A Film Canon

The Kid Brother simplifies Harold Lloyd's appeal, drawing upon his naive, boyish persona, but failing to engage with the urban and sexual collisions that affront and, ultimately, clarify that persona. If anything, his sweating, stuttering anxiety becomes less pronounced when his love interest is around, while urbanity is reduced to a couple of dim echoes (a travelling medicine-show and a proposed dam), with all the action occurring in and around a small rural hamlet. This simplification results from an unprecedented attempt to make over Lloyd in Chaplin and Keaton's images, whom he respectively imitates in his subversive reinterpretation of everyday objects, and his reduction of the entire physical world to a series of elegant machines. Such is the shrewdness of new directors J.A. Howe and Ted Wilde, however, that they are unwilling to choose between Lloyd's appeal and that of his competitors, with the result that even these imitations have a reductive, simplified quality, particularly clear with respect to Keaton's iconic 'trajectory-gag'. Instead of becoming objects, Lloyd hides behind them, creating a series of chase sequences paradoxically predicated on stillness; or, rather, upon the tiny movement (such as a fly's landing) that disrupts the mise-en-scene in which he is concealed, necessitating his (dramatically elided) transition to another. This mechanical stopping and starting only really works when it is itself explicated as the gag - and, in particular, when the starting is increasingly surprising, or unbelievable - such as when Lloyd climbs to higher and higher vantage points on a tree to call out to his love, or makes successive efforts to catch up with the car whisking her away from him. In the end, this shrewd syncretism extends beyond the boundaries of comedy itself, evident in a series of dramatic, violent episodes that culminate with the showdown on a Gothic ship, all of which gesture towards the existence of evil to an extent that sits uncomfortably with Lloyd's comic universe, best defined in terms of its innocence - as if the directors have made the mistake of convincing us that Lloyd has finally grown up.