Skip to main content

Sherlock, Jr.

Director: Buster Keaton
Year: 1924
Run time: 45 min
Source: Kanopy

When Buster Keaton started working in the film industry in 1917, he apparently had reservations about this new art form.  By 1924, he had changed his mind enough to direct film's first, and possibly its best, love letter to itself.  Sherlock, Jr. stars Keaton as a wannabe detective in the mold of Holmes, but Sherlock, Jr. is really all about life imitating cinema.

The greatest scene - probably among the top ten special effects of all time - is the moment when Keaton's character, dreaming, steps onto the screen itself from the audience's position, where he finds himself madly transported between locales as the scenes change.  The genius of Keaton's stunts is that he makes it look simple, when really each shot required using surveying equipment to get his position exactly right.

There are plenty of other great stunts here, but this is the first Keaton movie on the list where he has an interesting theme to match them up to.  The false detective, wrapped up in his dream, misses the solution to the mystery entirely, which his girlfriend ends up finding on her own.  Despite this, it's hard not to like Keaton, who feels sleuthing is all about looking smart, and knowing things without any work.  Ultimately, I still feel that Steamboat Bill, Jr. just edges this movie out for its daring and panache, but I love this movie for the way it looks at its audience and wonders how its audience is looking back.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fétiche Mascotte (The Mascot)

Director: Ladislas Starevich Year: 1933 Run-time: 26 min Source: Youtube Notable For : The second animated short on the list from 1933 is this stop-motion piece from the Polish-Russian film-maker Ladislas Starevich.  Stop-motion is almost as old as cinema itself (Starevich had been innovating since 1912).  The craft here is as good as any modern film, and Starevich's twisted imagination is on full display, with dolls and household objects coming to life in a dark version of Toy Story.  For animation fans, it almost goes without saying that Starevich was an influence on Jan Svankmajer's work much later. Verdict :  Every frame is a bizarre delight. There didn't seem to be an overarching plan to this work (indeed, it's possible that The Mascot  is an amalgamation of several shorter films featuring the same dog character), and so the film veers from one strange scene to the next, with much of the second half taking place in some kind of tchotchke hell governe...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Killers

  The Killers  uses up every noir cliche that had developed by this time - the detective story with flashbacks from Laura , the insurance investigator from Double Indemnity, the seductive femme fatale from Gilda - but somehow manages to feel wholly original. I thought that I'd grow weary of noirs by this point, but they are getting better, and there's no doubt that it's a fun genre, if there's not always much going under the pristine surface. There's some tremendous acting, and I unabashedly love the opening scene with the titular killers - the only part that seems to have been actually adapted from the Hemingway short story (Ernest himself was nevertheless a fan) - but the ending doesn't really work. It's a bit easier to follow than The Big Sleep, but it has a few too many twists for what is ultimately a pretty straightforward story without any real morals. Still, I have to recommend it, and it would definitely be up there in my list of best noirs.
Post a Comment
Read more

Suspense

Director: Lois Weber (with Phillips Smalley) Year: 1913 Runtime: 0:10 Source: Youtube Lois Weber is a fascinating, largely forgotten figure in the history of cinema.  Not only is she an early female filmmaker, with an unusual auteur-level control over her works, but for a short few years she held a surprising amount of sway in the burgeoning industry.  In 1916, she was Universal Studio's highest paid director, period.  During her heyday she made 10 movies a year, but the vast majority of her films are lost.  Unfortunately, this brief short is likely her only appearance on the list, but it highlights her technical innovations. Weber probably didn't invent the split screen, but she used it extremely effectively in this tight little domestic thriller.  The real highlight is a triangular three-way split, in which we see a distressed wife, played by Weber herself, calling her husband at work, while a burglar is about to cut the phone line with a knife.  A...
Post a Comment
Read more