Today most people have seen few silent films and when I tell people my favorite film is D.W. Griffith's Intolerance from 1916 they look at me as if I were demented. In 1949 James Agee wrote an article for Life magazine called "Comedy's Greatest Era." about Harold Lloyd, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. Few of the films by those men were available at that time and it was not until the 70's that they began to emerge again; Chaplin and Lloyd controlled their own films and gradually began to release them; Keaton made a deal with distributor Raymond Rohauer to release Keaton's films (which produced lines around the block at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan) and only Langdon languished in obscurity. Now most of these films are available in decent prints on DVD and I recently watched Lloyd's The Kid Brother with my two children and my wife Susan, who found the film too contrived. Gideon, Victoria and I found it both funny and touching.
The Kid Brother is clearly influenced by rural romances such as D.W. Griffith's True Heart Susie (1916) and Henry King's Tol'able David (1921). It not only has lovely location shooting ("the wind in the trees," as Griffith was fond of saying) but also chases influenced by Keaton and emotion influenced by Chaplin. Perhaps its gags are hung on too slender a narrative thread, like the runaway closeline that Lloyd pursues to rescue his father's Sunday shirt, and perhaps the final chase goes on too long, but much of the film is not only funny but beautiful, as Lloyd uses his brain and occasionally his fists to win the girl, played by Jobyna Ralston; at one point the camera moves vertically higher and higher with Lloyd climbing a tree to follow Ralston as she moves farther and farther away. The long chase on a deserted ship is highlighted by Lloyd putting his shoes on a monkey (played by Jocko, who was also in Keaton's The Cameraman in 1928) and the villain thinks it's Lloyd coming around the corner.
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