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.
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