The Kid Brother

(1927) director Ted Wilde, J.A. Howe
viewed: 08/13/2011

In my ongoing quest to expose my kids to a variety of classic, as well as contemporary, cinema soldiered forth to yet another of Silent Film’s great comedians.  We’ve watched a number of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplain films, as well as some Keaton-Fatty Arbuckle shorts, but we hadn’t forayed into the work of Harold Lloyd.  Which is only a little funny in that the one major silent comedy that I saw more than once as a child was Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923), which may have been an anomaly based on our local PBS channel in Gainesville, FL in the 1970′s.  But as an adult, and as I’ve developed a greater interest in Silent Film in the past decade, I myself hadn’t revisited his films.

So, on Friday night, we nestled down for The Kid Brother, which I had never seen, but had read that it was one of his better films.  It’s great, actually.  And the kids really liked it, too.

Set before the turn of the 20th century, the story takes place in a small town.  Harold is the “kid brother” to two big burly fellows, smaller still than his father, the town’s sheriff and major figure in the town.  With no mother around, Harold is given the “women’s work” and is considered too little/young for any of the more manly stuff.  When a traveling medicine show comes through town and Harold falls for the young woman traveling with it, it also unleashes the two other members of this show as the villains.  The sheriff has collected money from the townspeople to submit for a big dam project, but then the money goes stolen.   And the sheriff’s rival likes to blame the sheriff.  Harold ends up saving the day.

What was particularly striking to me was some of the camerawork in the film.  In an early scene, when Harold is introduced to the young woman, he climbs a tree as she walks away so that he can shout one more thing to her.  But he keeps having to climb higher as he keeps thinking of things to say.  The camera “climbs” up behind him, giving the vantage further down the slope of the girl ever further in the distance.  It’s a remarkable shot, or series of shots.  And as in this scene, there are a number of scenes in which the camera moves around, which is quite unusual for the period.

Lloyd’s “glasses character” as he is known, perhaps because he’s not as implacable as “Old Stoneface” Keaton nor as winsome as Chaplain’s “Little Tramp”, is given to a far greater range of emotions and as a result, the story seems to have more depth and development.  It does indeed build from a relatively slow beginning to a wonderfully madcap adventure with a number of clever and funny stunts and gags aboard an abandoned ship, trying to retrieve the townsfolk’s money from the big thug.

I really enjoyed it a great deal and the kids did too.  It’s funny how now they don’t even bat an eye at transitioning from a full-color summer action movie like Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) or some of their favorite cartoons like Phineas and Ferb to these movies that are 80 years old,  silent, black-and-white.  I’ve often patted myself on the back about this, but I truly enjoy sharing these experiences with them, especially when they are as satisfying as this one was.