Sun 19 Apr 2015
A Movie Review by Mike Tooney: SHERLOCK, JR. (1924).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews , Silent films[3] Comments
SHERLOCK, JR. Buster Keaton Productions, 1924, 45 minutes. Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Erwin Connelly, Ward Crane. Writers: Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, Joe Mitchell. Director: Buster Keaton.
For silent film aficionados Charlie Chaplin is the ne plus ultra of comedians. Certainly Chaplin had a wide emotional range which he was able to exploit at every turn; with him, slapstick humor and pathos — if not bathos — could be only a few frames apart. There is no denying Charlie Chaplin’s talent.
For this silent film enthusiast, however, Buster Keaton is still my favorite comedian of the era. No knock against Chaplin, but there is something irreducibly American about Keaton, especially in his boundless enthusiasm and unquenchable energy in accomplishing his goals. If a situation seemed hopeless, Keaton would simply redouble his efforts and win out in the end — no defeatism for Buster. For him, the most intractable problems would always involve women in some way — and thus has it ever been with men.
Buster Keaton didn’t have that wide emotional range that Chaplin possessed, but he didn’t really need it. In fact, he eschewed facial emotions, leading to his nickname “The Great Stone Face.” Keeping a dead pan regardless of the situation, Buster was still able to convey exactly what he should be feeling at any given moment. Now that’s talent!
Sherlock, Jr. is one of Keaton’s best efforts. In it he plays a film projector operator whose dreams mirror his real-life anxieties, so you shouldn’t think that the movie is simply a shallow comedy. As Dan Callahan writes:
It is within this framework of fantasy that Buster acts out some of his most inventive visual gags — falling in and out of the dream world of the film-within-a-film, pretending to be the suave supersleuth (more like James Bond, in fact) who nearly gets it from an explosive billiard ball, diving through a window in a tuxedo and coming up from the ground inside a woman’s dress, diving headfirst yet again through — yes, through — another human being, an exquisitely-timed descent hanging from a railroad crossing gate into a moving car (if you can, run that sequence in slow motion), a gag involving Buster all alone on a bicycle’s handle bars approaching a train that’s just about to pass a trestle, and another stunt in which he falls from a moving train (and during which, he learned years later, he actually broke his neck). It seems that one of Buster’s favorite gag props was trains; he also used them to good effect in The General.
No two ways about it: Buster Keaton was a comic film genius.
April 19th, 2015 at 4:29 pm
This was the first full Keaton film I ever saw (I had seen clips) and it is a stunner, especially in the way it nails the nature of film, which is not voyeurism as so many have wrongly accused, but participation.
Keaton nails exactly that narrow line between cinema and dream that marked early films in Europe from TRIP TO THE MOON to CALIGARI. But instead of the bizarre or surreal Buster finds comedy gold by at once being the audience and the star.
It’s a surprisingly subversive film really.
I much prefer Keaton to Chaplin, and I think Buster has worn better. Modern audiences don’t identify with Chaplin’s tramp in the same way that they did then. They tend to see the cruelty beneath much of the comedy and the darker side of Chaplin himself.
With Keaton I think you see the pure joy of movies and movie making. Perhaps the only actor to ever come near him in his ability to be pure grace in movement and not seem graceful doing it is Jackie Chan. Keaton was the Nijinsky of pratfalls.
April 19th, 2015 at 6:30 pm
I’ll make it three for three in terms of Chaplin vs Keaton. I enjoy Chaplin’s movies, but Keaton makes me laugh out loud, and Chaplin only makes me smile.
April 20th, 2015 at 3:59 am
I’m unable to pick a favorite. Both have individual moments of greatness, so breathtaking, graceful, and so damn funny there isn’t any point in comparison. For that matter, so do Harold Lloyd and Jackie Chan.