Grandma’s Boy (1922) - film review

In the sleepy rural town Blossom Bend, a grandmother lives with her beloved grandson, whom she has nurtured and taught since he was a baby.  Now 19, the boy is a timid young man who is afraid to propose to the girl he loves and is tormented by a bully of his own age.  The final humiliation comes when the town’s sheriff enlists his help in arresting a troublesome vagrant and he only succeeds in making a fool of himself.  Moved by her grandson’s plight, the old woman tells him the story of his grandfather.  He too was once a weak, cowardly man, but thanks to a magic talisman he overcame his timidity and ended up a hero of the American Civil War...

The first of Harold Lloyd’s five reel films, Grandma’s Boy was conceived as a short film.  Lloyd had only just made A Sailor-Made Man (1921), the longest of his short films at around 46 minutes and was reluctant to begin making feature films.  It was only at the insistence of his producer, Hal Roach, that the story was extended and gradually grew to a full length film, with well developed characters, an episodic narrative and an extended flashback (the Civil War sequence).   It was the success of this film that persuaded Lloyd to switch from making shorts to full-length films.

Grandma’s Boy does at times feel like several short films spliced together and is less well structured than Lloyd’s subsequent features.  This doesn’t diminish the film’s entertainment value one iota and it makes a satisfying morality tale that is both amusing and poignant.  Lloyd is as inventive as ever at devising comic routines and gags that are still hilarious to watch, the best being the scene in which Lloyd mistakenly eats a mothball whilst courting his girlfriend.  The heroine is played by Mildred Davis, who appeared in many of Lloyd’s films and would become his wife.   Anna Townsend would reprise the role of the unassuming grandma in Lloyd’s next film, Safety Last! (1923).

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