Long Pants is a fascinating, subversive, dark, but not very funny work which, in the words of critic Leland Poague, “is concerned with demonstrating the folly of innocence gone berserk”. Harry [Langdon] plays a naively romantic young man from a small town who is just at the point of receiving his first long pants. Harry is not ready to deal with women, however, because everything he knows about them comes from books. In a series of day-dreams (only one of which survives, in part, in the film) he fantasizes himself a great lover. Though his parents want him to settle down with the sweet, innocent Priscilla (Priscilla Bonner), he falls under the spell of Bebe Blair (Alma Bennett), who fits his image of a sultry, sophisticated femme fatale. Not realizing that she is a peddler of “snow” (cocaine or heroin), he allows himself to be duped into following her to San Francisco to work as her unsuspecting accomplice. When he learns the truth, Harry numbly returns to the protection of his small town, his parents, and Priscilla, just in time to say grace at their table. Though the misogynistic violence of the story reflected the deterioration of Capra’s relationship with Helen [Howell, his wife in the ’20s], and the odd intrusion of drugs into the story may have been a projection of his revulsion over Helen’s drinking, Capra felt that Ripley wanted to push the dark elements of the story much further than he was killing to go. There were certain things he believed Langdon should not do on screen: it was important to keep a balance between the comedy and the drama, between the optimism and the pessimism. Capra said he objected with particular vehemence to both Ripley and Langdon about the bizarre black comedy sequence in which Harry, to get out of his forced marriage with Priscilla, sees no alternative but to take her out into the woods and shoot her. In his daydream (no longer in the film today), he succeeded smoothly, but when he actually tries to do it, he is a pathetic failure. To Capra, this scene was a gross violation of Langdon’s character: “I don’t say it wasn’t funny. It was funny that he was going to be the villain, that he was going to take the girl out and kill her. And the way he played it, he did it well. I think he had Chaplin in mind. But it was not in character for him that he wanted to kill in the first place. He was not the kind of a man who would want to kill. He might want to kill a fly, but not a human being”. Capra lost every major argument.

Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Simon & Schuster, New York 1992 (revised edition, St Martin’s Griffin, New York 2000)