An Old Fashioned Boy on AllMovie

With a title like this one, it's practically a given that this silent picture starred Charles Ray. But this time around, instead of being a homespun rural boy, he's a city guy with homespun ideals. His dream of a home in the suburbs is so strong that he has one built before he tells his fiancee, Betty Graves (Ethel Shannon). But Betty is upset by his presumptuousness and her vision of home life definitely doesn't include a suburban home, so she dumps him. Then Herbert (Wade Boteler) and Sybil (Grace Morse), married friends of the battling pair, split up, and Sybil takes their three children to stay with David. So David and the girl's father, a doctor (Alfred Allen), plot to have the home quarantined -- with Betty in it -- in the hopes that this will enable her to make up with David. Amazingly, instead of driving her completely nuts, this ploy does work (even in the 20s, this idea couldn't possibly have been realistic), and both couples wind up reconciling.