The High Sign

What amazes me in every Buster Keaton short is how good the physical action is. In 'The High Sign' he has the perfect setting to show us his tricks. In a house where there must be a secret escape in every room he has to escape from a couple of guys who do not like him very much because he betrayed them. He had to kill a certain person but faked the whole thing.

The story in a Buster Keaton short is not that important. Once he starts doing those great things on screen I don't want it to end. The camera is able to see four rooms at the same time and Keaton moves from room to room, through walls and ceilings. It is all great.

This is the kind of pleasantly silly and very funny film that typifies the very best of these old silent short slapstick comedies. It's fast-paced and filled with clever gags, and a couple of especially hilarious scenes. It starts when Buster tricks everyone into thinking that he is a crack shot, and thus finds himself hired by a rich miser to be his bodyguard, while also being recruited by a gang of criminals (the 'Blinking Buzzards', who go around saluting each other with the 'High Sign') to assassinate the same man. There's not much else to the plot, which is mostly a setup for a lot of zany antics. It's funny all the way through, and there is some especially good use of props and settings in this one. It's just slapstick fun, nothing to take seriously, but slapstick doesn't come much better. This is highly recommended for fans of silent short comedies.

The 'High Sign' has to be my favourite Buster Keaton short and it just so happens to be the first independent film Keaton produced, giving birth to his iconic unnamed character. However, Keaton was reportedly disappointed with the short and didn't release it until the following year, instead making One Week his first solo short. I question why though as I feel the premise of The 'High Sign' is one of Keaton's most inspired and even worthy of being used as the set-up for a feature - it's true what they say, the artist is often wrong about their own work. The opening prologue of The High Sign states "Our hero came from Nowhere- he wasn't going Anywhere and got kicked off Somewhere"; and considering his superhuman stunts, Keaton is like an alien who just landed on Earth. This opening prologue reminds me of a statement Roger Ebert made in his review of The General; "(Keaton) seems like a modern visitor to the world of silent clowns".

The 'High Sign' packs in so much gags and material into its 21-minute runtime, chocked full of blink-and-you-miss-it moments in the story of a wannabe gangster who also becomes a bodyguard for the man he is assigned to kill. The gag involving Keaton's set-up with the dog, the meat and the string (it's hard to explain) is reminiscent of something Mr. Bean would conjure while the short also features the earliest example I've seen in a film of a recurring gag with the high sign itself, a secret signal between the members of a gang known as The Blinking Buzzards. Keaton even messes with the audience's expectation for comic effect by walking past a banana peel on the ground only to not slip on it. Furthermore, the short's finale is a real "How did they do that?" sequence. The house with its traps and secret hatches is an astounding piece of set design and when four rooms on duel levels appear in the frame at once in which Keaton jumps back and forth between them, it reminds me of a 2D platform video game. I was laughing, in awe and was even shocked (when the gangster's neck is closed on the door) all at once. All of this takes place within a nostalgic, Coney Island-like setting (filmed at Venice Pier in Los Angeles) and even features the appearance of a man at the 11 minutes mark who bears quite a resemblance to that other great silent comic, Charlie Chaplin (intentional or not?). I'll say it now and I'll say it again; the genius of Buster Keaton will never cease to amaze me.

This begins with Buster being a crook. First, he steals a newspaper from a man riding a merry-go-round. It turns out to be the biggest newspaper you have ever seen! He sees a "help wanted" ad for a worker in a shooting gallery. You must be "crack shot." Buster isn't, of course, but he cheats again and gets the job, thanks to a little (and very clever) scheme with a little dog. (Buster is not an honest man in this movie, but he sure is resourceful!).

The arcade is run by a giant of a man (Charles Dorety?) who is a member of the Blinking Buzzards, a brutal secret group of extortionists and hit men. One of the men on their hit list is the town tightwad: "August Nickelnurser." The latter, knowing his days are numbered, walks by the arcade, sees Buster, and hires him as his bodyguard. The big villain-arcade owner (no name was ever given him) comes back, takes Buster to the Buzzards hideout, makes him a member and gives him his first assignment: kill Nickelnurser.

Holy cow - Buster is both the bodyguard and the hired assassin for the same man!!! What to do?

This fantastic premise - to be played out in the second half of the film, doesn't really get going until the final few minutes, unfortunately. We have to sit through a few meaningless scenes back at the arcade. However, when Buster, the target and his cute daughter, and all the Buzzards all wind up in the same house - a great house filled with trap doors....the finish is fantastic!

This movie is chock full of visual gags. It starts of establishing a plot that seems a bit interesting (the guy getting two jobs at once), but you soon realize that this is only to facilitate a lot of different stunts and sight gags. The secret symbol of the evil gang here is also used well, and Keaton's inability to use in the correct situations. As the plot slowly progresses, the movie ends up in a situation where Keaton is in a man's house for two different reasons (that oppose each other), and the house is full of traps. When Keaton ends up getting chased around in this house, there's just minutes of fun, jumping from one room to the other, often with big sets consisting of several rooms at once. It's great how much Keaton manages to squeeze into this movie's 20 minute run time.