Kelly, a friend who’s a true old-time movie buff, says that the critics with their lists always rank The General as the best Buster Keaton film, but she made a good argument for Sherlock Jr. being not only funnier but more accessible for viewers unfamiliar with silent film. (Although if you savor stunts involving trains, The General should be your pick.)
If memory serves, I don’t even think I’d seen a movie made pre-1937 before tonight when I saw Sherlock Jr. I hang my head in shame, for I once considered myself a movie buff. Now that the whole era of silent film has been re-emphasized to me, I’ll have to preface that claim with, “but talkies are my specialty.”
I’ve also never seen any Chaplin, the more famous and beloved silent star, but from what I’ve read and from what I saw tonight, Keaton is my man, and not just because of that impassive face. Here’s Roger Ebert, writing for his Great Movies Series about Keaton:
His films avoid the pathos and sentiment of the Chaplin pictures, and usually feature a jaunty young man who sees an objective and goes after it in the face of the most daunting obstacles. Buster survives tornadoes, waterfalls, avalanches of boulders and falls from great heights, and never pauses to take a bow: He has his eye on his goal. And his movies, seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.
As you may have guessed, Film Forum is in the midst of a Keaton retrospective and right off here’s one of several reasons why that place kicks ass: the film tonight was scored live by a pianist sitting off to the side of the screen, just at it was in the ’20s when the movie was first released.
The plot is simple: Keaton and Ward Crane are rivals for “the girl.” Crane steals her father’s pocketwatch and Keaton is blamed. Back at his job as a projectionist, he dreams himself and everyone else in his life into the movie that’s playing. Suddenly he’s a gallant detective on the case of some stolen pearls while avoiding death traps as readily as Inspector Clouseau.
The stunts are mind blowing. You sit watching, astounded and laughing, then wonder how the hell he pulled it off without killing himself, like in the scene where he’s almost hit by a speeding train as he rides down the street and across the tracks on the handlebars of a motorcycle. He falls constantly, including one of the best ever banana-peel slips, where he somehow seems to land on the side of his face. Kelly told us of watching another Keaton film on DVD, mesmerized as she paused and frame-advanced a scene where he flips himself head over heels while holding a cup of coffee, lands and hasn’t spilt a drop.
But the minor stunts, the more slapstick physical comedy in Sherlock Jr., are what sealed the deal for us. My favorite scene has Keaton shadowing a suspect in his case, walking in perfect synch, and often into trouble, as he trails the guy. Katie and Megan, who I saw the movie with, enjoyed the bit where Keaton escapes a gang of toughs by leaping through a window directly into a dress. Disguised as a woman, he shuffles off in plain sight as the goons scratch their heads over where he went.
What this movie and others by Keaton inspired or prefigured must be immense. At the least it includes the whole Wizard of Oz-style dream sequence before that film made it famous; surely one of the first instances of a film-within-a-film; the primitive but effective special effect of Buster’s dream-self leaving his sleeping body; and most importantly, stunts and physical comedy borrowed or ripped off outright for everything from Warner Bros. cartoon shorts to the films of Jackie Chan.