The Kid Brother (Harold Lloyd Productions, Paramount, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the horrors of the Lifetime movies The Stepdaughter and The Stepdaughter 2 on Sunday, August 31, my husband Charles and I got to watch a truly great film: a Blu-Ray transfer of Harold Lloyd’s 1927 film The Kid Brother. It was reportedly Lloyd’s favorite of his own films and one of the few he would allow to be shown publicly during the last two decades of his life (his dates were 1893-1971). It was also a commercial disappointment because it was so dark. Lloyd’s stock in trade was playing the brash middle-class striver in happy-go-lucky comedies, often with spectacular thrill sequences. Lloyd himself once commented, “I made just six thrill pictures, and those are the only ones anyone remembers!” The Kid Brother is a pastoral comedy in which Lloyd plays Harold Hickory, growing up in the town of Hickoryville under the long shadows of his father, Sheriff Jim Hickory (Walter James) and his brothers Leo (Leo Willis) and Olin (Olin Francis). Harold is relentlessly bullied by his dad, his brothers, neighbors Sam Hooper (Frank Lanning) and his son Hank (Ralph Yearsley), and just about everybody else in town. Hickoryville is invaded by “Prof. Powers’s Medicine Show,” which since the recent death of Prof. Powers has been run by his daughter Mary (Jobyna Ralston, who took over from Mildred Davis as Lloyd’s leading lady when Mildred quit to marry Lloyd for real; they stayed together until her death in 1969, and of the leading male comedians of the silent era – Charlie Chaplin, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon – Lloyd was the only one who married just once) and two shady associates, “Flash” Farrell (Eddie Boland), who’s taken over from the late Prof. Powers the job of hawking the patent medicine the show sells (which he says is good not only for whatever ails you but also for polishing furniture and keeping horses’ harnesses supple), and strongman Sandoni (Constantine Romanoff).

While he’s wearing his dad’s sheriff’s badge, Harold is tricked by the medicine-show people into signing a permit for them to operate in Hickoryville, and when dad finds out he sends Harold to shut down the show. Of course, Harold has no chance of doing that against the throngs of people who’ve been attracted to it. He tries to sneak his way to the front of the crowd where “Flash” is hawking the magic elixir, and eventually he ends up trapped on stage and literally handcuffed to a swinging trapeze bar. That isn’t enough for “Flash,” who lights a bed warmer and waves it under Harold’s ass, only he loses control of it and sets the entire medicine show on fire. Mary frees Harold from the handcuffs (she happens to have the key) and Harold takes her into the Hickorys’ home – but a local busybody couple takes Mary out of the Hickorys’ place and into their own because they don’t think it’s proper for a woman to spend the night with a whole house full of unmarried men. (We don’t see a Mrs. Hickory, so we’re obviously supposed to assume Jim is a widower.) To escape his brothers, who are after him at least to beat him up and possibly to kill him, Harold fakes it to look like he’s gone out to sleep in the barn while he actually sleeps on the couch in the space he made up for Mary. Brothers Leo and Olin both think Mary is the person sleeping on the couch and compete to bring “her” breakfasts and flowers. While all this has been going on, the good citizens of Hickoryville have been collecting money to build a dam for the town and have entrusted the cash to Sheriff Jim, who will hold it until a representative of the state treasurer comes to collect it the next day. (There’s a glitch in that the letter from the Hickorys announcing that they’ve collected the money for the dam is dated May 5, but the calendar on the wall is set to August.)

Unbeknownst to anyone but Harold – and even he is unsure as to what’s really going on – “Flash” and Sandoni are skulking around the Hickorys’ home intending to steal the dam money, which they do. This sets up the film’s most audacious sequence: while the rest of the townspeople have been convinced by Sam Hooper that Sheriff Jim has stolen the dam money and are literally preparing to lynch him over it, Harold sees a leaflet for the medicine show and deduces that “Flash” and Sandoni stole the money and are hiding inside the Black Ghost, an old, derelict sailing ship beached on the town’s nearby lake. Harold rows out to the wreck of the Black Ghost and there ensues a series of scenes that when I first saw this movie with Charles in the 1990’s (as one of a series of Harold Lloyd films I’d recorded onto VHS from Turner Classic Movies showings) reminded me so much of F. W. Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu (1922) I was convinced Lloyd had seen it and was deliberately parodying it. Not only does the cadaverous appearance of Constantine Romanoff as Sandoni remind me of Max Schreck, the star of Nosferatu, there are plenty of sequences “copped” from Murnau’s film, including shots of faces of people (or, in some scenes, a pet monkey) leering over open hatches or through portholes on the ship’s decks. Ultimately Harold catches Sandoni (presumably “Flash” escapes, but without the money) and literally traps him inside a stack of life preservers. Since his own boat has drifted away, Harold brings the captive Sandoni by getting on the life preservers and literally rowing them to shore, using a broom as his oar. Then he commandeers an open wagon and loads Sandoni on it to drive it to town, though there’s some nice suspense editing as the life preservers binding Sandoni fall off one by one and we wonder whether he’ll still be captive when Harold gets to town in time to return the stolen money and save his dad from being lynched. The film ends as you’d expect, with Harold finally accepted into his family as the equal of his father and brothers, and also ending up with Mary’s love.

One of the ironies of The Kid Brother is that in 1927, Buster Keaton was making one of his lamest vehicles – College, a blatant ripoff of Lloyd’s The Freshman (1925) – while Lloyd was making this ground-breaking and audaciously dark film. Keaton had been forced by his producer, Joseph M. Schenck, to make College after the financial failure of his 1926 masterpiece, The General, and likewise Lloyd ran for cover after the commercial failure of The Kid Brother and the next year made Speedy, a light-hearted comic romp through the streets of New York City that cast Lloyd as the son of a horse-drawn streetcar proprietor who’s being threatened with the loss of his concession if he doesn’t run it every day. (Speedy would be Lloyd’s last silent film; in 1929 he’d make his no-fuss entry into the sound era with a film called Welcome Danger that was based on the same kinds of thrill sequences he’d become famous for in movies like his best-known film, 1923’s Safety Last!) Despite its bland title, The Kid Brother is an audacious film that shows Lloyd not only going for Chaplinesque pathos but also displaying some of Keaton’s mechanical imagination, notably in his combination butter churn and washing machine that washes clothes and automatically hangs them on a clothesline. He has a similarly economical way of washing dishes: after they’re washed, he puts them on a combination drying rack and shelf so he can rack them back on the walls after he’s done with them. Lloyd would embrace the dark side yet again in The Cat’s-Paw (1934), an amazing sound film in which he plays the son of an American missionary couple who aised him in China who comes to the U.S. as an adult for the first time, is drafted to run a campaign for mayor by a political machine as a phony “reformer,” wins and takes the job seriously enough he uses old tricks he learned in China to bust the city’s gangsters. The credited director on The Kid Brother is Ted Wilde, though imdb.com lists other contributors, including Lewis Milestone (already a major name then!), J. A. Howe, and Lloyd himself – and it’s quite clear that here, as in all his major films, Harold Lloyd is really the auteur.