The Kid Brother: Mettle Is Stronger than Muscle

The film is the sprightly saga of Harold Hickory, a hick from Hickoryville and the reedy sibling in a family of barrel-chested musclemen. Made at the apex of Lloyd’s career and of silent film, it is the most lyrical of his features and, arguably, the funniest. For many years, he cited it as his favorite among his movies. I watched it with a counter in hand and reckon that it averages three good laughs—from giggle to chuckle to guffaw—per minute. A 1927 review in Variety supports my tally: “Harold Lloyd has clicked again with The Kid Brother, about as gaggy a gag picture as he has ever done. It is just a series of gags, one following the other, some funny and others funnier.” Variety was wrong about one thing, though: it’s not just a series of gags—it’s a series of gags with a tender romance that runs through it, and a terrifically funny and suspenseful action sequence in its third act.

Early in this Cinderfella tale, we meet Harold’s father (Walter James), Hickoryville’s sheriff, and his two older brothers (Leo Willis and Olin Francis) as they transport tree trunks the circumference of sequoias. Then we meet Harold himself, the homemaker in this all-male household, as he works a churn plunger that’s roughly on the scale of a broom handle. As Lloyd’s silent comedies seem to exist in a pre-Freudian universe, the contrast between the he-men hefting timber and the boy with the spindly plunger is not played the least bit salaciously. 

Now, Harold may be a hick, yet note the efficiency and genius with which he has rigged the churn within an interconnected series of time-saving devices for doing the family laundry. What Harold—both the character and the man who plays him—lacks in conventional manliness he makes up for in mechanical and comic invention. Harold Hickory’s marvelous system of combining dishwashing, drying, and stacking duties is similarly breathtaking. 

Yet these charming vignettes reveal neither the breadth of the movie’s scope nor the delicacy of its tone. Ultimately, directorial credit for the film went to Ted Wilde and J. A. Howe (Lewis Milestone was initially hired as director but left due to contractual issues with another studio). All the directors—including Lloyd, who took producer credit only but whose sensibility dominates the direction, here as in all his films—collaborated on a film more visually atmospheric and naturalistic than his previous features. Another factor in The Kid Brother’s unusual look is that cinematographer Walter Lundin shot the movie on panchromatic film, more sensitive to the entire spectrum of light and thus less contrasty than Lloyd’s earlier films.

The film opens with a graceful panorama of a cove at sunset, a ship adrift in the water, and a medicine-show wagon weaving up the road in the middle distance. Both vessel and vehicle will play important roles, as will the woman in the wagon. She is Mary Powers (Ralston), the medicine show’s proprietress—a dark-eyed young woman who has been recently orphaned. The breathless seconds during which Harold and Mary first see each other make for as tender and romantic a meet-cute as any in the movies. She is hiding in the woods outside Hickoryville from the medicine show’s leering roustabout, Sandoni (Constantine Romanoff), who has tracked her on her afternoon ramble. Harold, feeling humiliated after his father and brothers went to town to pass a resolution for a new dam and left him behind—the meeting is for men, not boys, his father tells him—has been on a walk of his own, angrily beating the bushes with a stick. Mary jumps out, expecting to confront Sandoni. Harold beholds her, an angel in calico. Mesmerized by her radiance, he mistakes the backlighting for her halo. Taken by his warm smile, she feels her fear melt away. The scene strikes a primordial note, as if it were Adam and Eve’s first rendezvous. (Carl Davis’s Aaron Copland–esque score, composed in 1989, nicely complements the moment.) 

But look! Here comes leering Sandoni, fully two heads taller than Harold and resembling a muscle-bound Nosferatu. Defending Mary’s virtue, Harold bran­-dishes a stick at the roustabout. Unbeknownst to Harold, a snake has coiled itself around his makeshift weapon. First Sandoni sees the snake and scrams. Then Harold sees the snake in his Eden and is sad that it was the serpent and not he who scared Sandoni away. Finally, Mary, relieved that Sandoni is gone, sees the snake and bounces into Harold’s arms as if her shoes had springs.