Buster Keaton at the height of his considerable powers was truly a sight to behold and those powers don’t get a much better showcase than Sherlock Jr, his unashamed love letter to the power of cinema that saw him letting his imagination run riot. It’s one of the most inventive, wittiest and breath-taking of his shorts (actually at 45 minutes it might just make it as a mini-feature). It was also his most ambitious film to date and Keaton had originally wanted the disgraced Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle – who had discovered Keaton back in 1917 – to co-direct with him. But Arbuckle’s erratic behaviour on set led to Keaton moving Arbuckle over to The Red Mill (which wouldn’t start production until 1927) and directing the film himself.
Buster is a projectionist at a small cinema who has his heart set on bigger and better things. He longs to be a detective and spends every spare moment with his nose in a text book, How to be a Detective. The other thing he wants most in life is to buy a present for his true love (Kathryn McGuire). He doesn’t ask for much, but his appalling rival (Ward Crane) steals and pawns her father’s pocket watch, frames Buster and uses the money to buy her a far nicer box of chocolates than poor Buster can afford.
So far, so good. Until now it’s been a sweet, often very funny comedy full of slapstick and minor stuntwork from Keaton. It takes off on a surreal tangent when the distraught Buster, banished from his girlfriend’s home and life, falls asleep in the projection booth and dreams of entering the film he’s showing, literally joining the action by walking into the screen. In the film, he’s the great detective he’s always wanted to be, investigating the theft of a pearl necklace and interacting with characters tat all look like the people he knows in the real world.
Sherlock Jr began life in January 1924 as The Misfits but Keaton was dismayed when test audiences dutifully gasped at the extraordinary stunts but didn’t laugh as much as he’d hoped at the gags. He re-edited the film down to a lean 45 minutes (not a single second is wasted) and retitled it Sherlock Jr but the film was received mixed reviews and didn’t do as well at the box office as his previous films. It was his first failure, albeit an honorable one, and Keaton later lamented that it was “alright [but] not one of the big ones.” 1 Time has been kinder to the film and it now stands as one of his most loved films.
The stunts that wowed those previous audiences – and everyone who’s enjoyed it since – are truly extraordinary and every bit as dangerous as they look. A motorbike crash left the star sprawled over a car but far worse was the injury he received during the scene where he escapes from the top of a moving train using a water spot. The unexpected force of the water knocked Keaton to the ground, leaving him in severe pain for many weeks afterwards. Astonishingly, eleven years later a doctor noticed that Keaton had in fact broken his neck during the accident.
Keaton’s commitment to the stunts – and his legendary high tolerance for pain – results in a series of amazing set pieces – the wild motorcycle ride, Buster perched perilously on the handlebars, that involves a collapsing bridge, mayhem at a stag party and a very near miss with a speeding train; a car chase that ends up with Buster and his love stranded in a river; Buster escaping from a rooftop in a beautifully timed piece that sees him land in a moving car. But some of the less life-threatening moments are impressive too: the game of pool wherein one of the balls is actually an explosive (Keaton spend four months learning how to do those trick shots); Buster’s amazing quick costume change through a window; and that shot of him seemingly leaping straight through his assistant/sidekick Gillette (Ford West) who then nonchalantly walks away. He never let on how the trick was done (though it’s not hard to work out today) but claimed that it was an vaudeville trick invented by his father.
But it’s not all big set-pieces, baffling special effects and stunts. There’s wit to be found in Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph A. Mitchell’s writing too. The aforementioned Gillette is introduced in an intertitle that manages to pack in more jokes and puns that most entire films:
“His assistant – Gillette. A Gem who was Ever-Ready in a bad scrape”
Gillette is a tip of the hat to William Gillette, the first actor to play Sherlock Holmes on the stage. It’s also the name of a popular brand of razors, as was Gem and Ever-Ready, all useful for scraping off that facial hair. It’s on screen for a brief few seconds but has so many jokes…
Keaton plays tricks with the medium of cinema itself, never moreso than in the scene where he first enters the film he’s projecting (a title card, Hearts and Pearls, can briefly be seen). Keaton finds himself flummoxed by a series of edits that leave him stranded and often in perilous situations, each cut moving him from one location to another in the blink of an eye. With the help of cameraman Byron Houck, he used surveyors equipment to keep himself in the same place between shots.
The result of all this work, all the stress of the test audience reactions, the physical injuries endured by the star, is Keaton’s masterpiece. The General may have got more love in recent years but for sheer excitement, laughs-per-minute and pure joie de vivre, Sherlock Jr is impossible to match. Every scene is a small gem, the action scenes are as breathtaking today as they were in 1924 (for all his much vaunted willingness to do his own stunts can you really see Tom Cruise doing half the things Keaton attempted here?) and as a love letter to the simple joy of cinema and of the audience’s relationship with it, it’s simply unbeatable.
- Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase by Marion Meade p.147 ↩
The EOFFTV Review 