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.

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.

Uncommonly fine little rural romance, where the familiar plot contrivances (mother love, war heroics, the "Daddy Long Legs" motif of the benefactor falling in love with his ward) are transcended by sensitive treatment. Borzage was working near the height of his powers, and his restrained handling of the actors and staging of the scenes make this comedy-drama far less dated than most of its contemporaries. He seems to really believe in the material, and so will you. Buck Jones, for most of his career a B-Western star, shows what he can do under a fine director: He has expressive eyes and a tender rapport with the rest of the cast. Also, as with so many Borzage projects, it's beautifully shot. One complaint: It ends rather abruptly and inconclusively (unless I saw an incomplete print). You expect things to come full circle, and they don't.