Harockerce What a beautiful movie!

Ensofter Overrated and overhyped

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Sammy-Jo Cervantes There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

drednm Buck Jones is a huge surprise in this 1925 silent, playing a rural man who lives with his mother (Edythe Chapman) and is known as Lazybones. Frank Borzage's delicate film (beautifully shot) shows the true of a man no one really knows. He sits around and fishes, neglecting chores and a local girl (Jane Novak) who is in love with him, much to the relief of her battle-axe mother (Emily Fitzroy).The one day, her sister (Zasu Pitts) returns from the city, where she was married to a sailor who has been lost at sea. She also has a baby. Knowing that no one in small-town America will believe she had been married, she sets down the baby and jumps into the river. Lazybones sees her and jumps in to save her. She tells him her story and they concoct a plan whereby he will claim to have found the baby and she can return home alone in a few days.Of course the town turns on him and the baby girl, but Lazybones holds to his promise while Pitts is consigned to marry a local jerk. Even the sister turns on Lazybones and says she'll never speak to him again. The years pass.As World War I approached, Lazybones goes off the war while the baby Kit (Madge Bellamy) is now about 15. Lazybones inadvertently becomes a war hero and returns to a town that has still never quite forgiven him. Kit now has a boyfriend (Leslie Fenton). Lazybones realizes he is in love with Kit and just as quickly realizes how many of their lives have changed over the years.Jones is terrific. He usually starred in Westerns and for a time rivaled William S. Hart in popularity. Here he has a chance at a part that requires a delicate mix of drama and comedy. Zasu Pitts is fantastic as the tragic Ruth. Best know for her fluttery old maids, here she turns in a solid dramatic performance. Also good are Bellamy, Novak, and Chapman. A special word is needed for Fitzroy, who along with Josephine Crowell, ranks among the major battle-axes of the silent era.A final word on Buck Jones. He was still going strong in 1942, starring in B Westerns when he was caught in the famous Coconut Grove fire in Boston. He died two days later.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx It's the turn of the century in the middle of nowhere. Buck Jones stars as rube Steve Tuttle, a man who is the very definition of bone idle. He's a nice honest guy but he'd much rather be chewing on an ear of corn with a hat over his face than doin' much of anything. For some reason a lovely young lady called Agnes is sweet on him, but he'd rather catch forty zees than go a-courtin'. There's a brash annoying fellow called Elmer Ballister who is referred to by an intertitle as being a "Beau Brummel" type, and he is well dressed and well-to-do but that's about the sum of the man. Agnes' 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.To add a dash of zing to the film Agnes' 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.He agrees to look after the baby, so that Ruth can go home and pretends that nothing has happened. And that's how he spends the next few years, lazin' away and bringing up "Kit". 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.This movie is about the passing of time though. Steve returns from France and time has moved on, his boots don't fit, and the sticking gate which he always meant to fix has been fixed by a young man who carries his Kit away.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't have. The last scenes were like a roundhouse to the jaw for me. Just after we'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's heart it is a movie about the sheer folly of letting life slip idly by.Steve, one might feel, deserved some reward for bringing Kit up, however in a nice guy comes last world, things like that don't happen. You have to seize life and in particular the girl to get anything out of it.My apologies for the spoilers, almost impossible to discuss the movie sensibly without them.

theskulI42 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}

rogerskarsten My fellow reviewers have done so much justice to this fine film that I hesitated to submit my own thoughts, since many of them would be quite redundant. I therefore will not comment so much on the story itself in this review, but instead concentrate on some of the aesthetic qualities of the film.The careful attention to period detail is one of the salient features of LAZYBONES. Produced in 1925, but telling a story that reaches back to the turn-of-the-century and advances to "now," it genuinely captures the look of each era it portrays. Often films made in the 1920s but set, say, before the War (WWI), look very different from actual films produced in 1914 -- we can see it in the clothes and the hairstyles. In LAZYBONES this is not the case. Even the characters age believably as the decades advance (only Kit is portrayed by different actresses as she grows up). Buck Jones's transformation from a teenager to an almost middle-aged man is especially noteworthy.Another strength of Borzage's direction is his strong evocation of place. His rural America is steeped in romanticism -- so stylized and yet so personal as to exist both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. One is left with the feeling that these characters -- especially Steve (Buck Jones) and his mother (Edythe Chapman) -- are inextricably linked with the languid atmosphere of their environment. This quality is also reflected in Borzage's lingering, empathetic close-ups that seem to stretch time beyond its natural bounds. The scene in which Ruth (Zasu Pitts) passes by Steve's house in the carriage, catching a glimpse of her daughter, is one such example. This moment -- consisting of only a few seconds in real time -- is frozen as Borzage focuses on the emotions displayed in the expressions of Ruth, Steve, and Kit (Virginia Marshall). The reunion scene when Steve returns from the war is certainly every bit the equal of the one near the end of Vidor's THE BIG PARADE, and is another prime example of "stretching time" for dramatic effect.In contrast to such Borzage silent masterpieces as 7TH HEAVEN, STREET ANGEL, and LUCKY STAR, I would classify LAZYBONES as a film fundamentally grounded in realism (note the prominent use of real exteriors instead of studio back-lot sets). At the same time, however, Borzage flavors the whole work with a wistful romanticism that is never cloying but somehow manages to capture the dream-like qualities of our own nostalgic memories: snapshot moments, tinged at times with melancholy, at times with happiness.