23. Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Directed By Buster Keaton (and allegedly "Fatty" Arbuckle)

Synopsis

A film projectionist (Keaton) is in love with a girl, and is falsely accused of stealing her father's watch. Later on while projecting a film he falls asleep and is transported into the world of the film where he solves "the case of the missing pearls". Meanwhile in the real world his girfriend discovers he is not the one who stole her father's watch and when Keaton wakes up in the real world all is solved.

Review

As you can see there isn't much to the plot of this film. It is also exceedingly short at 44 minutes. This is actually an unfortunate thing because it is such a great film, it just leaves you wanting more. If that was the objective than it is very well achieved. I am looking forward to my next Buster Keaton film.

Firstly, it's a funny film. Although many of the jokes depend on slapstick, a number of them are so surreal that they are amazingly original. Even the slapstick jokes are so perfectly executed that you have your mouth gaping wide at "how the fuck did he do that?" more than actually laughing. This is not a bad thing. The technical execution of all the gags is so perfect than you really can't understand it. If it was today you could explain many away with blue screens but there was no such thing in 1924.

Again Keaton repeats his death defying choreographies, again they involve trains (he had some kind of obssession)and he is amazing at it. Again there isn't much of a plot, but it's a very entertaining 44 minutes, which leave you much more astonished than all the CGI stuff today, because you just know that it can't be CGI, this shit is all real!

A very impressive sequence happens when Keaton's Dream Self steps into the silver screen, finds himself in the middle of the action and in a sequence of events that action changes from a parlour room to a mountain, to the sea, to a busy road, to snow and you can't understand where the cuts were made as Buster interacts extremely fluidly with his environment. The only explanaition is blue screen, which is clearly impossible. 'Tis Witchcraft I tell Thee!

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Final Grade

9/10 (no real plot)

Trivia

He's a witch! Burn him!

From Wiki:

During the railroad watertank scene in Sherlock Jr. Keaton broke his neck and did not realize it until years afterwards.

In 1933, Buster married Mae Scriven - his nurse, during an alcoholic binge that he claimed to remember nothing about afterwards (Keaton himself later called that period an "alcoholic blackout"). When they divorced in 1936, she took half of everything they owned — half of their diningroom set, half of each table and chair set, half of their books - and Buster's favorite St. Bernard, Elmer.