a5c7b9f00b Steve Tuttle, the titular lazybones, takes on the responsibility of raising a fatherless girl, causing a scandal in his small town. Many years later, having returned from World War I, he discovers that he loves the grown-up girl. My first entry in the sudden Borzage/Murnau double-quest I&#39;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&#39;s Lazybones.<br/><br/>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 &quot;Lazybones&quot;. He&#39;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 &quot;the local Beau Brummel&quot;, Elmer Ballister (William Bailey). But while doin&#39; 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&#39;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&#39;s ready to tell her mother, but when Ruth&#39;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)a young girl,a teenager, anda young woman in 1917, and Steve finally has to do something, and gets shipped off to war.<br/><br/>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&#39;s Steve&#39;s house, from grandmother on down to adopted daughter, runs into the stubborn gate and yells, &quot;Darn that gate!&quot;, isn&#39;t really that funny, but it&#39;s one of the few moments of lightheartedness in the entire piece, and even then, it&#39;s useda 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 slapstickthrough dumb luck, he becomes a national hero.<br/><br/>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&#39;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&#39;m glad this collection is mostly Borzage (only two of the twelve films in the collection are from Murnau), because of the two I&#39;ve seen (this and Moonrise, I&#39;ve been pretty much underwhelmed.<br/><br/>{Grade: 6/10 (C+) / #6 (of 6) of 1925} It&#39;s the turn of the century in the middle of nowhere. Buck Jones starsrube Steve Tuttle, a man who is the very definition of bone idle. He&#39;s a nice honest guy but he&#39;d much rather be chewing on an ear of corn with a hat over his face than doin&#39; much of anything. For some reason a lovely young lady called Agnes is sweet on him, but he&#39;d rather catch forty zees than go a-courtin&#39;. There&#39;s a brash annoying fellow called Elmer Ballister who is referred to by an intertitlebeing a &quot;Beau Brummel&quot; type, and he is well dressed and well-to-do but that&#39;s about the sum of the man. Agnes&#39; 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.<br/><br/>To add a dash of zing to the film Agnes&#39; 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.<br/><br/>He agrees to look after the baby, so that Ruth can go home and pretends that nothing has happened. And that&#39;s how he spends the next few years, lazin&#39; away and bringing up &quot;Kit&quot;. 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.<br/><br/>This movie is about the passing of time though. Steve returns from France and time has moved on, his boots don&#39;t fit, and the sticking gate which he always meant to fix has been fixed by a young man who carries his Kit away.<br/><br/>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&#39;t have. The last scenes were like a roundhouse to the jaw for me. Just after we&#39;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&#39;s heart it is a movie about the sheer folly of letting life slip idly by.<br/><br/>Steve, one might feel, deserved some reward for bringing Kit up, however in a nice guy comes last world, things like that don&#39;t happen. You have to seize life and in particular the girl to get anything out of it.<br/><br/>My apologies for the spoilers, almost impossible to discuss the movie sensibly without them.
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