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Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
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Long Pants
(1927)

What does that title refer to? Harry Langdon is something of a mother-coddled boy who is kept in old-fashioned short pants, commonly designating a boy who has yet to come of age. Yet Harry, a bookworm, is beginning to discover romance — in some of the wrong places.

Kino on Video
2000 DVD edition

Harry Langdon . . . the Forgotten Clown (1926-1927), color-toned black & white, 196 minutes total, not rated,
including Long Pants (1927), color-toned black & white, 58 minutes, not rated.

Kino International, K173, UPC 7-38329-01732-3.
One single-sided, dual-layered, Region 1 NTSC DVD disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at 5.2 Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to 60 fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 stereo sound encoded at 192 Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no foreign language subtitles; 12 chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $39.95 (reduced to $29.95).
Release date: 2000 (rereleased 2 September 2003).
Country of origin: USA •

Ratings (1-10): video: 6 / audio: 7 / additional content: 7 / overall: 7.

This David Shepard-produced DVD edition of Long Pants has been mastered from a very-good 35mm print that is overall a bit on the lighter greyscale range and a little blasted-out in its highlights. Highlight details, especially Langdon’s face, and hard to discern during the film. The windowboxed natural-speed video transfer is OK, but overall, image details are also a little soft, making viewing worse, likely due to a print that has been duped from other positive materials.

The film is accompanied by a music score performed on piano by Donald Sosin.

Someday there may well be a better edition of Long Pants than this, but for now . . . this is it.

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