Frank Borzage's delicate romances almost always had an element of mad love. Lazybones is a tender comedy that evolves into melodrama with a far from happy ending. A bridge to Borzage's early Westerns, Lazybones stars cowboy Buck Jones as a country layabout who adopts a baby girl when the mother (ZaSu Pitts, in a beautiful performance) is forced by her own puritanical mother to abandon the child. The forbidden longing here is that of Jones for the child as she grows into a woman. "Borzage conveys Lazybones's growing desire with an explicitness no less powerful for its gentleness, making us uncomfortably complicit... In this gentle masterpiece, Borzage tells a tale of universally unfulfilled desire.... Like Sherwood Anderson, Borzage manages a vision of small-town American life based on the repression of desire, yet still manages to be sympathetic towards his characters." (Tom Gunning)