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As Good As It Gets

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The title character, Lazybones (Buck Jones), was named this because he's a ridiculous caricature when it comes to his sleeping all the time and being incredibly lazy. I didn't like this concept, as it just seemed very unreal. However, I did love his character later in the film when he showed he was more than just a one-dimensional guy. While fishing, he sees a woman trying to drown herself in the river (Zasu Pitts). It seems she's feeling desperate--she married a sailor who has since died and she's now stuck with his baby. Her family doesn't know and she anticipates that her nasty mother will reject her and the kid (in an 'I told you so' moment)--hence she threw herself in the river. Lazybones takes pity on her and agrees to take the kid home and raise it himself agrees never to tell anyone who the real mother is. Time passes and the child grows up in a nasty town where the other kids enjoy tormenting her because of her lowly birth. But despite this, she is a nice kid and grows to be a lovely woman. However, Lazybones doesn't see this transformation, as he's off in the war and when he returns he sees her in all her glory. He almost instantly falls in love with her (which is icky considering that he raised her) and plans on asking for her to marry him. But another man, much younger, has already won her heart and nice 'ol Lazybones is left with his unrequited love.The film is very lovingly filmed and the director (Frank Borzage) did a great job with the material. The acting, likewise, was quite good. I just couldn't get past how one-dimensional some of the characters seemed (not just Lazybones but Pitts' mother) as well as the creepy notion of a guy wanting to marry a girl he raised. Still, it is a nice little film...if a bit odd.

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.

My first entry in the sudden Borzage/Murnau double-quest I'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's Lazybones.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 "Lazybones". He'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 "the local Beau Brummel", Elmer Ballister (William Bailey). But while doin' 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'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's ready to tell her mother, but when Ruth'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) as a young girl, as a teenager, and as a young woman in 1917, and Steve finally has to do something, and gets shipped off to war.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's Steve's house, from grandmother on down to adopted daughter, runs into the stubborn gate and yells, "Darn that gate!", isn't really that funny, but it's one of the few moments of lightheartedness in the entire piece, and even then, it's used as a 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 slapstick as through dumb luck, he becomes a national hero.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'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'm glad this collection is mostly Borzage (only two of the twelve films in the collection are from Murnau), because of the two I've seen (this and Moonrise, I've been pretty much underwhelmed.{Grade: 6/10 (C+) / #6 (of 6) of 1925}

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.