The Kid Brother (1927)

Why it's here:
We needed to beef up on Harold Lloyd after seeing Safety Last!. What I had wanted to include was The Freshman, but despite exhaustive search of all sources available, could not find it. This was a worthy substitute.

Specs:
An hour and 20 minutes, black and white, silent.
It isn't clear to me exactly when the film is set, but it is a Western, probably meant to be in the late 1880s or so.

Our family's average rating (on a scale of 1-10):

7.75 

More about the film and our reaction to it:
How much thoroughly better a viewing experience is a movie like this -- with a plot, good acting, humour and pleasant on-location cinematography -- than a movie who's job it is to simply capitalize on the fact of sound like The Jazz Singer, also released in 1927. Here, Lloyd is a bit more nuanced and interesting a character than he played in Safety Last!. The film isn't quite so hilarious, but its value lies elsewhere.  This is a slower-paced, sweeter, romantic picture. Harold is quite an appealing romantic lead and has great chemistry with his co-star Jobyna Rawlston. Yet it's still funny and full of great slapstick moments.

Harold's "look" doesn't translate well to still photos. When you watch him in a film, he moves with a nice grace and has a fresh, attractive, modern quality to his face. Yet in stills, he usually just looks dorky. Its too bad, because this is probably not winning him scores of modern fans. But he deserves modern fans. His films are really good.

He has another big strike against him, in terms of winning popular support today, and that is a too-protective nature toward his films while he was living and too active a trust with respect to copyrights now. His films were not shown on tv when people my age were growing up (by his choice, as he didn't care for the medium); so now, though people can get them on dvd, most haven't heard of him. And because his estate has actively secured copyrights and kept a tight hold on his material, people can't easily stumble upon videos of his work online -- to get to know and appreciate him. All of this makes him pretty obscure -- I can't find his films at my library nor though Netflix; even if you were inclined to rent his work on Amazon or iTunes (which I am!), you're out of luck.

It might not happen without effort, but if you get the chance to see his work you should.

Iconic shot: