1,001 Films: "The Kid Brother" (1927)

The Kid Brother was one of the first in the run of features with which Harold Lloyd delighted audiences in the late 1920s/early 30s, and a work very much in thrall to the prevailing Keaton-Griffithian notion of celebrating an American paradise that was lost with the Fall (or Crash). Hero Harold Hickory (Lloyd) is a descendant of the clan that gave its name to the quaint backwater of Hickoryville, yet where his brothers are rugged outdoorsmen shifting logs around in anticipation of a dam being built, young Harold is a whey-faced, bespectacled romantic left behind to do all the housework. All this changes when the latter steals off with pa's badge, appoints himself sheriff for the day, and becomes entangled in the lives of a passing medicine show.

Detractors may sneer it's just Our Hospitality with a few Sherlock, Jr.-isms thrown in late on, as Harold solves the mystery of the missing dam funds. Yet that would be to overlook the film's exceptional grace and fluency: the middle act manages to make balletic the stomping and roughhousing of these womenless menfolk in their cramped cabin, and there's something indescribably lovely about the courtly and tentative romance Harold comes to conduct with the medicine show's resident beauty. If you've come for the stunts that were so prominent in later Lloyd films, they're here, too, albeit in a form that's less the precision science of a Keaton than a form of sport - for if, at this point, Buster was funnier and self-sufficient, Lloyd was heartier and more agile.

There are bits involving tree-climbing, flag-chasing and rope-tying, that demand our hero being nimble enough to put hats on pigs, shawls on goats, workboots on a monkey; this rigorous cardio-comedy comes as preparation for a final scrap played not for straightahead laughs, but as an urgent matter of life and death - the climax of Harold Hickory's struggle to prove himself worthy of his family name, his beloved's hand, and the townspeople's respect. A genuinely swell entertainment, marked by the optimism of its age: every frame bears witness to the boundless possibilities of what it must have been to be young and American - even young, American and four-eyed - at the start of the century, to have such wide roads and big, rolling country to grow into.

The Kid Brother is available on DVD as part of Optimum's Harold Lloyd: The Definitive Collection boxset.