long takes, the surreal scenes. It’s all here. I love Harry Langdon and I love this movie. Some of his greatest work.
Highlight is definitely the second reel, in which Harry's immediate solution to being in love with a femme fatale who's not his fiancee is to bring said fiancee into the woods to murder her. It goes hilariously wrong, of course, and the darkness and melancholic solipsism underlying Harry's outward boyish innocence turns out to be a recurring theme of the movie's humor. There's a shot toward the end in which he's just watched his cocaine-dealing lover and her supplier(/pimp?) shoot each other to death, and the room is rushed by a crowd from the bar downstairs, and we get a floor-height shot of him cowering amongst the excited crowd, horrified at what he's witnessed and the horrible mess his desire to live a romance novel has created. What an odd, funny movie, directed with an elegance that belies silent comedy's madcap pace, even when the action's indulging in slapstick wackiness.
Much better film than its Langdon-Capra predecessor, The Strong Man.
Long Pants is about a young man named Harry (Langdon, natch), a bookish dreamer whose parents (Gladys Brockwell & Alan Roscoe) graduate him from trousers to long pants (in olden days, when a man received long pants it was a sort of rite of passage into adulthood). They are trying to set him up with girl next door Priscilla (Priscilla Bonner), but when he sees gangster’s moll Bebe Blair (Alma Bennett) stopped outside his house due to a flat tire, he goes gaga and tries to move heaven and earth to be with her.
There are some lengthy riotous sequences in Long Pants, much more so than in The Strong Man, and…
LONG PANTS is a film that has long been forgotten but those who do remember it probably do so because it was directed by Frank Capra before he was fired. The only reason people remember it is that the film was so poorly received that it pretty much ruined any chance of Harry Langdon becoming an "A" star like other silent clowns of the era.
No matter how you judge the film, it's certainly a very weird and dark one. As a comedy the film is a complete failure because I honestly don't recall laughing a single time. The film was brutally attacked upon release due to some rather tasteless comedy bits where Langdon takes his bride out to the…
