Sherlock Jr (U.)
Directed by Buster Keaton. 1924.
Starring Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Erwin Connelly and Ward Crane. Black and white. 44 mins.
This is one of the cinema's wildest rides; centred around one of its prissiest central performances. Half real, half dream sequence, it's second half is as surreal and freewheeling as any comedy ever filmed; an Andalusian Chien that has been given a great big kick up the backside and is running wild rather than looking in admiration at all these ants in its paw.
You have to sit tight to get to it. The first half, in which cinema projectionist and amateur sleuth Buster vies with the burly villain Crane for the affections of waif McGuire and gets framed for the theft of a pocket watch, is mostly pretty humdrum stuff, standard silent era melodrama. The magic starts when the crestfallen Keaton goes back to his cinema booth, fall asleep and dreamwalks through the packed auditorium and straight into the screen, just like Mia Farrow in Purple Rose of Cairo.
The last twenty minutes is almost a free association of gags: the billiard game with the exploding 13 ball; the bike chase with him on the handlebars or the moment when he leaps through a window into a costume. The very best moments merge cinematic trickery with magic act stagecraft. It was cutting edge then, and still is 90 years later.
It's a Lucy of a movie; in Luc Besson's fantasy actioner Scarlett Johansson takes a drug that exponentially increases her intelligence, based on the fallacy that humans only use 10% of their brain power. Watching Sherlock Jr makes you realise how most movies only use a fraction of the medium's potential. Keaton's cinema wasn't the full Lucy, but he at least got it up over 50%, perhaps even into the 70s%.
And in the midst of this is Keaton's stony face. A masterly comic tool, but here perhaps a little too puckered: how can anybody who is so full of energy and derring-do, who can break his neck and not even notice*, seem so neutered and frigid. In The General, with his wild hair, he looks like a fearless bloodhound, surging into the unknown and always lent forward in his eagerness to attack. Here his pale face looks drained, like a Calvinist priest that Bunuel might have dredged up in a fishing net. In fact, to be precise, he is alarmingly similar, especially in the final scene, to Murray Melvin's Reverent Runt in Barry Lyndon, which is very joyless persona to end up with after 44 minutes of comic exuberance.
*During the stunt with a train.
Directed by Buster Keaton. 1924.
Starring Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Erwin Connelly and Ward Crane. Black and white. 44 mins.
This is one of the cinema's wildest rides; centred around one of its prissiest central performances. Half real, half dream sequence, it's second half is as surreal and freewheeling as any comedy ever filmed; an Andalusian Chien that has been given a great big kick up the backside and is running wild rather than looking in admiration at all these ants in its paw.
You have to sit tight to get to it. The first half, in which cinema projectionist and amateur sleuth Buster vies with the burly villain Crane for the affections of waif McGuire and gets framed for the theft of a pocket watch, is mostly pretty humdrum stuff, standard silent era melodrama. The magic starts when the crestfallen Keaton goes back to his cinema booth, fall asleep and dreamwalks through the packed auditorium and straight into the screen, just like Mia Farrow in Purple Rose of Cairo.
The last twenty minutes is almost a free association of gags: the billiard game with the exploding 13 ball; the bike chase with him on the handlebars or the moment when he leaps through a window into a costume. The very best moments merge cinematic trickery with magic act stagecraft. It was cutting edge then, and still is 90 years later.
It's a Lucy of a movie; in Luc Besson's fantasy actioner Scarlett Johansson takes a drug that exponentially increases her intelligence, based on the fallacy that humans only use 10% of their brain power. Watching Sherlock Jr makes you realise how most movies only use a fraction of the medium's potential. Keaton's cinema wasn't the full Lucy, but he at least got it up over 50%, perhaps even into the 70s%.
And in the midst of this is Keaton's stony face. A masterly comic tool, but here perhaps a little too puckered: how can anybody who is so full of energy and derring-do, who can break his neck and not even notice*, seem so neutered and frigid. In The General, with his wild hair, he looks like a fearless bloodhound, surging into the unknown and always lent forward in his eagerness to attack. Here his pale face looks drained, like a Calvinist priest that Bunuel might have dredged up in a fishing net. In fact, to be precise, he is alarmingly similar, especially in the final scene, to Murray Melvin's Reverent Runt in Barry Lyndon, which is very joyless persona to end up with after 44 minutes of comic exuberance.
*During the stunt with a train.
