The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, 1927)

Olin Francis, Leo Willis, and Harold Lloyd in The Kid Brother

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Walter James, Leo Willis, Olin Francis, Constantine Romanoff, Eddie Boland, Frank Lanning, Ralph Yearsley. Screenplay: John Grey, Ted Wilde, Thomas J. Criser, Lex Neal, Howard J. Green. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Allen McNeil.

Underdog saves the day, gets the girl. It's a familiar comic formula, but that's no reason to criticize Harold Lloyd for reworking it constantly. In The Kid Brother he's Harold Hickory, the unappreciated youngest of the family, who as the title card tells us, "was born on April Fool's Day. The stork that brought him could hardly fly for laughing." His two brawny older brothers and their brawny father, the local sheriff, mock him for his weakness and never include him in their manly business, leaving him at home to do the washing and cooking. The plot has something to do with Sheriff Hickory (Walter James) raising money to build a dam. But the money gets stolen by the unscrupulous manager (Eddie Boland) and the strongman (Constantine Romanoff) in a traveling medicine show. Also with the show is "the girl," Mary (Jobyna Ralston), whose late father owned the show and who tries in vain to deal with the crooks in the company. Eventually, the sheriff gets charged with absconding with the funds and is almost lynched before Harold, who has tracked down the thieves and captured them, arrives to set things right. There's an extended battle between Harold and the strongman that takes all of the ingenuity of which the former is capable -- it's almost as much an action film as it is a comedy. It's also a romance, with the scene in which Harold and Mary meet as one of the film's sweeter highlights, almost Chaplinesque in its conception. Harold has just rescued Mary from the attentions of the lecherous strongman, scaring him off by picking up a stick that he doesn't realize has a snake twined around it. Then the snake scares Mary into jumping into Harold's arms, sparking their romance. They must part, however, and as she walks downhill out of sight, he climbs a tree to get a look at her; he calls out to ask her name and she replies, then goes farther downhill out of sight; so he climbs still higher and asks where she lives; she tells him and walks out of sight again, so he climbs higher and waves goodbye. When she is finally out of sight, he sits on a branch and sighs, and then of course falls down past his earlier perches. It's a beautifully constructed sequence -- literally, as a tower was built next to the tree for the camera to ascend. I think The Kid Brother is less well-known than other Lloyd features like Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925), but for inventiveness and variety of tone it may be the best of the three.

Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, 1925)

Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, 1925)

Cast: Mary Pickford, William Haines, Walter James, Gordon Griffith, Carlo Schipa, Spec O'Donnell, Hugh Fay, Viola Vale, Joe Butterworth, Oscar Rudolph, Francis X. Bushman Jr., Charles K. French, Eugene Jackson. Screenplay: Mary Pickford, Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton; titles: Tom McNamara. Cinematography: Hal Mohr, Charles Rosher. Art direction: John DuCasse Schulze, Paul Youngblood. Film editing: Harold McLernon.

To our eyes, there's something grotesque about a 33-year-old movie star pretending to be a hoydenish 12-year-old girl. But then there's also something grotesque about a 50-year-old diva playing Octavian or Cherubino. Operagoers accept the one, so why can't we accept the other? Moviegoers of the 1920s certainly did -- in fact, they demanded it of Mary Pickford, rejecting attempts in which she tried to play roles her own age. Pickford was exceptionally small, just a fraction over 5 feet, which helps her carry off the scenes in which she's performing with actual boys, though it's worth noticing that there are no other "girls" in these battling gangs, probably because putting Pickford up next to real girls would draw our attention to the maturity of her face. We become aware of that maturity most when we see her with other adults in the film, like 6-foot-tall William Haines, when only the costuming and her diminutive stature work to maintain the illusion. Still, Little Annie Rooney was near the end of Pickford's turns as a little waif. Four years later she would almost act her age in Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929) and win a not particularly well-deserved Oscar for it, then follow up with some grownup roles, including Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (Sam Taylor, 1929), in films that flopped and precipitated her retirement. Little Annie Rooney was cooked up by Pickford herself almost as a conscious farewell to the little girl in curls. You have to get yourself in the frame of mind of the original audiences to appreciate how good Pickford is in this hodgepodge of slapstick action and tearjerking family drama, but she really was a formidable actress.