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.
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