Steve Tuttle, the titular lazybones, takes on the responsibility of raising a fatherless girl, causing a scandal in his small town. Many years later, having returned from World War I, he discovers that he loves the grown-up girl. 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).<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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. 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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>{Grade: 6/10 (C+) / #6 (of 6) of 1925}
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