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Lazybones  /  Secrets

Lazybones (1925)
July 11, 2015 - 7:30 pm

Live musical accompaniment will be provided by Cliff Retallick.

Lazybones  (1925)


A shiftless young farmer (Charles Buck Jones) takes a fatherless infant girl under his wing after he rescues her and her mother from the river, until, years later, his experience of war transforms his feelings for his now adult ward.  Abounding with Biblical allusions and echoes of D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), Lazybones finds director Frank Borzage breathing new energy and life into well-worn narrative conventions.

Production: Fox Film Corp.  Distribution: Fox Film Corp.  Director: Frank Borzage.  Based on the play Lazybones by Owen Davis.  Scenario: Frances Marion.  Cinematographer: Glen MacWilliams, George Schneiderman.  With: Charles Buck Jones, Madge Bellamy, Virginia Marshall, Edythe Chapman, Leslie Fenton.  35mm, b/w, silent, 80 min.

Print courtesy of the Royal Belgian Film Archive.

Secrets  (1924)


Perhaps director Frank Borzage’s best-known film before he joined Fox, Secrets extols the enduring virtues of love over time.  An adaptation of Rudolph Besier and May Eddington’s play, it unfolds as an extended flashback when an elderly wife, tending to her sick husband, falls asleep and dreams of the many “secrets” they have shared in their long, tumultuous life together.

Distribution: Associated First National Pictures.  Producer: Frank Borzage.  Director: Frank Borzage.  Based on the play Secrets, a Play in a Prologue, Three Acts and an Epilogue by Rudolf Besier and May Edginton.  Screenwriter: Frances Marion.  Cinematographer: Tony Gaudio.  With: Norma Talmadge, Eugene O'Brien, Patterson Dial, Emily Fitzroy, Claire McDowell.  35mm, b/w, silent with Czech intertitles and live English translation, 90 min.