“The Cameraman” - Buster Keaton and Edward Sedgwick (1928)

The Cameraman (1928) was the last of Buster Keaton’s great silent-film features, which had earlier included Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).  This was also the first film he made with MGM Studios, after having made most of his earlier classics with his own hand-crafted production company.  The move to MGM may have seemed like a good option at the time, but Keaton later very much regretted it, since it led to a loss of his autonomy and restrictions on his creative options.  MGM insisted on having a finalized script prior to shooting and filming according to a tight shooting schedule, something that didn’t mesh with Keaton’s usual improvisational style.  So for The Cameraman, the studio assigned 22 writers to work on the script to ensure it would meet their professional standards [1].  However, for this first film for MGM, at least, Keaton managed to convince producer Irving Thalberg to let him scrap the studio’s script and let him do things his way.  The result was a hit at the box office and with the critics, but the subsequent increasing MGM restrictions on Keaton’s creativity, along with the coming of the sound-era in filmmaking, led to a relentless decline to Keaton’s career.

The story of The Cameraman concerns a would-be newsreel photographer and his efforts to break in to this exciting professional arena.  In those days newsreels, often with live, on-the-spot footage, were shown prior to the mean features at movie theaters.  Since these were in the days prior to television and electronic media, the newsreels were the only visual samplings the public had of newsworthy events taking place around the world, and they were immensely popular. So there was a premium placed on those intrepid newsreel photographers who could rush to a newsworthy, sometimes dangerous, event and capture what was happening on film.  Our film’s protagonist wants to engage in this heroic pursuit.
 
Our protagonist, of course, is played by Buster Keaton, who always portrays an ordinary, innocent, and naive young man who despite, his ill preparation and lack of resources, dauntlessly faces seemingly overwhelming challenges.  And as I have previously mentioned in earlier reviews of Keaton’s films, his narratives usually progress through three stages of intensity concerning the challenges to be faced:

• the Quaint (the hopelessly naive and shy protagonist trying to play by the conservative  rules he has been brought up on),
   
• the Slapstick (the protagonist encountering unexpected events and obstacles that result in one acrobatic pratfall after another), and
   
• the Maelstrom (the protagonist(s) engulfed in a blizzard of existential threats arising from an inscrutable environment).

In The Cameraman, however, these phases are not so clearly marked, and, moreover, the maelstrom is not the culminating event of the story.  In addition, many of the slapstick occasions in this story seem to be just random occurrences that are not very closely connected to an overriding narrative.  Nevertheless, the film does manage to carry much of the characteristic Keatonesque charm.

The Cameraman’s story passes through four stages.

1.  The Tintype Photographer (the Quaint)

At first we see Buster Keaton (playing “Buster”) working on the street soliciting passers-by to have their pictures taken with his tintype camera.  Tintype photography was an early image print process that could produce pictures in a couple of minutes, so Buster could hand over his taken pictures immediately to his customers.  His work, however, is interrupted by a tickertape parade that attracts a big crowd.  Among the onlookers is a naturally beautiful young woman, Sally (played by Marceline Day), on whom Buster develops an instant crush.  Buster also sees that the tickertape parade is being filmed by a newsreel photographer, and he wonders if that’s something he could do.

So Buster goes to the offices of MGM Newsreels looking for a job, and he is surprised to see that working there as a receptionist is Sally, towards whom the awkward and virtually speechless Buster can only make worshipful glances.  Buster’s primitive tintype camera is rudely dismissed by the MGM boss and a staff cameraman Harry (Harold Goodwin), who also has his eyes on Sally, and Buster is shown the door.  Before leaving, though, Sally sympathetically tells him that he needs to have his own motion-picture camera and take some interesting footage with it in order to get such a job.  So Buster uses all of his money to buy an old hand-cranked film camera at a pawnshop, and then he goes off looking for interesting things to film.

2.  The Slapstick Scenes
Now the film passes into a somewhat disconnected sequence of slapstick scenes.  Out on the city streets looking for interesting things to shoot, Buster has a slapstick encounter with a cop (Harry Gribbon) walking his beat.  These semi-hostile encounters will reappear throughout the rest of the film.  Then, not knowing that the New York Yankees baseball team is on the road, he visits an empty Yankee Stadium looking for something to shoot.  There follows a slapstick pantomime sequence of Buster imitating baseball players in action.  Although this scene has nothing to do with the rest of the story, it is amusing to see how closely Keaton’s 90-year-old pantomiming matches the gestures of today’s baseball players.

When Buster returns to MGM Newsreels to show the footage of supposedly interesting urban activity he has collected, he is crushed to see that his incompetence with his hand-cranked camera led to everything being double-exposed, and he is scornfully laughed out of the studio screening room.  Before he departs, though, he manages to secure a date to take Sally for a walk the next Sunday, the preparation for which involves further slapstick, including a continuous multi-floor tracking shot showing Buster running up and down stairs.

On the date, after a harrowing bus ride, they wind up going to the municipal indoor swimming pool, where more shenanigans take place.  Perhaps the most famous of these shows Buster and a fat man cramped inside a phone-booth-sized changing stall, where he and the man struggle to change into their swimming suits.  All of this must have been carefully planned, because this is presented in extended takes, the longest of which lasts 2:40.  There are also frantic sequences showing Buster and Sally in the water after Buster had embarrassedly lost his swimsuit.

When they are ready to go home, Harry shows up uninvited and offers Sally a ride home in his fancy car.  Harry dismissively tells Buster to go sit back in the rumble seat, and Buster winds up getting soaked to his skin when a thunderstorm arises during their ride home.

3.  The Tong War Maelstrom
Later the still-sympathetic Sally gets word that in Chinatown there is an imminent Tong (Chinese gangsters) war, and she quietly passes the information about this certain-to-be-newsworthy event on to Buster.  Buster immediately rushes off towards Chinatown, but in his haste he knocks over a sidewalk organ grinder, the crushing fall apparently killing the organ grinder’s his little dancing monkey.  However, after the organ grinder departs with some compensatory coins from Buster, the monkey revives and permanently attaches itself to Buster. 

Buster now arrives in Chinatown, and he, with the clever assistance from his new monkey pal, starts filming the incredibly violent and chaotic Tong war that has erupted.  He is now in the middle of a maelstrom.  This tumultuous battle goes on for seven minutes of screen time, and Buster is lucky to survive.  Afterwards, he triumphantly returns to MGM to show his precious footage, but he is shocked when he opens his camera to find no film in it.  Seemingly having ruined his last change with Sally, he apologizes to her and goes home.

4.  Finally, Some Valuable Footage
The next day Buster, still with his monkey, goes to film a yacht club regatta.  When he sets up his camera, Buster discovers that his monkey had the previous day mischievously removed Buster’s earlier-shot film reel from his camera, suggesting that his Tong-war footage is still available. 

But at this point we see that Harry has taken Sally out in the same waters in his speedboat, and they speed into Buster’s camera’s field of view.  When Harry attempts a daredevil turn in the speedboat, he and Sally are both thrown into the water.  Saving his own skin, Harry safely swims ashore, leaving Sally alone struggling way out in the water.

When Buster sees what has happened, he strips off his coat and plunges into the water to save Sally.  Incredibly, after Buster has abandoned his camera, the monkey comes over and starts cranking the camera to film everything.  Buster manages to rescue the now-unconscious Sally, and once he brings her ashore, he immediately rushes off to a nearby drugstore to get something that will help revive her.  While Buster is momentarily away, Harry shows up just as Sally regains consciousness.  Harry quickly claims wrongful credit for having saved Sally and ushers her away just before Buster can return to her.  Buster has once more lost to Harry.

Buster feels that he has been defeated once and for all.  But we know that his camera has recorded, thanks partly to his ingenious monkey pal, the truth of his heroic deeds, including the Tong war, on film.  You can watch the ending of The Cameraman for yourself to see how these truths are finally revealed to all.

Overall, The Cameraman has two satisfying narrative threads: one of them tracing Buster’s hectic efforts to film newsworthy events so that he can secure a job at the newsreel company and the other thread covering the tentative and gradual relationship between Buster and Sally.  This relationship thread is greatly enhanced by Marceline Day’s sensitive and subtly emotive performance in the role of Sally.  This is all interlaced with an admittedly hodgepodge collection of slapstick scenes, which must have required careful planning and execution to get right.

On the thematic plane, we might inquire whether the cameraman’s occupation in the film stimulates considerations of larger social issues, such as privacy, authenticity, and censorship.  However, although those issues are lurking in the background, they do not come up in any significant way here in this film.  Nevertheless, The Cameraman is an entertaining film that I recommend.
★★★½ 

Notes:

1. “The Cameraman”, Wikipedia, (21 December 2018).   

“Steamboat Bill, Jr.” - Buster Keaton and Charles Reisner (1928)

Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) was the last brilliant product of his own, personally-managed production team, which had earlier produced an amazing string of silent classics that included Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General(1926), and The Cameraman (1928).  These films collectively place Keaton among the elite list of great film auteurs, and in fact, some leading critics even rank Keaton ahead of Charlie Chaplin as the greatest silent-era auteur [1,2].

Although Steamboat Bill, Jr. belongs to this list of Keaton’s finest films, it was unfortunately not a hit at the box office and drew only mixed reviews from the critics (The New York Times critic, Mordaunt Hall, for example, panned the film [3]).  Probably for these reasons, Keaton felt compelled to sign on with MGM studios for future productions, “despite the urgent warnings of Chaplin and Lloyd and his own misgivings” [4], and this led to his loss of production control and had disastrous consequences for his remaining career.  So with Steamboat Bill, Jr. we have one of the last examples of Keaton’s greatness.

With this film, we again have Keaton’s almost patented sequential mixture of narrative elements –

• the quaint (Keaton seen as an earnest but almost hopelessly naive young man trying to play by the rules in an artificial and quaintly stilted social setting),
   
• the slapstick (Keaton dealing with a relentless sequence of unexpected events and obstacles that result in one acrobatic pratfall after another), and
   
• the maelstrom (the protagonists facing a culminating blizzard of existential threats that seem to stem from inscrutable natural forces).

However, in this film these narrative elements are somewhat disjointed and not so well fit together into a narrative whole.  While more than half of the film running time is devoted to various standalone slapstick scenes, it is the final fourteen minutes showing the maelstrom that stand out in everyone’s memories.  This was probably Keaton’s most dizzyingly delirious maelstrom sequence.

The story of the film concerns the unequal rivalry between two riverboat operators somewhere out in the American Midwest.  One of them, William "Steamboat Bill" Canfield, Sr. (played by Ernest Torrence), is a rough-hewn captain of an old and rundown paddle steamer.  His business is threatened by rival John King (Tom McGuire), a wealthy businessman who owns about every establishment in town and whose fancy brand new steamboat is overwhelmingly superior to Steamboat Bill’s.  This sets the stage for the three narrative sections that ensue. 

1.  Junior Arrives
In the opening sequences we are exposed to the quaint.  Steamboat Bill is eagerly looking forward to the arrival of his son, William Canfield, Jr. (Buster Keaton), who has been studying at college in the East (Boston) and whom he hasn’t seen since the boy was a toddler.  The father is expecting that his son will be a strapping tough guy like himself who can help in his boating operations, and he is dismayed to see on the boy’s arrival that he is a useless, effeminate fop who wears a beret.  Much of this first twenty or so minutes of the film are devoted to the father’s efforts to make Junior look more like a man – first by having his pencil mustache shaved off and then by replacing his beret with a more manly hat.

We also see in this sequence that John King’s daughter, Kitty (Marion Byron), has just also returned home from college in the East and that she and Junior had developed something of a romantic attachment while studying there.  Naturally, Junior and Kitty are thrilled to discover that they have wound up together in the same Midwestern city.  But their respective rivalrous fathers are dead set against seeing their relationship move forward.

2.  Working on the Steamboat
We now move to slapstick mode, as Junior tries to adapt himself to working on the family steamboat and live up to his father’s expectations.  At the same time, Junior is hoping to sneak over to the other boat so he can meet up with Kitty.  Some of the slapstick scenes shown here (several shots more than a minute in duration) must have been very carefully planned in order for all of the acrobatic Keaton’s coordinated movements to have worked out so perfectly.  But it all comes to naught, as Bill, Sr., finally gets fed up with his son’s uselessness and buys him a bus ticket to go back to Boston.

Just as Junior is about to leave, though, Bill, Sr., learns that his steamboat has been officially condemned by the authorities, and he assumes that John King is behind the move.  So, true to his character, Bill, Sr., physically attacks King and gets quickly thrown in jail.  Seeing what has happened, Junior decides not to leave town just yet and to see what he can do to get his father out of jail.

However, Junior’s efforts to sneak some breakout tools (hammer, wrench, etc.) to his father by concealing them inside a loaf of bread come to naught.  Although he does help engineer a temporary breakout, after some more slapstick, his father lands back in jail, and Junior winds up getting knocked out and sent to the hospital.

At this point, after all this slapstick, we have Bill, Sr., in jail and Junior in the hospital.  The outlook doesn’t look good, and the weather forecast is gloomy.

3.  The Storm
In fact now the weather takes over completely, and a horrific thunderstorm hits the town.  It has become time for the maelstrom.  Although these scenes shown here don’t show much narrative continuity, their depiction of cataclysmic annihilation stand out as some of Keaton’s most memorable visual images.  In particular, as we watch these shots of chaotic physical destruction, we can only marvel at how Keaton managed to stage them.  These were in the days before most special effects could be conjured up, and most of these destructive shots had to be executed in one take – reshooting a building collapse, for example, was presumably not an option.

As the storm mounts in ferocity, we first see people being blown off their feet, and then cars are shown being blown down the street from the intensity of the wind.  Then we see Steamboat Bill’s boat breaking away from the pier and being blown out into the river.  As things get worse, buildings are shown being destroyed by the force of the wind.

Over in the hospital where Junior is still lying unconscious, he finally awakens just as the entire hospital building is lifted off the ground and blown away.  Then, still lying in his hospital bed, he finds himself and the bed being blown down the street into more chaos.  This leads up to the most celebrated shot in the film.  Junior stands up just as the entire wall of a building falls and crashes down onto him – but he is saved because the open 2nd-floor window of that wall just happens to fit around and clear his body.  How Keaton had the courage and confidence to stage that shot is still amazing to me every time I see it.

Finally, the jail building, with Bill, Sr., still confined in his cell, gets blown into the river and starts slowly sinking.  And then at this point, Junior gets blown into the river, too, and he manages to swim over to his floating steamboat and scramble aboard. 

Now an astonishing transformation seems to come over Junior.  While still acting in his usual bumbling way, he somehow changes from being a useless fop to an unlikely heroic savior.  And there are plenty of people around him in desperate need of being saved.  As he looks out from the deck of his steamboat, he separately sees in the water his father in his sinking jail and Kitty clinging to another sinking building.  But the intrepid Junior breathtakingly manages to single-handedly steer his steamboat over to each of them and perform the rescue.  Then he rescues his father’s hitherto enemy, John King, who is also swimming in the water after his own steamboat has sunk.

All this leads to a joyful coming together and reconciliation on the part of John King, Bill, Sr., Kitty, and Junior.  With their lives having been saved, they all seem finally relieved.  But the ever-mindful Junior realizes that if he wants to marry Kitty right away, there is still one more person (the church pastor) he needs to save from the water. 

All in all, Steamboat Bill, Jr. is one of Buster Keaton’s most satisfying films.  The real narrative development in the story concerns, as it does in a number of Keaton’s tales, the transformation of the protagonist from a naive greenhorn into a highly competent get-things-done master.  And the film’s lasting image is that single-take falling-wall scene, in which the entire action of the falling wall is shown without an editorial cut.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, E. P. Dutton & Co. (1968), p. 62. 
2. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, (1968), passage quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Buster Keaton ‘Our Hospitality’, 1923”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XXI:1), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (31 August 2010).    
3. Mordaunt Hall, “THE SCREEN; A Gloomy Comedy”, The New York Times, (15 May 1928). 
4. Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “August 31 ‘Buster Keaton Sherlock Jr.’ and ‘Steamboat Bill Jr.’ 1928", Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (IX:1), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (31 August 2004). 

“The Navigator” - Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp (1924)

Buster Keaton was one of filmdom’s masterful auteurs [1], and some of his great silent classics stand as testaments to that fact.  One of these, The Navigator (1924), was an early example.  Coming as it did immediately after Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), which was only a modest success with the critics and at the box office, The Navigator was one of Keaton’s biggest commercial successes.  We can attribute part of this success to Keaton’s adherence to his own special scheme of narrative progression, the structure of which I will remind you a little bit more about below. 

First it is worth mentioning a couple of items about the production.  Keaton often liked to give his films an atmospheric setting, the nature of which plays an important role in his cinematic storytelling.  Here in the case of The Navigator, Keaton’s production team acquired a 500-foot ocean liner that was about to be condemned for scrap metal, and most of the film is set onboard this ship [2].  And the ship’s environment is so important that in some respects we could say the ship is a key character in the story.  With respect to another production matter, we note that although veteran Donald Crisp is officially listed as having co-directed the film with Keaton, the two of them did not get along, and Keaton went ahead and finished most of the film without Crisp’s participation [2]. 

As for that matter of Keaton’s narrative progression, it is a unique feature that I have discussed in connection with my review of his Our Hospitality (1923) [3] and comprises a movement across three basic narrative schemata:

• The Quaint  
  Here we see Keaton as an earnest but naive young man operating in accordance with what he thinks are the rules in an artificial and quaintly stilted social setting. 
    
• The Slapstick 
  In these scenes the protagonist must deal with a relentless sequence of unexpected  events and obstacles that result in one acrobatic pratfall after another.  It is here that Keaton’s amazing agility and athleticism are on full display.  And on this occasion, Keaton’s slapstick theatrics are well complemented by those of his costar, Kathryn McGuire.
   
• The Maelstrom 
  In this phase the world, itself, seems to close in on the protagonist and present a blizzard of unfathomable existential threats.  Chaos reigns, as Keaton struggles to survive in an increasingly dizzying world.  It is Keaton’s closing maelstrom phase that is his signature and most memorable contribution.

The story of The Navigator passes through three phases that roughly correspond to these three narrative dimensions.

1.  Getting Onboard The Navigator

This whole first phase is basically portrayed in Quaint mode.  In the beginning we are introduced to two wealthy and spoiled young people whose lives are disrupted by an obscure rivalry between two overseas countries.  When wealthy businessman John O’Brien sells the ocean liner, The Navigator, to one of the two rivalrous countries, agents of the adversarial country immediately make plans to sabotage the ship by setting it adrift from the harbor that night. 

Meanwhile, the young heir, Rollo Treadway (played by Buster Keaton), to an equally wealthy family’s fortune impetuously decides to arrange to marry O’Brien’s daughter, Betsy (Kathryn McGuire).  And he purchases tickets for himself and Betsy to go on an immediate honeymoon the very next day to Hawaii.  But when Rollo gets down to actually proposing to Betsy, she curtly turns him down.  With his honeymoon ticket already paid for, the now dazed and disconsolate Rollo decides to take the trip to Hawaii by himself, and since he doesn’t like getting up for an early morning departure, he decides to board the ship that night.  However, some pier sign confusion leads Rollo to board the wrong ship – not his Hawaii cruise ship, but the about-to-be sabotaged The Navigator. 

A little bit later and knowing nothing about Treadway’s doings, John O’Brien, accompanied by his daughter Betsy, makes a last-minute evening visit to his just-sold ship.  Unfortunately, the foreign saboteurs are now ready to strike, and they capture O’Brien and take him ashore.  Hearing her father’s call for help, though, Betsy boards The Navigator to look for him.  It is just then the saboteurs disengage the ship from the pier and cast it adrift.  The Navigator is now adrift in the Pacific Ocean with just two passengers, Rollo and Betsy.
                   
2.  Coping at Sea
In the second phase of the film, we move into Slapstick mode.  We have two spoiled and impractical rich kids alone on a large ship adrift in the sea.  Initially they each find evidence that there is someone else on board, and some time is spent on frenetic chase scenes as they search for each other.  When they eventually meet up, they then have to figure out what to do.  Since they have always been attended to by servants all their lives, neither Rollo nor Betsy has even the faintest knowledge concerning how to cope with practical affairs.  In particular, there is a six-minute segment showing their ludicrous attempts to prepare food in the kitchen.

Then they see a ship approaching from the distance, and Rollo, hoping to attract the ship’s attention, hoists a flag.  However the flag he unwittingly hoists is one signaling that their ship is under quarantine, and the approaching ship quickly sails away.

Since they have soaked themselves a few times in the water, they find some drier, sailor clothing to wear, and this occasions our seeing Keaton now decked out in his signature porkpie hat.  They retire to sleep in separate bedchambers, and there is a funny sequence in which Betsy sees in her own chamber a disturbing picture of a scowling sea captain, which she rids herself of by hanging it outside her port window.  But the scary picture hangs down and swings in front of Rollo’s port window, scaring the daylights out of him even more.

Eventually they find boxes of firecrackers and Roman candles which they hope to use to signal other ships.  But, of course, these get detonated accidentally all at once, causing further mayhem.  

3.  Weeks Later 
Time passes, and it seems that Rollo and Betsy have learned somehow to feed themselves on the well-stocked, but still-adrift, ship.  They have hooked up some makeshift Rube-Goldberg-like contraptions to help them deal with the large kitchen devices in the ship’s galley.  Things seem to be going better.  But finally they catch sight of what they have long been looking for – land!  This should lead to their salvation, but here it only leads to the Maelstrom.

When they look at the land through their spyglass, they see that it is an island full of cannibals.  Even worse, as their ship approaches the island, it runs aground and springs a leak.  Betsy finds a deep-sea diver’s outfit for Rollo to don, and once he is so clad, she then helps lower him over the side to repair the ship’s hull from the outside.

When Rollo enters this aquatic underworld, he finds himself barely able to move (because of his cumbersome diving suit) and having to cope with threatening sea creatures, like octopuses and swordfish.  At one point he even has to grab hold of one swordfish and use it as a weapon to engage in a sword fight with another, bigger swordfish.

Meanwhile the island cannibals have spotted the grounded The Navigator and have canoed en masse out to it, where they capture Betsy and take her as a prisoner back to their island.  Rollo, still at the bottom of the sea, sees that his line to the ship has come loose, but he somehow manages to stagger all the way to the island. 

When the natives see the strange looking figure emerge from the ocean, they think it is a monster, and they all scatter in fright.  Betsy and Rollo then make their way back to the ship, with Betsy sitting on the floating, diving-suited Rollo and rowing as if in a rowboat.  But the natives overcome their initial fright and soon chase after them.  A chaotic battle ensues, and it seems that the maelstrom only worsens.

The natives overwhelm the ship, and Rollo and Betsy try to escape in a lifeboat, but that effort fails, too.  They find themselves struggling unaided in the ocean, and all hope seems to be lost. The maelstrom has overwhelmed them.  But just as they are about to sink underwater for the last time, they are saved by an out-of-nowhere US navy submarine that lifts them out of the water and rescues them.


As is evident from the events described, the title of this film is somewhat ironic.  Far from charting and managing a planned course of action, our protagonist struggles to survive a torrent of problems that flood his way.  Overall, though, The Navigator stands out as displaying a perfectly crafted Quaint-Slapstick-Maelstrom Keaton narrative sequence.  Some critics especially single out the Slapstick part for praise [4], and perhaps it is due to this section that the film has been hailed as one of America’s all-time funniest films [5].  But I think, as with most of Keaton’s masterpieces, it is, again, the Maelstrom part that renders The Navigator its surreal, existential aura that is so special about Keaton’s best films.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Legendary film theorist Andrew Sarris included Keaton in his “pantheon” of greatest American directors:
• Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, E. P. Dutton & Co. (1968).
2. “The Navigator (1924 film)”, Wikipedia, (15 March 2019).        
3. The Film Sufi, “Our Hospitality - Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone (1923)”, The Film Sufi, (26 May 2018).    
4. Ed Howard, “The Navigator”, Only the Cinema, (3 April 2012).   
5. “America’s Funniest Movies”, American Film Institute, (2002).     

“Our Hospitality” - Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone (1923)

Our Hospitality (1923) was the first of Buster Keaton’s 1920s silent comedy masterpieces, which also included Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928). Together, these works put Keaton, along with Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, as one of his era’s true comedy masters [1].  Indeed many critics now consider Keaton to be even better than Chaplin and rate him the best of those three.  Noted film scholar Kevin Brownlow, for example, remarked [2]:

“In retrospect, Buster Keaton was probably the best comedy director in the business. Chaplin’s use of film was pedestrian by comparison.”

What elevated Keaton’s work above the “pedestrian” was his unique use of pure cinematic expression to evoke feelings of an existential nature.  Chaplin was a humanist (i.e. an essentialist), while Keaton added a manic existentialist touch.  (For more discussion on the distinctions between essentialism and existentialism, see my essay, "Phenomenology and Red Desert” [3].)

Keaton achieved his accomplishments by working from a very young age as a pure auteur.  Although others were credited with the cinematography, editing, and sometimes even co-direction of his films, it was Keaton who retained total control of all camera positions and editing decisions [4,5].  Even most of the scripts were extemporaneously made up under his guidance during the shootings of his films [4].  And it was Keaton who was the sole originator of many of the most creative sight gags in his films. It was also well-known that Keaton did not use a stunt double for any of the dangerous stunts he performed in his films, and on several occasions he had serious accidents while performing these stunts that almost killed him [5].

Keaton’s films invariably feature himself as a shy and innocently earnest young protagonist who relentlessly seeks his goals in the face of a daunting world of challenges.  The cinematic depictions of these events are often shown in terms of three distinct narrative schemes of presentation:

• The Quaint
  This is a ludicrously old-fashioned world reflecting in exaggerated terms the Keaton protagonist’s background.  Thus this is an imaginary essentialist social world.
• The Slapstick  
  Here the innocent protagonist must somehow deal with an evil cohort of adversaries, and this is where the classic silent-comedy slapstick pratfalls are performed. So the protagonist is now in a world full of nefarious, ill-intentioned villains, but it is still an essentialist world.
• The Maelstrom  
  In the final stages of many Keaton films, it seems that the entire universe has turned against the protagonist and has released its unfathomable fury.   It is here that we enter into an expressionistic depiction of existential annihilation, and these are the scenes that always linger in the viewers’ memories. 

In Our Hospitality these three schemes of narrative presentation appear sequentially in the three distinct sections of the film.  Note that this film uniquely has four members of the Keaton family in its cast.  Besides Buster Keaton, himself, the film also features his wife, Natalie Talmadge, in the female lead; his father, Joe Keaton, as the railroad train engineer; and his one-year-old son, Buster Keaton Jr., as the protagonist when he was a baby. 

The story of Our Hospitality was inspired by the notoriously deadly Hatfield-McCoy family feud (1863-1891) in the US Appalachian region in the 19th century [6].  That feud was fueled by an endless succession of back-and-forth revenge killings, and entered American folklore as an iconic element for mindless resentment and revenge.  However, to satisfy his own fascination with American historical development, Keaton set this film mostly in 1830, when the American train system was just getting started.  This was a technologically primitive time when even the pedal-driven bicycle was not yet in use, and Keaton accurately shows himself using a human-leg-propelled “dandy horse” to wheel himself around in an early scene [7].

The film opens in The Quaint narrative tone by setting the scene for subsequent comedic mayhem.

1.  Going to Claim the Inheritance 
The film opens in 1810, during the deadly McKay-Canfield family feud, when the last adult male Mckay family member is killed.  One-year-old Willie McKay’s mother takes her boy to New York City in order to escape the horrors of the family feud.  In 1830, however, 21-year-old Willie McKay (played by Buster Keaton) receives a letter informing him that he should go to Appalachia to claim his inheritance as the sole heir of the McKay family estate.  So the young man decides to take the train there, and much of this section of the film depicts the quaint primitiveness of early 19th-century American life, even seen from a 1923 perspective.

McKay shares a seat in his train coach with an equally shy young woman, Virginia Canfield (Natalie Talmadge, Buster Keaton’s wife), who, unbeknownst to McKay, is a member of the feud-linked Canfield family.  It is interesting when I look at Natalie Talmadge today, by the way, to see a kind of classic feminine beauty that was apparently a feature of the 1920s but which seems, regrettably, to have disappeared from our current imagery of glamor. 

Anyway, much of this section of the films depicts the ludicrous frailty of the early train system, where, for example, train personnel found that when they encountered a stubborn mule on the train tracks, they found it easier to move the tracks to the side than to move the mule.  After a series of such comedic mishaps, the ramshackle train makes it to its destined southern town, and its passengers alight.

2.  Our Hospitality     

In the town, the film’s narrative moves into slapstick mode.  Joseph Canfield (Joe Roberts) and his two adult sons discover that the still unsuspecting Willie McKay is in town and make immediate feud-fuelled attempts to shoot the young man. But various slapstick moments of accidental circumstance save him on each occasion.  Keaton is again faithful to the historical context in these scenes by showing the limitations of the gun technology of those days, when revolvers were not yet in use and single-shot guns were the norm.

Virginia Canfield, though, is still unaware of McKay’s family identity, and she invites the young man to her family home for dinner.  When he arrives, he is greeted graciously, but the Canfield sons make immediate preparations to shoot him.  However, the Canfield father quickly privately admonishes his sons that the rules of “Southern Hospitality” [8] prohibit them from killing any guest on their home premises.  

McKay finally gets wind of his precarious situation, too.  He now realizes that as long as he can stay inside the house, he is safe; but if he steps a foot outside the door, he is likely to be shot.  There follows a cat-and-mouse game of characteristically Keaton-crafted slapstick encounters involving attempts to get McKay to leave the home so that they can kill him.  During this time, too, McKay and Virginia are gradually falling in love.

3.  The Maelstrom 
Eventually McKay manages to escape the Canfield home by dressing up as an old lady.  The Canfields quickly discover the ruse, and the mad chase begins.  The film now enters its surreal, existentially threatening phase, when Keaton seems not only to be fleeing human adversaries but is also threatened with existential annihilation by Mother Nature, herself.  And this is where the film achieves its memorability.  Some of the ensuing scenes must have entailed incredible engineering ingenuity in order to play out so miraculously.

McKay, hotly pursued by the Canfields, runs madly into town and jumps onto a train and then onto a horse, which carries him madly into a wilderness.  He steals another train engine and gets into its tender car.  When the careening train derails on a mountainous track, the tender car somehow crashes off the tracks and down into a roaring river, with the tender box becoming a boat that McKay manages to try and steer in the raging waters. 

Virginia, worried about her new love, has also been looking for him.  When she sees him in the river, she gets into a boat to try and save him.  But things get only more precarious, and the raging torrents leave McKay and Virginia both frantically swimming in the water and heading for a catastrophic waterfall.  McKay’s breathtaking rescue of Virginia at the waterfall’s edge is the film’s highpoint and one of the most memorable scenes in silent movie history.

In the end, McKay and Virginia make it back to town and are immediately married by the kindly village parson.  The Canfield men discover the fact of the couple's union too late, and their own rigid adherence to their traditional mores and protocols forces them in the end to welcome Willie McKay as a new member of their family.


On the production side of things, we can only marvel at how Keaton managed in the filming of Our Hospitality the mechanics of all those carefully choreographed slapstick and maelstrom scenes.  In particular, those closing maelstrom scenes can be said to represent Keaton’s opening steps into the cinematic pantheon.  In fact those scenes are so breathtaking that we might likely overlook some earlier jump cuts or some other actually very nice touches, such as Keaton’s evident fascination with and fondness for dogs.

Looking at Our Hospitality from today’s increasingly hostile and perilous world perspective, we can appreciate Keaton’s dismissive take on the inanity of revenge and resentment, as well as the vacuity of rigid adherence to social protocols that are not supported by an innate sense of compassion.  In today’s utilitarian-focused world of individual attainment, it seems that we are forgetting about a fundamental aspect of human existence – our intuitive compassion for everyone we encounter, including our so-called (and often arbitrarily so) enemies [9].  This feeling of human compassion, not selfish resentment, needs to underlie what social protocols we may claim to adhere to.  In his high-spirited way, Keaton was reminding us more than ninety years ago that open-hearted compassion and resourceful, never-say-die optimism are the ways to go.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Jim Emerson, “Buster Keaton’s ‘Our Hospitality’ (1923) at Film Forum (Aug 01)”, Alt Screen, (1  August 2011).    
2. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, (1968), passage quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Buster Keaton ‘Our Hospitality’, 1923”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XXI:1), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (31 August 2010).  
3. The Film Sufi, “Phenomenology and Red Desert”, The Film Sufi, (11 September 2010).  
4. Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Buster Keaton ‘Our Hospitality’, 1923”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XXI:1), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (31 August 2010).  
5. Roger Ebert, “The Films of Buster Keaton”, RogerEbert.com, (10 November 2002).    
6. “Hatfield–McCoy feud”, Wikipedia, (18 May 2018).  
7. “Dandy horse”, Wikipedia, (26 April 2018).  
8. “Southern hospitality”, Wikipedia, (28 April 2018).   
9. Pankaj Mishra, “A Gandhian Stand Against the Culture of Cruelty”, The New York Review of Books, (22 May 2018).  

“The General” - Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman (1926)

Of the string of brilliant silent-film comedies Buster Keaton made in 1920s – which include Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928) – the one that is most remembered and most honored today is The General (1926). This is particularly interesting, since the The General lost money and was initially a flop with the critics at the time of its release. But that work was the most carefully preserved of Keaton’s films and the one that has been most seen by subsequent audiences.  And since those early days, the film’s reputation has swelled dramatically.  Many film critics consider The General to be Keaton’s greatest film and one of the greatest films ever [1,2,3].  In fact in the British Film Institute’s decennial polls of greatest films ever made (published in its outlet Sight & Sound), international critics ranked it #8 in 1972, #10 in 1982, and #34 in 2012 [4,5].  And in the British Film Institute’s 2012 poll of international film directors, The General was ranked 75th greatest film of all time [6].

There are a couple of things that stand out in connection with The General.  For one thing, the film is based on true events that took place during the American Civil War (1861-1865).  It tells the story of the Union army military theft of a railroad train in Confederate (Southern) territory in 1862 and the ensuing chase for its recapture, known as the Great Locomotive Chase [7].  Although the original memoirs of these events were told from a “Northern” perspective, Keaton felt audiences would be more sympathetic if the narrative focus to were shifted to the perspective of Southern protagonists.

Another distinguishing feature of The General is its unrelenting presentation of a manic series of physical events that draw the wonder of any viewer as to how the filmmakers were able to engineer (and survive) them.  These all contribute to the usual Keaton theme of an innocent and intrepid young man facing a hostile and seemingly overwhelming universe blocking his sincere intentions.  Actually, this was always a feature of Keaton’s films at that time, but The General went to further extremes in this regard than any of his other films and could be considered to be a marvel of cinematic engineering [8].

The story of The General is told in five acts of unequal length.  But the core of the film and the source of its appeal is presented in the two acts featuring chase scenarios – “Chase #1" and “Chase #2".

1.  A Locomotive is Stolen

The film starts in 1861 in the Southern city of Marietta, Georgia, where young railroad engineer Johnny Gray (played by Buster Keaton) has two passions – his girlfriend Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) and the locomotive for the Western and Atlantic Railroad for which he is the engineer (driver), The General.  When news of the Civil War’s break out, everyone rushes to enlist in the South’s army.  But Johnny is turned away, because, unbeknownst to him, the authorities think he is more valuable continuing to serve as a railroad engineer.  He is immediately branded as a coward by Annabelle and her family, and she tells him that she won’t see him again until he is wearing a military uniform.  Thus Johnny’s big problem is disproving to the world that he is a coward.

One year passes, and we see Johnny setting off northward from Marietta in his train.  Annabelle, who is still not speaking to Johnny, is a passenger onboard on he way to visit her wounded father at the front.  When the train stops for a dinner break at Big Shanty (Kennesaw), some disguised Union army saboteurs enter and steal the train while it is empty and head north.  But Annabelle was looking around inside a baggage boxcar at the moment and becomes a prisoner of the train thieves.  When Johnny looks up and sees his train heading off, he chases after it.

2.  Chase #1

The scene is set for the first of the famous chase sequences.  To hinder their pursuers, the Union saboteurs cut telegraph lines and dislodge track rails.  But Johnny furiously chases after them, first on foot, then in a handcar, and then in bicycle.  When he gets to the town of Kingston, he finds a train full of Confederate soldiers to help out in the chase.  But when he hurriedly takes off in the train, he doesn’t realize that the engine was decoupled from its cars, and he finds himself speeding down the tracks alone.

Now we have two trains racing, one in pursuit of another.  The pace of the film becomes absolutely frantic.  There are a number of ingeniously filmed actions shown, as the saboteurs try to impede Johnny by decoupling one of The General’s boxcars so it will be left behind to slow up Johnny’s train and by dropping railroad ties on the tracks in hopes they will cause Johnny’s train to derail.

Johnny manages to overcome these obstacles by performing amazingly dangerous and dexterous feats while perched on his pursuing train’s cowcatcher.  Keaton always worked without a stuntman, and anyone who watches this movie will wonder how they filmed it, when modern special-effects techniques were not yet available.

Eventually, Johnny notices that he has crossed into enemy territory in Tennessee.  He abandons his train and escapes on foot into the forest.

3.  Behind Enemy Lines
Johnny just happens to hide inside a house where Union army generals have come to meet in order to plan their next offensive.  While hiding precariously under their meeting table, he overhears their plans to have their advancing army join up with a Union supply train at Rock River Bridge.  He also is shocked to see that Annabelle is being held prisoner in the house.

So then in a few slapstick action sequences, Johnny manages to knock out a Union guard, don his uniform, and then sneak Annabelle out of the house.  They make their way to a train station where the stolen train, The General, just happens to be parked.  There Johnny smuggles Annabelle onto the train, decouples the engine from most of its boxcars, and then steals the train.

4.  Chase #2

Johnny, back driving The General, is now heading south, and as Union soldiers pursue him in a separate train, the second chase begins.  Again it’s a hectic sequence of back-and-forth manic maneuvers between the pursued and the pursuers, but this time the roles are reversed, and Johnny is the pursued.  Once more we see frantically sabotaged telegraph lines, train track switches thrown off, and Johnny littering the track behind him with boxes from the car he is pulling.  This time, though, Johnny is accompanied by the well-meaning but overly household-concerned Annabelle.  At one memorable point the exasperated Johnny begins choking Annabelle out of frustration, but ends up kissing her instead.

There are actually two Union trains rushing after Johnny in The General in this sequence.  One has soldiers intent on capturing Johnny, and a following train has supplies intended for a meeting up with the Union army at the Rock River Bridge.

5.  Rock River Bridge
Johnny arrives at the bridge first and manages to set a fire on the bridge and leave it burning there.  Then he and Annabelle make it to a nearby town where a Confederate army camp is located and summon rebel soldiers to confront the Union army back at the bridge.  Johnny wants to join these soldiers but is ignored, because he is not a member of the Confederate army.

At the Rock River Bridge, the Union train attempts to cross over the burning bridge, but the bridge collapses, and the train falls to its destruction.  This bridge destruction was an incredibly expensive action for Keaton and co-director Clyde Bruckman to film, and they had only one camera take in which to record it [3]. Note that Keaton was normally a painstaking perfectionist who often demanded many shooting retakes to get things just right – the shooting ratio for The General was greater than 30:1.  So Keaton’s carefully planned craftsmanship and elaborate physical action sequences like this bridge collapse and train engine destruction were what caused the production expenses for this film to run way over budget.

Then the assembled Confederate army soldiers ambush the Union army trying to ford the river, and the Union army is forced to beat a hasty retreat.  With the battle won, the Confederate soldiers return triumphantly to the town.  Johnny is still ignored by the celebrants, but when a Confederate general learns of Johnny’s capture of the commanding Union train saboteur, he hastily appoints Johnny to the position of army lieutenant.  Johnny is recognized as a hero at last.

The final scene shows Lieutenant Johnny awkwardly struggling to at the same time both kiss his now-forgiving Annabelle and also duplicate in acknowledgment the salutes of troops that pass by the embracing couple.


Overall, Keaton’s The General manages to pack into a relatively complex plot structure an incredible mixture of slapstick comedy elements.  Throughout the story, Keaton maintains his never-say-die enthusiasm and determination to get past a seemingly endless succession of insurmountable obstacles.  What people undoubtedly remember most, though, are those two chase sequences, where the obstacle encounters appear at a dizzying rate.

Unforgettable for me is the time when Johnny is sitting on his speeding train’s cowcatcher and has to remove railroad ties that can derail his train and which have been left on the tracks by those whom he is chasing.  He somehow manages to hold a large, unwieldy tie in his arms and, with miraculously accuracy, heave it onto another tie lying ahead on the tracks, causing both ties to fall harmlessly away by the wayside.

On another occasion, this time when he is being chased by a Union train, Johnny stops by a log fence to gather more wood fuel for his engine, and he hurriedly starts heaving big fence logs onto his train  tender.  After laboriously managing to get three logs onto his tender, the fourth log he  heaves unluckily lands in such a way as to cause all of his previously loaded logs to bounce out of the tender and back onto the ground.

And, of course, there is the famous artillery cannon sequence, when the fortuitous encounter of a curve in the railroad tracks saves Keaton from being blown away when the out-of-control cannon fires its load.

Physical actions like these, which last only for a few seconds, must have taken extraordinary efforts to get right, and they successively appear to the viewer at a furious pace.  Keaton often doesn’t fuel the viewer’s expectations of critical events like these much in advance.  They just unexpectedly appear, one after another, and the ever-hopeful Keaton character has no time to reflect on or despair of what is swirling aground him.  This is an aspect that distinguishes Keaton from Chaplin.  Chaplin personalizes his encounters, making himself out to be the naughty underdog in a social world that is rigged against him.  Keaton externalizes the perspective, thereby pitting an upright, innocent man struggling in a world, in which all of nature, itself, seems sometimes pitted against him.  In that sense Keaton’s vision is often expressionistic, while Chaplin’s is not.

So this relentless succession of acrobatic and perfectly executed circus acts is what makes Keaton’s The General a great film. Brilliant as The General is, though, I still think Seven Chances is Keaton’s finest film.  But The General is excellent, nonetheless, and worth repeated viewings.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “The General”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com, (31 May 1997).   
2. Roger Ebert, “The Films of Buster Keaton”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com, (10 November 2002).    
3. Tim Dirks. "The General (1927)", Filmsite, (retrieved 17 April  2018).  
4. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).   
5. Roger Ebert, "How the directors and critics voted / Roger Ebert / Top Ten", bfi.org.uk, The Internet Archive, (Archived from the original on May 17, 2012).   
6. “Directors’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).  
7. “Great Locomotive Chase”, Wikipedia, (12 April 2018).  
8. In this sense it might be compared to Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923).  

“Sherlock Jr.” - Buster Keaton (1924)

Buster Keaton was, along with Charlie Chaplin, certainly one of the master auteurs of the silent film.  Indeed legendary film theorist Andrew Sarris included Keaton in his “pantheon” of greatest American directors, both silent and sound [1].  And when Sarris compared Keaton to Chaplin, he had this to say [2]:

“[Compared to Chaplin,] Keaton is now generally acknowledged as the superior director and inventor of visual forms.  There are those who would go further and claim Keaton as pure cinema as opposed to Chaplin’s essentially theatrical cinema.”

A signal ingenious creation of Keaton was his own screen persona: a modest, earnest, and innocent young man who never gives up, even in the face of the most daunting circumstances.  To highlight the contrast between his lone, unsupported innocence and the frighteningly hostile forces around him, Keaton subjected his screen character to an endless succession of pratfalls (he performed all his own, incredibly dangerous, stunts), which he had learned how to withstand as a child vaudeville stage performer.  These epic confrontations invariably had a magical attraction for his screen audiences.  From a larger perspective in fact, his survival in these tales seemed to represent a light-hearted cinematic embodiment of the optimistic American Dream [3].

One of Keaton’s most popular films was his early feature, Sherlock Jr. (1924), which prolific film critic Jeffrey Anderson has gone so far as to say is the greatest film ever made [4]. Like many of Keaton’s top films, it starts off with a string of more or less conventional slapstick sight gags and then gradually moves in to an increasingly dizzying and surreal comic mania.  It is this frenzied second stage of Keaton’s films that single his work out as ingenious creations.  In addition, Sherlock Jr.’s narrative has two other notable features:

• Keaton tells his tale in a brisk 45 minutes.
• The film explores the very nature of the film medium and how it relates to our conscious experience.

It is this latter point that intrigues many viewers.  Film was still a relatively new medium of expression in 1924, and filmmakers were still working out what was natural for film expression.  In particular, the editing cut, particularly the cut on action, was still a film narrative technique that had to be used with caution.

The story of Sherlock Jr. concerns a shy young man who works as a projectionist in a local cinema and who also dreams of being a detective.  He spends his spare time reading his instruction manual, How to be a Detective.  Over the course of the story’s several phases, the film moves increasingly into a Keatonian maelstrom of hysteria.

1.  The Young Projectionist Courts His Girl

This first section of the film shows the young projectionist (the “Boy”, played by Buster Keaton)  studying his detective book and then attempting to give the girl he likes (the “Girl”, Kathryn McGuire) a box of chocolates.  The problem is that he doesn’t have the money to buy the expensive box that he wants, and there are some gags here showing him trying to scrounge up the extra dollar he needs.  He finally buys the cheaper box and goes over to the Girl’s house and shyly gives it to her. 

Also at this time, his romantic competitor, the “Sheik” (Ward Crane), wants to buy the expensive chocolate box for the girl, too.  (Although the term “sheik” in the old days could mean a man who is romantically irresistible to women, it is not so commonly used now, so I will refer to him as the “Cad”.)  The Cad doesn’t have the money for the expensive chocolate, either.  So he goes to the Girl’s house, steals her father’s (Joe Keaton, Buster’s father) pocket watch, which he then pawns in order to purchase the expensive chocolate and give it to her.  He then manages to frame the Boy for the pocket-watch theft, which causes the Girl’s father to banish the Boy from their home.

The Boy, in ludicrously literal attempts to follow his detective manual’s instructions, then tries  to shadow the Cad in order to expose him of the crime.  There is an amazing scene here when the Boy is locked inside of a freight car and manages to get out as the train is pulling away by holding onto a water-tower spout.  When the spout is lowered by the Boy’s weight, a massive torrent of water comes out of the water tower, drenching the Boy. The force of this water apparently caught Keaton by surprise, and he fractured a neck vertebra and suffered a concussion while filming this scene.  This was one of the many times in Keaton’s career that he barely survived the screen stunts that he committed himself to [3].

Finally, one-third of the way into the film, the disconsolate Boy gives up and returns to work as a projectionist.  Up to this point what has been shown has been fairly conventional silent comedy stuff; but now things start to get interesting.

2.  The Dream Begins
In his projection booth, the Boy starts up a film and then begins to snooze and falls into a dream.  In his dream, the Boy is still in the projection booth, but when he looks at the film being shown, he sees that the main characters are the Cad and the Girl.  So he approaches the screen and manages to magically enter into the action being shown. 

But he has only part way entered into this new narrative level. We see the theater audience and the screen, with the Boy taking part in the action shown onscreen. There is now a spectacular series of cuts showing the background environment suddenly changing while the continuing  presence of the Boy is unchanged from shot to shot.  The Boy suddenly finds himself in new, unexpected surroundings every few seconds. 

Finally the camera zooms in, and we enter fully into the narrative world of the film being shown.  In this film-within-a-film, an expensive pearl necklace has been stolen by the Cad.  The rich owner of the necklace (Joe Keaton again) summons the world’s greatest detective, the super-confidant Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) to crack the case.  When Buster Keaton appears as Sherlock Jr., the Boy is now fully immersed in the new narrative.  The Cad and his accomplice, the rich man’s butler, now engage in a series of attempts to kill Sherlock Jr.  But they all come to nothing, primarily due to sheer happenstance, as shown in a set of sight gags,.

3.  Surreal Chases
The film now enters into its surreal progression, as Sherlock Jr. starts following the Cad to his gang hideout.  There are more spectacular stunts here, including one showing Sherlock Jr. escaping from the gang by leaping through a window and into a disguise costume all in one motion.  On another occasion he escapes from the gang by leaping into a box held by his loyal assistant and mysteriously disappearing.

Finally we come to the most spectacular chase, which involves Sherlock Jr. riding on the handlebars of a motorcycle being driven by his assistant.  After a pothole throws off the driver, Sherlock is shown riding on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle as it careens through city traffic.

There are more chase scenes, as Sherlock Jr. rescues the Girl from the gang’s remote hideout and gets away from their pursuers.  After their car plunges into a lake, they end up swimming in the water, as the Boy finally wakes up from his dream.

4.  Reunion with the Girl
The Girl comes to the cinema projection booth and quietly informs the Boy that she has solved the crime of the stolen pocket watch, herself, and established his innocence.  She had gone to the pawnshop and determined that it was the Cad who had stolen the watch and pawned it.

Now is the time for them to kiss and make up, but the Boy is too shy and innocent about what to do.  So he peers through his projection booth at the cinema screen and takes cues from the film being shown in order to learn how to embrace and kiss a girl.  But after their kiss, he peers again at the screen and sees that the projected film has made a forward time-transition cut and left out a few things he may need to know.


There are several interesting aspects of film in Sherlock Jr.  One concerns the undeniable fact that most of us have taken cues concerning how to behave romantically towards the opposite sex by observing our role models in films.  Of course these cues were always available in literary fiction and stage plays, but the intimacy afforded by film enabled these gestures to be presented on more subtle levels.  The Boy in Sherlock Jr. exaggerates things by attempting to follow his instructions too literally, but the imitative possibilities offered by film were probably relatively new in the early 1920s and a subject of interest.

But the progression of film towards more emotionally expressive intimacy was a gradual process. And Keaton’s mise-en-scene is displayed mostly in long shots and extreme long shots that are only occasionally intercut with medium shots and medium closeups.  Over-the-shoulder shots affording more intimacy on the part of the camera as “invisible witness” were less common in those days.  And Keaton’s constant, unflappable gaze ensured that the viewer did not have to regularly monitor his facial expressions in order to discern any emotive subtleties.

Nevertheless, Keaton’s allusion to film as an example and an agent of dreams – in fact as a dream machine – is telling.  And those images of him riding alone on the motorcycle’s handlebars and careening headlong towards a likely disastrous fate are the most memorable moments of Sherlock Jr.  As film scholar Michael Goodwin remarked [5],

“The famous image of Keaton balancing on the handlebars of a riderless motorcycle, perfectly poised in a world of trouble, could be the central metaphor for his entire filmic career.”

★★★½ 

Notes:

1. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, E. P. Dutton & Co. (1968).
2. Ibid., p. 62.
3. Roger Ebert, “The Films of Buster Keaton”, RogerEbert.com, (10 November 2002).   
4. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Super Snoop”, Combustible Celluloid, (n.d.).   
5. Michael Goodwin, “Passing Through the Equal Sign: Fractal Mathematics in Sherlock Jr.”,  from Buster Keaton’s ‘Sherlock Jr.’, edited by Andrew Horton, Cambridge U Press (1997), quoted in Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), “Buster Keaton Sherlock Jr. and Steamboat Bill Jr. 1928”, Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (IX:), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (31 August 2004).