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In a review of Moonrise (1948), I asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: did Borzage ever direct a film that wasn't about the redemptive power of love? Then I saw Lazybones, a deceptively low-key film that quietly suggests that love and sacrifice are not always rewarded, that relationships can be destroyed permanently by lack of trust, and that people's characters just don't change. I always associated Borzage with miraculous, credibility-straining happy endings in which people return from the dead, recover their ability to walk, or at least forgive and forget past misunderstandings in sublime romantic union. I don't want to spoil the ending of Lazybones, but I will say: this film doesn't go where you think it's going. It's not a tragedy, nor a melodrama, but a sustained, tender look at a group of people whose lives are more like those of real human beings than of Hollywood movie characters.

Charles "Buck" Jones plays Steve Tuttle, nicknamed "Lazybones." He is introduced by a symbolic shot of molasses pouring slowly over pancakes; then we see Steve snoozing with his feet up against a fence, where they have been so long cobwebs have formed at his toes. We seem to be in the realm of quaint rural comedy. Steve has an ever-loyal mother and a beautiful girlfriend named Agnes (Jane Novak), whose gargoyle of a mother, naturally, doesn't approve of this good-for-nothing. The movie starts slowly with light humor, in a beautifully realized turn-of-the-century setting. Then Steve rescues Ruth (Zasu Pitts), a young woman who throws herself into the river in a suicide attempt. She has a baby from a secret marriage, her husband is dead—and she's Agnes's sister. Steve offers to take the baby home, and of course no one believes that he found it; they assume it's really his. Agnes says she will never speak to him again.

What we expect now is some comedy about a man trying to deal with a baby, before a few revelations and a happy denouement. Instead, the story starts to leap ahead in time, as baby Kit becomes a little girl, teased by her schoolmates and ostracized by the town for her questionable parentage, then a teenager in overalls. Steve continues to be shiftless and lazy; Ruth is unhappily married against her will to a pompous dandy. World War I breaks out, and when Steve returns, after inadvertently becoming a hero, he sees the beautiful young woman Kit has become and—rather disturbingly—falls in love with her. By this point, all the expectations aroused by the conventional storyline have gone out the window.

Lazybones is a small-scale film, but it's exquisitely crafted, from the clever and handsomely illustrated title cards to the visual wit with which sequences are connected. I can't think of a silent drama more subtly acted; every performance is natural, delicate and underplayed. I've never seen Buck Jones in his cowboy persona, but it was a wonderful inspiration to turn this big, square-jawed lug into a gentle, dreamy, wistful character. Without any overt emoting, he gives an affecting performance as a man of innate decency but curious passivity. He shades ever so subtly from youthful promise (he'll overcome his laziness and make good, we assume) to a still likable but saddened, almost stunted middle age; he realizes he's missed his chances, yet his life can't be seen as wasted. The delicate ambiguity of this character development is more reminiscent of Japanese cinema than Hollywood.

Zasu Pitts uses her huge mournful eyes and thin, sickly face to powerful effect in the tragic role of a woman forced to watch her child grow up without knowing her. The mother of Agnes and Ruth is the only character who is less than nuanced. Borzage seems to have had an obsession with abusive women: like the mother in Lucky Star and the sister in Seventh Heaven, Mrs. Fanning wields a whip against a helpless waif. Virginia Marshall, who plays the young Kit, is striking and not a bit cloying. Madge Bellamy is reminiscent of Mabel Normand in her tomboyish teenage scenes, and brilliantly nervous and embarrassed in a scene with her dying mother. Towards the end of the film, her chocolate-box prettiness takes the edge off Kit's appealing outcast character.

Lacking a transcendent romance at its center, Lazybones highlights Borzage's interest in outsiders, social rejects, people who create their own world because they can't fit into the mainstream. Refreshingly free of clichés or easy answers, it's a tender miniature that makes an unexpectedly strong impression.

The title character, Lazybones (Buck Jones), was named this because he's a ridiculous caricature when it comes to his sleeping all the time and being incredibly lazy. I didn't like this concept, as it just seemed very unreal. However, I did love his character later in the film when he showed he was more than just a one-dimensional guy. While fishing, he sees a woman trying to drown herself in the river (Zasu Pitts). It seems she's feeling desperate--she married a sailor who has since died and she's now stuck with his baby. Her family doesn't know and she anticipates that her nasty mother will reject her and the kid (in an 'I told you so' moment)--hence she threw herself in the river. Lazybones takes pity on her and agrees to take the kid home and raise it himself agrees never to tell anyone who the real mother is. Time passes and the child grows up in a nasty town where the other kids enjoy tormenting her because of her lowly birth. But despite this, she is a nice kid and grows to be a lovely woman. However, Lazybones doesn't see this transformation, as he's off in the war and when he returns he sees her in all her glory. He almost instantly falls in love with her (which is icky considering that he raised her) and plans on asking for her to marry him. But another man, much younger, has already won her heart and nice 'ol Lazybones is left with his unrequited love.

The film is very lovingly filmed and the director (Frank Borzage) did a great job with the material. The acting, likewise, was quite good. I just couldn't get past how one-dimensional some of the characters seemed (not just Lazybones but Pitts' mother) as well as the creepy notion of a guy wanting to marry a girl he raised. Still, it is a nice little film...if a bit odd.

It's the turn of the century in the middle of nowhere. Buck Jones stars as rube Steve Tuttle, a man who is the very definition of bone idle. He's a nice honest guy but he'd much rather be chewing on an ear of corn with a hat over his face than doin' much of anything. For some reason a lovely young lady called Agnes is sweet on him, but he'd rather catch forty zees than go a-courtin'. There's a brash annoying fellow called Elmer Ballister who is referred to by an intertitle as being a "Beau Brummel" type, and he is well dressed and well-to-do but that's about the sum of the man. Agnes' ma, rather a wicked witch type of character straight of the set of the Wizard of Oz prefers Elmer to Steve. For sure, if she could sweep him into the river she would.

To add a dash of zing to the film Agnes' sister Ruth turns up with a baby. She went away to college and married a nautical fellow on the sly. Unfortunately the sea took him from her. Ruth knows that her mother will never believe the story. On the way home she ditches herself in the river and Frank hooks more than he bargained for lazing in the Y of a tree with his fishing rod.

He agrees to look after the baby, so that Ruth can go home and pretends that nothing has happened. And that's how he spends the next few years, lazin' away and bringing up "Kit". Borzage allows us the usual tender moments here. As in Lucky Star, come the Great War, the protagonist (almost an oxymoron in this case) heads off to France, where he becomes a war hero by total chance.

This movie is about the passing of time though. Steve returns from France and time has moved on, his boots don't fit, and the sticking gate which he always meant to fix has been fixed by a young man who carries his Kit away.

This is the part of the movie that really is a punch in the gut. Steve, inept at love through inexperience and sheer idleness falls in love with his adoptive daughter whom he can't have. The last scenes were like a roundhouse to the jaw for me. Just after we've quite literally seen the hay wain of life pass a house-entombed Agnes by, we see Frank catching the tiniest fish in the gulch. That I think is major cinema. There are momentous hardcore existential messages pouring off the screen during the reversal at the end of the film. At it's heart it is a movie about the sheer folly of letting life slip idly by.

Steve, one might feel, deserved some reward for bringing Kit up, however in a nice guy comes last world, things like that don't happen. You have to seize life and in particular the girl to get anything out of it.

My apologies for the spoilers, almost impossible to discuss the movie sensibly without them.

My first entry in the sudden Borzage/Murnau double-quest I've been thrust into by receiving the behemoth collection that bears their names was this forgotten 1925 melodrama with the title that sounds like a slapstick comedy: Frank Borzage's Lazybones.

The film concerns a dude named Steve (Buck Jones) that just lays around all the time, and his one activity is fishing, which involves him laying around all the time. Needless to say, he has acquired the nickname "Lazybones". He's sweet on a girl named Agnes (Jane Novak), whose evil mother (Emily Fitzroy) forbids her to go with him, and has arranged a marriage for her abroad student daughter Ruth (Zasu Pitts) with "the local Beau Brummel", Elmer Ballister (William Bailey). But while doin' jacksh-t, Steve runs into Ruth upon her return, with an infant and a story: she married a seaman in secret because she knew her mother wouldn't approve, she had a child, and then he went off to sea, never to return. Steve offers to claim he found the baby in the reeds until Ruth's ready to tell her mother, but when Ruth's mother whips her and threatens to send the child away if Ruth tells anyone, Steve ends up keeping her and raising her himself. From there, the film fast-forwards episodically to the child, named Kit (Virginia Marshall, later Madge Bellamy) as a young girl, as a teenager, and as a young woman in 1917, and Steve finally has to do something, and gets shipped off to war.

The film is a fairly dour affair all around, no one is content, no one is satisfied, no one is happy, and it pretty much stays that way. Their one recurring gag, how every single person that enter's Steve's house, from grandmother on down to adopted daughter, runs into the stubborn gate and yells, "Darn that gate!", isn't really that funny, but it's one of the few moments of lightheartedness in the entire piece, and even then, it's used as a heartbreaking mile-marker motif later in the film when he gets sent off to war. Actually, one into the trenches of Europe, the film turns to outright slapstick as through dumb luck, he becomes a national hero.

But the film takes a weird turn once he returns home from the war that made me sort of lose all sympathy for Steve and sort of soured the dramatic weight of the film: he falls in love with his adopted daughter. Despite the fact that he has raised this girl from the time she was still forming kneecaps, and he has been her singular parental guardian, and yet we're supposed to feel sad when he comes back for war and wants to do things that, had they been related, would have been illegal and are taboo to depict, even now? No thanks. I'm glad this collection is mostly Borzage (only two of the twelve films in the collection are from Murnau), because of the two I've seen (this and Moonrise, I've been pretty much underwhelmed.

{Grade: 6/10 (C+) / #6 (of 6) of 1925}

My fellow reviewers have done so much justice to this fine film that I hesitated to submit my own thoughts, since many of them would be quite redundant. I therefore will not comment so much on the story itself in this review, but instead concentrate on some of the aesthetic qualities of the film.

The careful attention to period detail is one of the salient features of LAZYBONES. Produced in 1925, but telling a story that reaches back to the turn-of-the-century and advances to "now," it genuinely captures the look of each era it portrays. Often films made in the 1920s but set, say, before the War (WWI), look very different from actual films produced in 1914 -- we can see it in the clothes and the hairstyles. In LAZYBONES this is not the case. Even the characters age believably as the decades advance (only Kit is portrayed by different actresses as she grows up). Buck Jones's transformation from a teenager to an almost middle-aged man is especially noteworthy.

Another strength of Borzage's direction is his strong evocation of place. His rural America is steeped in romanticism -- so stylized and yet so personal as to exist both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. One is left with the feeling that these characters -- especially Steve (Buck Jones) and his mother (Edythe Chapman) -- are inextricably linked with the languid atmosphere of their environment. This quality is also reflected in Borzage's lingering, empathetic close-ups that seem to stretch time beyond its natural bounds. The scene in which Ruth (Zasu Pitts) passes by Steve's house in the carriage, catching a glimpse of her daughter, is one such example. This moment -- consisting of only a few seconds in real time -- is frozen as Borzage focuses on the emotions displayed in the expressions of Ruth, Steve, and Kit (Virginia Marshall). The reunion scene when Steve returns from the war is certainly every bit the equal of the one near the end of Vidor's THE BIG PARADE, and is another prime example of "stretching time" for dramatic effect.

In contrast to such Borzage silent masterpieces as 7TH HEAVEN, STREET ANGEL, and LUCKY STAR, I would classify LAZYBONES as a film fundamentally grounded in realism (note the prominent use of real exteriors instead of studio back-lot sets). At the same time, however, Borzage flavors the whole work with a wistful romanticism that is never cloying but somehow manages to capture the dream-like qualities of our own nostalgic memories: snapshot moments, tinged at times with melancholy, at times with happiness.

Even in this early lyrical rural romance, a charming reworking of "Silas Marner", there are many Borzage magical moments. Being at the same studio (Fox) as Murnau, Borzage was often overshadowed by him and his movies were often dismissed as candy box romances by the critics. A reassessment of Borzage's films has shown his harmony of narrative and emotional sincerity were carefully planned and not just accidental.

Steve Tuttle (Buck Jones) is the local "Lazybones" - "as slow as molasses in winter" - ridiculed by all the town, except his mother. He loves and is beloved by Agnes (Eva Novak) but her mother (Emily Fitzroy, always the villain) is determined that he shall not be part of their family. One day, while fishing, he rescues a young woman who has thrown herself off the bridge. It is Ruth (Zasu Pitts), Agnes's sister - she is returning home, at her mother's command, so she can marry the local "Beau Brummell", but she is bringing her baby, the result of her marriage to a seaman who has been drowned in an accident. Steve assures Ruth he will take the child home and bring her up and Ruth can return in a few days.

Time marches on. Ruth marries Elmer and Agnes fades from the scene - she is just not emotionally and mentally strong enough to stand up to her mother and after telling Steve that he should put the baby in a home, disappears until the very end of the movie. Zasu Pitts gives the film some much needed intensity and her's is easily the best performance in the movie. There is a very poignant scene where Ruth is going by Steve's house in a carriage, Steve holds up baby Kit and waves and Ruth, hesitantly and secretly, waves back. Virginia Marshall, who plays Kit as a child also brings pathos to her role - especially in the tracking shot that follows Kit on her way home from school, being taunted by the other children. Ruth escapes from her husband's ceaseless humbug and comforts the child.

War comes and to everyone's surprise, Steve returns a hero. I also found it disturbing and the one false note of the film, that Steve should return with more than fatherly feelings for the now grown up Kit. Fortunately Kit (played by the chocolate box pretty Madge Bellamy) is able to dispel them before it causes embarrassment - she has found love already, with mechanic Dick Ritchie ( a young Leslie Fenton) who has already fixed "that darn gate"!!! I also thought it ended abruptly. A small, harrowing scene where Agne's learns the truth about Kit's parentage but because she is completely under her mother's domination, she will have to keep it a secret forever and a closing scene showing "Lazybones" fishing - indicating that life goes on.

Highly, Highly Recommended.

"Remind me to fix it tomorrow/when I get back home ".

That gate ,along with the incredible last (very short) sequence ,is a comic relief ,without which the viewer would be full of despair.

"Lazybones" begins as a light comedy: a "good-for-nothin" boy whose nickname is the title of the film ,spends his time fishing in the river or pouring syrup on his pancakes -the opening of the movie is revealing- He's got a fiancée,Agnes ,but both she and his mother ,although they love him,think that there 's nothing they can do to cure his laziness.

Steve might be the first of the great heroes Borzagesque,one of those who gave all and asked for nothing in return ;he is a cousin of Tim scrawling in the snow ("Lucky Star") ,of Angela smiling through her tears when she's about to be arrested ("Street Angel") ,of Hans doing anything to make his wife happy ("little man what now?" ) of Louise on her boat saying farewell to her husband ("Big city"),of the Dr Paige ("Green Light")using herself as a guinea pig ,of.... the list is endless.All these characters are ready to sacrifice everything so that the persons they love tenderly will be happy .

Steve is a good man from the start.After rescuing a woman ,he receives her baby in his home and all along the story his face seems to say:"don't thank me,everybody would have done the same".

And Steve has to fight,like the great Borzagesque heroes ,against a hostile ,nay cruel world: the mother beating her daughter is a very violent scene by the silent era's standards ;the little girl considered the ugly duckling by her schoolmates (the subject of the outcast would be applied again in Borzage's underrated "moonrise" ).But the scenes between "Uncle " Steve and his nephew make it all worthwhile.When she complains the others treat her like a punching bag ,he takes her in his arms and they communicate with their eyes .Few directors show more sympathy and tenderness for their own characters.

With "Lazybones",Borzage had invented what the Italians would do long after him: a comedy which turns into a drama.