Always fresh, ever surprising -- revisiting a Buster Keaton comedy is always a
rewarding experience. Although not a smashing success when new, 1924's
Sherlock
Jr. has grown in stature as one of his more fascinating flights of cinematic
fancy. While Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin were developing their own styles, Keaton
combined slapstick and visual tricks with an inquisitive approach to movie mechanics,
constructing a complex physical world around his famous "great stone face". His gags
are developed with near-mechanical precision.
Kino International continues its Buster Keaton series of Blu-ray discs with a double
bill of his early features
Sherlock Jr. &
Three Ages, including a number
of eye-opening extras. Both films are a delight to watch, and frequently fall-down
funny.
Sherlock Jr. displays camera tricks that prove Keaton to be a master of
his medium.
A plot description makes
Sherlock Jr. seem like a fairly ordinary comedy.
Buster is a movie projectionist frustrated in love because the object of his
affections (Kathryn McGuire) is attracted to a dishonest rival (Ward Crane). Buster is
also an aspiring detective, and when the girl's father's pocket watch disappears he
tries to take charge of the situation. But the rival contrives to make Buster look
like the culprit. While projecting a show about two lovers and a similar domestic
crime, Buster experiences a bizarre daydream of "entering" the world of the movie. He
dreams that he walks right up to the front of the theater and steps into the screen.
The last act of the film introduces one pell-mell action thrill after another, a
cascade of beautifully engineered chase stunts. Buster rides a motorcycle while
sitting on the handlebars, barely missing trains and trucks. He plummets from a tall
building and uses a delightful bit of stage magic to make an instantaneous costume
change. The crime is solved and the girl rescued, all within Buster's cinematic
daydream.
Keaton had used dream sequences in several of his comedy shorts, and a big section of
Sherlock Jr. takes place in a sustained fantasy of wish fulfillment. The
characters and events in Buster's movie dream closely parallel his real-life romantic
quandary, to the extent that the movie's heroine becomes Buster's girlfriend, etc..
Just by falling asleep, Buster replays his problems in an alternate cinematic
universe.
Film critics have marveled at this central dream sequence for the better part of a
century. Fighting his way back "into the screen", Buster becomes caught
within the
filmic convention of The Cut. While the audience and orchestra continue watching,
Buster stays on screen as the film cuts between different locations. Finding himself
in a garden, Buster sits on a bench, but the scene changes to a busy street and he
falls backwards into traffic. The street changes into a rocky cliff, and he almost
loses his balance. A few seconds later Buster tries to dive into the ocean, but the
scene changes to a snowy landscape. He ends up stuck in the snow, with his legs
flailing about.
One must appreciate the state of film effects in 1924 to understand the technical
accomplishment involved. Some of the "movie screen" scenes in the dream are clever
double exposures, but others are built right into the theater set, where the screen
should be. Keaton's absurd transitions had to be measured with great precision to
place him in the exact correct position across cuts. Buster leans against a tree just
as the scene cuts to a garden; his position between the two shots is a perfect match.
Once the cutting games are over, the dream world becomes an exaggeration of Buster's
waking dilemma. Buster enters the movie story as "Sherlock Jr.", a master detective
summoned to find a purloined necklace. The thieves try to kill him with a trick chair
and an explosive billiard ball, to no avail. Buster's cinematic alter ego Sherlock Jr.
exhibits the self-confidence that the "real" Buster lacks. This of course cues the
thrilling physical stunts when Sherlock chases the villains.
A couple of wild stunts were accomplished by double exposures and running the camera
backwards, but others would appear to be extremely dangerous. Keaton learned to drive
a motorbike while sitting on the handlebars. He had no way of applying the brakes as
he rides through traffic. Buster attempts a leap between two buildings and doesn't
make it, a stunt that looks guaranteed to break one's neck. Another seemingly less
hazardous gag requires Buster to be knocked to some railroad tracks by water from a
spout. Years later, a doctor informed Keaton of a hairline fracture in his neck that
had never been noticed before. From the doctor's description, Keaton realized that the
injury had to have happened on
Sherlock Jr., when he fell a few feet to the
rails.
1923's
Three Ages is conceptually less advanced, but often just as
funny. Basically a cinematic in-joke on D.W. Griffith's
Intolerance, the film
compares and contrasts three identical stories set in the Stone Age, Roman times and
the "modern, fast and greedy" present. Buster pursues the girl (Margaret Leahy) in all
three ages of the title: as a caveman, a Roman citizen and a young man about town.
Three iterations of her parents prefer the more aggressive villain (Wallace Beery).
Not yet the flabby blowhard of his MGM talkies, Beery plays a generic Bluto type. The
rivals compete, respectively, in trial by combat, a chariot race and a football game.
Buster to the 3rd power eventually wins, by a combination of pragmatism and blind
luck.
The
Intolerance spoof makes no critical claim on Griffith, as Keaton instead
derives his humor by adapting gags to the three time periods. Buster's attempts to
make his girlfriend jealous by romancing another girl backfire in slightly different
ways. The cave girl he chooses turns out to be much bigger than he, and throws him off
a cliff. The Roman nymph is a champion wrestler. The 1923 Buster tries to get close to
another man's date in a restaurant, only to lose his head after drinking some
forbidden bootleg gin. The chariot race provides some big laughs when Buster arrives
in a rig pulled by dogs instead of horses. When one dog injures a paw, Buster swaps it
for a "spare" dog kept in a box on the back of the chariot! The rivalry gag is almost
the same as in
Sherlock Jr.-- the villain turns out to be a nasty bigamist.
Buster's race to the church is the expected marvel of compressed stunts and gags, but
he arrives in time to save the day.
Three Ages makes use of a number of sophisticated camera techniques, including
an elaborate foreground miniature for the Roman stadium scenes, and Willis
O'Brien-style stop-motion animation for a few shots of caveman Buster riding in the
back of a Brontosaurus. The action stunts are breathtaking. Escaping from a police
station, Buster climbs a building and swings downward on a loose drainpipe. It
catapults him into the window of a fire station, where he slides down the fire pole
and leaps onto a departing fire truck --- which takes him right back to the police
station!
Keaton ends the modern story with a wry joke. Epilogues to both of the earlier "ages"
show Buster with a full brood of offspring, appropriately clad in bearskins and Roman
togas. But the modern couple quietly emerges from their house accompanied only by a
little dog on a leash. Buster would top this "what happens after the big kiss" gag in
his later
College with a more cynical black-comedy montage. The happy lovers
grow old and gray before finally transforming into a pair of tombstones. Fade out.
Kino International's Blu-ray of
Sherlock Jr. &
Three Ages is a fine HD
transfer of these early vintage comedy silents.
Sherlock Jr. is for the most
part in fine shape. Speckling is apparent on inter-title cards and some scratches crop
up here and there. We also notice that a missing shot or two are represented by
inferior sources. One of these is a terrific billiard table trick that Keaton later
edited out of the "dream" sequence. The older
Three Ages has survived intact
but in less perfect condition. Many scenes are marred by flickering patterns of very
light image deterioration. The way some material is untouched and other parts are
affected, it's possible that tinted sections of the archival copy may have decomposed
at a different rate.
Sherlock Jr. carries three separate music choices: the Mont Alto Motion Picture
Orchestra, the Club Foot Orchestra and a jazz score compiled by Jay Ward.
Three
Ages has a Robert Israel score, an organ score by Lee Erwin and a piano score.
David Kalat's commentary and a short documentary by David B. Pearson offer a wealth of
information and opinion about
Sherlock Jr.. Experts still debate the assertion
that Keaton's frequent partner Roscoe Arbuckle may have directed parts of the film.
Kalat deconstructs the film's sophisticated dream structure, noting the absurdity of
Keaton restricting "impossible" action to the movie-within-a movie -- on grounds of
credibility.
Three Ages includes
Man's Genesis, a 1912 D.W. Griffith short with a
similar caveman setting. Buster Keaton may have hedged his bet by designing the show
so that it could be broken down into three two-reel comedy shorts, should audiences
not accept him as a feature film star. To see how this would work, another extra
re-edits
Three Ages' stories into separate short subjects.
Both films carry fascinating photo-comparison featurettes by John Bengtson, author of
Silent Shadows. Bengtson specializes in determining the exact locations where
silent films were shot, and shows us plenty of examples. The Stone Age hills in
Three Ages were filmed out in Chatsworth, and Keaton used some of the
structures of the then-new L.A. Coliseum for the Roman segment. Locations for
Sherlock Jr. range all over Hollywood and Orange County. Los Angeles residents
will be impressed to see which local streets served as "famous" filmic locations.
Kino's producer and writer Bret Wood is again responsible for the disc's handsome
packaging design.
Reference: Buster Keaton by David Robinson, Indiana University Press
1969.
For more information about
Sherlock Jr./Three Ages, visit
Kino Lorber. To order
Sherlock Jr./Three Ages, go
to
TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
