A silent movie that should have been the length of a silent movie

I saw the phenomenon known as Hundreds of Beavers last night. I was very amused by it ... for about 25 minutes. But the movie goes on for 108 minutes. 

My favorite silent movie of all time is the Buster Keaton masterpiece Sherlock Jr. You could make an argument for Erich Von Stroheim's Greed, which is currently ahead of Sherlock Jr. on my Flickchart. But I can tell you which movie I'm more eager to see again.

And part of that is that Sherlock Jr. is only 45 minutes long. There is so much brilliant physical comedy packed into that 45 minutes that it makes your head spin. I've written about Sherlock Jr. multiple times before, so if you want to go off down that rabbit (beaver?) hole instead of this one, the posts are here and here. 

Hundreds of Beavers has some moments that are as fun and joyous, in their own ways, as some of the better moments in Sherlock Jr. 

But by running more than twice as long, with many of the set pieces resembling one another in actual content as well as tone, it feels four times as long.

You've not doubt heard about Mike Cheslik's movie by now, but if you haven't, allow me to introduce you.

It basically feature the main character, a fur trapper named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), interacting with all manner of rabbits, wolves, dogs, and -- yes -- beavers, who are played by actors wearing animal costumes. The movie is in black and white and there is no (well, almost no) spoken dialogue. There is also almost no on-screen text, so it's truly the sort of film that would play equally well to any audience with any native language.

There's a lot of delightful silliness involving backfired booby traps, frozen sneeze icicles, attempts to win the hand of the daughter of the local trading post, and more dead animals with cartoon X's in their eyes than you can shake a stick at. The underlying creativity is undeniable and thoroughly delightful. 

But there's just ... so ... much of it. 

My long-standing conflict in terms of silent movies is that their length does not conform to my notion of what makes a feature film. However, I have granted films like Sherlock Jr. a pass because they were made in a different time, when movies that ran longer than an hour were rare. And by "granting a pass" I mean I include them in all my various movie lists.

Even though Hundreds of Beavers was made during an era when I would not grant it this sort of pass, I doubt that Mike Cheslik actually cared a lot about the length of his movie for its own sake. The movie is such a rule breaker that I don't think Cheslik would hesitate to make it only 45 minutes if that's what he thought was appropriate for it.

But let's say Cheslik was concerned about meeting a certain minimum length in order to qualify for the Oscars or something like that. (Hundreds of Beavers getting an Oscar nomination. There mere concept makes me giggle.) Wouldn't that 85-minute minimum for Oscar consideration be plenty of Hundreds of Beavers? I think it would be. 

Over the course of all this silly mayhem, there is enough of a narrative thread that you can at least say the story has a certain trajectory, even though at its core, the movie is the sort of experience whose scenes you could watch in any sequence and still get about the same out of it. And any individual moment of creativity is not something you'd feel like you wanted to sacrifice, now that you've seen it and know that it exists.

But creative types need to kill their darlings, and Hundreds of Beavers just has too many darlings for a viewer to leave the experience feeling anything less than exhausted. 

Audient Classics: Sherlock Jr.

This is the first in my 2023 monthly series Audient Classics, in which I rewatch films from before I was born that I loved, but that I've seen only once.

As you would know, January was a busy month for me, so I decided to start Audient Classics with what will certainly be the shortest movie in the series. It will also certainly be the oldest, so it works in a couple different ways.

That's right, I was long overdue to revisit Sherlock Jr., my favorite Buster Keaton film and possibly my favorite silent film ever, though other contenders for this series -- such as The Passion of Joan of Arc and Greed -- may have something to say about that.

This is, I believe, also the first film that I've ever watched for two different monthly series on this blog, though I'd have to go back and check on that. This was the second film in No Audio Audient, my 2016 series watching silent movies. It won't be the last to repeat, as I figure to revisit some others this year that I first discovered through one of these other viewing series. 

So the challenge of this series will be to say something fresh about each film, since some of them will have already received a write-up on this blog in a very similar format to the current one. I will intentionally not check to see what I wrote back then, until once I'm done and I can compare and contrast which things I thought were worth talking about on each viewing. Then I might make a couple comments to that effect at the end of this piece.

Everything is worth talking about in Sherlock Jr. I can't imagine this much technique, this much heart, this much humor, and this much just plain movie magic being fit into a movie even twice its 45-minute running time. (I'll wager the phrase "movie magic" came up at least once in my other write-up.)

I'll start with one of the bits of humor. I laughed out loud when Keaton's main character (I don't think he has a name so we can just call him "the projectionist") timidly gives his sweetheart a ring with a very small diamond in it. She has trouble seeing the diamond so he helpfully produces a magnifying glass from his pocket to assist. I don't know which I think is funnier, that the projectionist has clown car pockets and can produce anything wants from them (and without looking or digging too hard), or that he brought along the magnifying glass purposefully because he knew she would need it.

The film is of course full of camera tricks, perhaps most memorably when the projectionist walks into the movie screen and starts seeing his background changing behind him as he tries to sit down on items that are suddenly no longer there, or dive into water that suddenly becomes snow. But I think the most seamless trick in the whole movie is when he's escaping some hoods who are chasing him and he literally dives into a briefcase being held open by another man at his chest. I know how they accomplished it, I'm pretty sure -- a man holding a briefcase in one shot, briefly a dummy with a trap door that allows Keaton to vanish through a hole in the fence, then back to the man again, all edited so quickly that you can't tell -- but I still find it extremely impressive for a movie that was made 99 years ago. 

For a 45-minute movie, I was surprised about the things I didn't remember from only seven years ago. I remember the basic contours of most of the set pieces, but I didn't recall the rather lengthy -- by the standards of a 45-minute movie -- scene involving billiards and the three traps that might get the projectionist, now the detective (an explosive 13 ball, a poisoned drink and a booby-rapped chair). I also remembered the tenor of the ending being a little different. I remembered him not getting the girl (oops, spoiler alert) and that it was far more melancholy, maybe even that he stepped into the screen and we never saw him again. (I think that probably does happen in some other movie.) Of course when I saw the girl discovering the truth of what happened at the pawn shop, which occurs much earlier, I knew I must have probably gotten that wrong.

I remembered the magic. As I said before, it's bursting with it. Keaton's gifted stunts and pratfalls are just a small, though very important, portion of it. The whole thing is just exquisite.

I could keep being Chris Farley and saying "Remember the part where he jumps through the window and puts on the old woman's shawl as a disguise in one single motion? That was awesome," but if I talk about too many of the great individual moments, it'll be unfairly stacking the deck in favor of having mentioned these moments in both this piece and the one I wrote in 2016. I'd like to see which ones struck me both times, and so I will go read that piece right now. 

Huh, not one use of the phrase "movie magic."

I do talk extensively about both the billiards scene and the ending, despite having subsequently forgotten those details in the ensuing years. I also discussed both the changing backgrounds scene and the briefcase scene, though in the latter case, I claimed to not know how they did and that I didn't want to know. I guess this time I was willing to speculate on what they obviously must have done to create the effect, and maybe that's the point of a second viewing -- you are analyzing the brilliant details rather than just letting them wash over you.

I also gave a plot synopsis, which I did not do this time -- I guess figuring that if I were watching it a second time and already knew the plot (at least the parts I could remember), then the same is probably true of you.

If you want to read that previous post, it's here. 

As much as I long to continue talking about this brilliant film, my busy January hasn't yet let up so I'll just say to come back here in February to see what great moment in cinema history, probably decades later than this one, comes next. 

No Audio Audient: Sherlock, Jr.

This is the second in my 2016 series No Audio Audient, in which I catch up with one silent film per month.

I've been chastising myself lately for being too indiscriminate with my high star ratings on Letterboxd. I'm desperately trying, by hook or by crook, to recalibrate my personal rating system, so a wider range of the available star ratings can be used to fairly describe my feelings about the movies I see.

But if I can't give five stars to one of the most delightful and imaginative silent films I have ever seen, I don't know when I can give it.

And even watching it late at night, after I'd tried to go to bed but tossed and turned for 20 minutes before giving up, didn't damper my appreciation of it.

Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. was one of the films that prompted me to choose this as my series for 2016, and it was what I meant to start with last month before a separate movie challenge led me to select the Harold Lloyd vehicle The Freshman instead. If I'm not mistaken, Chicago film critic Michael Phillips chose it as one of his ten films to submit to the Sight and Sound list in 2012 -- either actually, or as a theoretical ballot composed just for his appearance on Filmspotting for their Sight and Sound-themed episode. I hadn't had all that much familiarity with it prior to that, but quickly stashed the title away in the back of my mind for future use.

It's a 45-minute "feature" (remember, I'm expanding my usually rigid definition of what constitutes a feature for the purposes of this series) from 1924, involving a projectionist (Keaton) who is studying to be a detective (as the poster above shows you). He's also in love with a girl and is trying to buy her a fancy box of chocolates that will help woo her, but is poor and can only afford a $1 box of chocolates. His rival, the "local sheik," is also poor, but steals the girl's father's pocket watch in order to pawn it and buy her a $3 box of chocolates. He slips the pawn ticket into Keaton's character's pocket in order to frame him for the crime once it is discovered. Keaton's own amateur detective work to find the culprit leads to himself, and he's banished from the girl's home. Upon returning to work, he dreams himself away into the film he's watching, replacing the actors with people from his life and trying again to solve the crime on celluloid.

Although the film ultimately ends up having a fairly well defined plot, Sherlock, Jr. is as close as I've seen to a film that exists purely to celebrate the possibilities of cinema and their inherent joys. This film is full of lovely optical tricks, which had to have been comparatively simple by today's standards, but whose actual mechanical details still sort of escaped me as I sat there watching them. The proof in the pudding of their success was that I didn't want to try to figure out what they'd done. I just wanted to sit there, reveling in it.

The most notable instance of this is probably when Keaton first tries to join the film in his dream, and he actually runs up to the screen and dives forward into it. That in itself is impressive, but it's only a prelude of things to come. As is always the case in the silent films of Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the hero must be constantly challenged by changing circumstances out of his control, and in this case, that couldn't have a more literal interpretation. The image on the movie screen keeps changing to scenes from different movies, such that the item he's sitting on in one scene will suddenly be gone; he'll be on dry land one moment and standing in the water the next; he'll be alone, and then moments later he'll be joined by tigers, which pass before him in the foreground to prove it's not just some visual trick. (I mean, it is a visual trick, but it invites you to believe it isn't.)

This type of sensibility is demonstrated throughout. There's a part where Keaton is being chased, and he meets a strange man in alley with a briefcase. The man seems to be offering him a way out. Before we know it, the man has opened his briefcase in front of him, in the classic position of a peddler showing you his wares. But instead of wares, it's some kind of portal to another dimension -- or simply to the other side of the fence, I guess. We see Keaton run forward and dive into the briefcase, still held at chest level for the man, so not only is he diving in to the briefcase, he's diving into the space where the man's chest should be. Only later is it revealed that he's on the other side of the fence. Again, how they did it had to have been fairly simple -- by today's standards. But I don't want to know, because the illusion was so damn pleasing on its own terms.

Then there's the part where Keaton is driving in a car with the woman and the car goes through all kinds of transformations as it's going along, losing its top, losing its bottom, driving over surfaces it should not be able to drive over, driving over surfaces that are present only for the very moment that the car is passing. As ever, Keaton and his passenger are completely stone-faced. Keaton's ability to underplay a zany moment is perhaps unparalleled in cinematic history.

Then there's the scene where he's playing pool with a #13 ball that is rigged to explode, only he doesn't know it (or does he?). It's actually incredibly tense as we watch him execute one shot after another that miraculously does not involve any incidental contact with that particular ball. This took some incredible trick shooting on Keaton's part, and it's not a feat we should just take in stride -- though by making it look so easy, Keaton does indeed invite us to do that.

I also love the moment when he perfectly rides one of those wooden arms that prevents cars from crossing train tracks, down from the top of the building to the back of a passing convertible. It's not a trick in this case, just one of Keaton's famous perfectly executed stunts.

I could probably go on, as I feel like I have not even scratched the surface of what's stuffed into these 45 minutes. But let me instead end by discussing the final scene, and if you really want a spoiler alert about a movie that is 92 years old, well here it is.

Sherlock, Jr. does end happily for its protagonist, who wakes up from his dream to discover that his girl has gleaned the true identity of the thief and has come to reconcile with him. It's then that we learn that as with his detective aspirations, the projectionist has modeled all his behaviors and goals on the cinema. He looks up at the screen to discover that characters in the movie are also having a romantic reconciliation. Clueless how to do this on his own, he simply mimics the behavior of the movie's romantic lead. And here we are reminded of one of the main philosophical underpinnings of the study of art and culture, which is that life imitates art. And the comparatively young medium of cinema is the perfect way for that occur.

Watching Sherlock, Jr. was also highly informative in the wake of listening to the episode of You Must Remember This on Keaton, which discusses his disastrous decision to sign with MGM and give over creative control on his movies to the studio. When Keaton was at Metro in the 1920s, he was allowed to do whatever he wanted because it was always a financial (and critical) success. But once sound came in, which more or less coincided with the signing of his MGM contract, Keaton became creatively castrated, and he promptly stopped being able to create things with this seemingly effortless sense of artistic joy and imagination. And so I felt like I watched this movie with an extra layer of sentimentality, as I knew that Keaton's days as a genius free to frolic within his element were numbered.

If that's not a five-star movie, I don't know what is.

Next month I'm inclined to start diving into some of the three-hour silent epics I've been meaning to watch for years, but I expect March to be a particularly busy month for me, so let's instead jump back in time ten years from the first two films I've watched in this series and check out the 72-minute Regeneration from 1915. I know nothing about it except it was recently recommended in my Flickchart group on Facebook, and that it's available on Youtube.