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SHERLOCK JR.
by Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton still remains one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and his third feature film is a masterpiece that stands not only as one of the best adaptations of the Sherlock character ever, but as a breathtaking display of every silent comedy technique imaginable, from his own formidable physical skills to some then-groundbreaking camera trickery.
A brief synopsis of the film undersells the levels of the film, and its remarkable ability to bring something not only new but light-years ahead of other filmmakers of the time – A film projectionist longs to be a detective, and puts his meagre skills to work when he is framed by a rival for stealing his girlfriend’s father’s pocket-watch.
Anticipating postmodernism by decades, the detective fantasy ‘Sherlock Jr.’ largely takes place inside the head of a hapless and wronged cinema projectionist. Seemingly a simple story, the beauty of ‘Sherlock Jr.’ lies in the projection of dreams onto the screen – literally, as the protagonist images himself on a movie screen during the film, we find ourselves watching a movie in a movie.
REASONS TO WATCH
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– Always a fan of film technology, Keaton here pushes film special effects to their then limits, though some of the most effective moments make use of old-fashioned vaudeville stage mechanics – such as the moment when he leaps “through” his disguised assistant to evade pursuers.
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– Includes a stunt so dangerous (he performed all of his own, and this was in the 1920s) that it broke Keaton’s neck – something he wouldn’t discover until a routine medical examination over a decade later.
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– An example of primitive American surrealism. Though not strictly surrealism, it does point toward what was soon to arrive across the world with regards to increased interest in psychology, dreams, abstraction (and eventually metafiction)
NOTES
In 1965, a year before Buster Keaton died, an author interviewed him for a biography and asked, “How did you come to make a surrealistic film like ‘Sherlock, Jr.’?” Keaton replied, “I did not mean it to be surrealistic. I just wanted it to look like a dream.”
Originally titled ‘The Misfit’, production began in January 1924 in Los Angeles. Keaton later said that his character walking onto the screen and into a film was “the reason for making the whole picture…Just that one situation.”
Keaton initially hired Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle as his co-director for the film. Arbuckle had discovered Keaton and his career was at a standstill after being falsely accused of raping Virginia Rappe in 1921. During the scandal and court case, Arbuckle had lost his mansion and cars and was in debt for $750,000. Keaton wanted to help his old friends career and financial problems and hired Arbuckle under the pseudonym “William Goodrich”. Filming began well and Arbuckle was happy to be back on set, but after Keaton corrected a mistake that Arbuckle made his attitude changed dramatically. Arbuckle became angry and abusive on set, yelling at actors and according to Keaton becoming “flushed and mad…[the scandal] just changed his disposition.”
The production included one of Keaton’s most famous on-set accidents. In a scene where Keaton grabs a water spout while walking on a moving boxcar train, the water unexpectedly flooded down on Keaton much harder than anticipated, throwing him to the ground. The back of Keaton’s neck slammed against a steel rail on the ground and caused him to blackout. The pain was so intense that Keaton had to stop shooting later that day and he had “blinding headaches” for weeks afterwards, but continued working due to his well known high threshold for physical pain. It was not until 1935 that a doctor spotting a callus over a fracture in Keaton’s top vertebra in an X-Ray. The doctor informed Keaton that he had broken his neck during the accident nine years earlier and not realized it. Keaton famously always performed his own stunts and this was not the only accident on set. In another scene Keaton was in a motorcycle accident when the bike he was riding skidded and smashed into two cameras, knocking over Eddie Cline and throwing Keaton onto a nearby car.
‘Sherlock Jr.’ was Keaton’s most complicated film for special optical effects and in-camera tricks. The film’s most famous trick shot involves Keaton jumping into a small suitcase and disappearing. Keaton later said that it was an old vaudeville trick that his father had invented and he later performed it on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, but never publicly revealed how he did it. The trick was accomplished with a trap door behind the suitcase and an actor lying horizontally with long clothes hiding his absent bottom torso, which then allowed the actor to smoothly fall forward and walk as though he had always be standing vertically. Keaton later said that they “spent an awful lot of time getting those scenes.” Filming took four months, while typically it took Keaton two months to finish a feature film. The editing was also difficult and took longer than a typical Keaton film. Keaton later told film historian Kevin Brownlow “every cameraman in the business went to see that picture more than once trying to figure out how the hell we did some of that.”
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