The Kid Brother

Sources claim that half this film was directed by Lewis Milestone, but it's a Harold Lloyd movie through and through, and perhaps only slightly less of an achievement than Safety Last. Lloyd's penultimate silent movie, made for Paramount, The Kid Brother is not an urban story (which was his trademark) but a rural one, which brings it quite close to the world of Keaton. Lloyd, like Keaton in The Navigator, is the living proof that every family tree must have its sap. Despised by his father and two strapping brothers, he proves he is a man after a girl catches his bespectacled eyes. The plot, of course, is just an excuse for a string of pratfalls, chases and derring-do, while the climax aboard an abandoned ship is a tour de force, and sometimes painfully violent.