Ted Wilde, J. A. Howe, Lewis Milestone, and Harold Lloyd | The Kid Brother / 1927

coming in contact with male flesh 

Howard J. Green (screenplay), Ted Wilde, J. A. Howe, Lewis Milestone, and Harold Lloyd (directors) The Kid Brother / 1927

 

      Something similar to what occurs to the central character in Harold Lloyd’s Grandma’s Boy (1922) occurs also to Lloyd’s character in The Kid Brother (1927), directed by the team of Ted Wilde, J. A., Lewis Milestone, and Lloyd himself. As early gay film commentator Vito Russo points out, when a local medicine show burns down, leaving his new girlfriend Mary with nowhere to go, Harold invites her to spend the night in the home he shares with his father, the town Sheriff, and his brothers. Before she can get settled down, however, the wife of the man who has accidently set the show on fire shows up and takes Mary with her, feeling it inappropriate for Mary to be left for the night in a house with only males.

     Harold’s macho brothers, Leo and Olin, thinking that she is still there, sleeping behind a curtain, as Russo describes it “take turns reaching through to pat her hand, making increasingly bold advances until they discover that it is the sleeping Lloyd they have been fondling, not the woman.” As in Grandma’s Boy Harold takes a beating for their having even accidently come in contact with male flesh.

     The film ends, moreover, with Harold capturing a thief, saving the others of his family, and beating up his nemesis to prove he is “a real Hickory,” like his father and brothers, a strong masculine man.

 

Los Angeles, July 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).