1920-21 comedy shorts
Finally untethered from Fatty Arbuckle, Keaton finally gets to unleash his full potential. And let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, it is simply magical. Keaton's a genius cinematic wizard, and this body of short work he did prior to his first feature films are very likely the best comedy shorts ever made. Here are the first six of nineteen that he made.
"The High Sign"
Like most of these, this is co-directed/written with Edward F. Cline. "The High Sign" was the first short Keaton actually made, but he wasn't happy with it and didn't release it right away.
Keaton plays a conman working at a shooting gallery where he is hired almost simultaneously to both kill a guy and be that same guy's bodyguard. It's a cute premise with a little romance thrown in, and there's a generous portion of Keaton's inventiveness and ingenuity. Early, there's a giant newspaper gag that I believe is pretty famous, but the Rube Goldbergian way in which he procures and then gets rid of a newspaper is funnier to me. He squeezes every single gag he can from a shooting gallery set, gives a banana to a police officer, and has a wild chase scene through a house filled with secret rooms and doors. And the recurring gesture of the Blinking Buzzards is kind of funny, too. You can see that on the poster up there. It's all pretty playful, but there's a bit of darker comedy on the fringes.
One thing I love about Buster Keaton is his use of very complicated contraptions to accomplish very simple tasks. There's something very American about the whole thing--ingenious cheating rather than actually being good at something. I don't know what I mean there exactly.
We got rid of Fatty, but not quite Al St. John who is in the shooting gallery at one point. The love interest, played by Bartine Burkett, has cute eyes.
The opening shot is a fun one, by the way--Buster plopping off a train. It's a great introduction to Buster in these short works, like he's saying, "Hey, there! Here I am, and this is what I do! Plop!"
"One Week"
This starts (rather than how a lot of these end) with Buster getting hitched, and then, as you might guess from the title, takes us through the first week of the couple's marital bliss. Wildly funny, hugely inventive, and really sweet, this one is a bona fide classic, a live-action cartoon that is just so much fun to watch. This is one of the shorts that I've shown to my middle school students, and it gets a lot of laughs.
That reminds me. I'm pretty sure there's a female nipple in this movie. It's a gag Keaton appears to have borrowed from Arbuckle involving nudity and a breaking of the fourth wall, but every time I watch the scene, I think I see Sybil Seely's nipple. It might be my mind filling in some visual gaps though. I probably shouldn't show it to children.
This is the rare short comedy where every single joke actually works. That includes a gag that might seem like a cliche now--a sequence where Keaton saws a board that he's sitting on and falls to the ground. I could watch Buster Keaton fall down all day, however.
The real star of this show is the house the couple assembles after the antagonist, Handy Hank, sabotages them. Handy Hank sure is an ugly fellow, and I'd tell you who plays him if I could find that information. I can tell you that big Joe Roberts, who is actually in sixteen of these shorts, is in this one. That house though. It's a hilarious monstrosity, and that's before it starts rotating.
This also has another Goldberg-type gag featuring the switching of cars that no other writer/director would have dared dream up in the early part of the 1920s.
You just have to marvel at Buster Keaton's ideas. So brilliant!
"Convict 13"
This one's a bit more episodic than the last two. It starts with our hero showing off some inept golf skills while wearing comical shoes. He winds up spanking a fish. That's not a euphemism. An escaped con--the real Convict 13--steals his identity, and poor Keaton is captured. Why an escaped con would be golfing is hilarious to me.
There's some gallows humor (literally) in this one and a great scene where he manages to break into prison. A heartbeat visual gag is a lot of fun, and Joe Roberts, looking a lot like Jeffrey Tambor, plays a crazed prisoner. This has some madcap cartoon violence with Keaton swinging a ball on a chain in a way that doesn't even seem possible.
This isn't top echelon Keaton short comedy, but it's got a few laughs.
"The Scarecrow"
This short has two equally enjoyable parts. In the first, Buster and his roommate Joe Roberts showcase their inventive domesticity in their home where "all the rooms are one room." They remove a tooth, share a meal, and clean up in a house that can only be inhabited by Buster Keaton. He shows terrific rapport with Roberts in this first part.
In the second part, we get a love triangle with the roommates and Sybil Seely, who does not display any nipples in this one. That part involves a lot of chasing, some featuring Fatty Arbuckle's dog Luke and some involving Buster's dad Joe. Keaton gets an opportunity to show off his athletic prowess in those scenes with the dog. Despite the title of this, there's really not that much scarecrow action although that sequence is very funny, including one bit that gets a laugh out of me every single time. And it's great if you're one of those silent cinema butt-kicking aficionados! There's no slide whistling though.
Keaton didn't overuse intertitles at all, but he would try to slip in some humor with them sometimes. It's usually the worst part of these. Here, there's an example of one that doesn't work at all--a reference to a "dancer's union"--as well as one that I kind of like: ""He's running away to get married with your horse."
Ok, now that I've typed that out, I'm not sure I like it at all.
There are some great sequences in this although it's probably not one of his very best. It's always great to see Fatty's dog (who I might like more than Fatty), and the finale is a lot of fun.
"Neighbors"
"He's my son, and I'll break his neck any way I please." Ok, there's an intertitle that is kind of funny.
This is sort of a ghetto Romeo and Juliet with Buster and Virginia Fox being prohibited from having sexual relations by their fathers who are played by Keatons father and, of course, Joe Roberts. A case of Three's Company-like mistaken identity, a scene where Keaton becomes an ostrich, the comedic use of a banana peel, some pants falling down, and a clothesline zip line are a lot of fun although some of the humor in this is a bit dated. There's also an unfortunate blackface gag that further dates things. This short is inventive, of course, although there's a little too much play with a board and fence. It's almost like Buster Keaton figured he spent a lot of time coming up with this contraption and had to give it lots of screen time.
Most impressive here is Keaton's work with the two "Flying Escalantes" as they crisscross the yards between the houses a few times while stacked on top of each other. That was poorly described, so I'll give you a picture.
The Flying Escalantes also appear in a 1934 Keaton short called "Allez Oop!" where they play an acrobatic troupe. I've not seen that one.
Despite some dated humor, this one is still enormously entertaining.
"The Haunted House"
This has two of those visual gags involving lots of extra unnecessary steps to accomplish something very simple--one with the unlocking of a door and one with changing a clock ahead. Those kinds of jokes are clever fun and work a whole lot better than that seemingly endless glue mishap pictured on the poster up there.
This isn't a very well-told story, and it takes forever to actually get to the haunted house in the title. Once there, it's a bunch of cheap magic tricks--a firework candle, and exploding book, unreliable stairs--and they don't all hit. There are some macabre bits that I enjoyed, but it's all very episodic, and not all of it makes sense. It's like Keaton wanted to do a story involving a haunted house, came up with a bunch of gags that would fit, and then lackadaisically wrote a story around it all.
The ending is really clever, but it makes about as much sense as the rest of this messy short. As with all Buster Keaton shorts, this is definitely worth watching. It's not close to being one of my favorites though.
Stay tuned for Part 4 of these Buster Keaton shorts.
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