Les ruses de Malec

If you love chase scenes, this Buster Keaton short is for you! Before any chases, however, we see Buster and his roommate, Big Joe Roberts, as they get ready for breakfast, eat it with the aid of a very clever pulley system (you have to see this to believe it) and then clean up. The big one-room house is nothing but gadgets and they are all fun to see.

Then Buster thinks a small "mad dog" is chasing him and the two go round and round both outside and inside the house, and even around the tops of a brick wall. It's clever and fast-moving slapstick.

Buster then winds up being chased by the father of the female (Sybil Sealey) that both he and Joe are enamored with. After that short chase, in which Buster disguises himself as a scarecrow, he winds up getting Joe and the father fighting each other. When they discover Buster is the culprit behind that, they both take out after Keaton....and on and on it goes, with Sybil joining in......overall, a tremendous 19 minutes of sight gags, slapstick and general mayhem.

I'd have to rank this as one of the most entertaining, if not THE most entertaining silent movie short subjects I have ever watched....at least to this point. I still have more to see.

One of Buster Keaton's early short films, The Scarecrow (1920) is brimming with youthful energy and silly fun. Keaton shares the screen with Big Joe Roberts and Sybil Seely.

Seely was nothing less than Keaton's finest leading lady, charming and spunky. She was a comic partner, not a "breathing prop" as Keaton's female co-stars are often stereotyped as being. It's a shame she and Keaton never starred in a feature film together, but at least we've got four shorts of them, so I won't complain. (Not too much anyway, ha!) But yeah, lots of cute stuff, like the rigged hut Buster and Joe share, or the wedding held on the motorcycle. For those who encounter pseudo-intellectuals who think Buster Keaton was all solemn and bleak and Kafka-esque, the sunshine of The Scarecrow should shut them up quickly. The man was plain funny.

You discover all what you expect from a Buster Keaton film. From inventiveness to the love story and gags. All - so fresh, seductive and charming. A story about the perfect manner to survive to challenges and great example of fine humor. A film more fascinating than amusing. Because it remains proof of high art. A great short film.

The Scarecrow is one of Buster Keaton's greatest silent shorts. In twenty minutes it catches us up in rapture, filled with cheer, humor, romance good nature, and a true and innocent sense of small town farm life. The film contains some of Keaton's most incredible acrobatics as he runs around on top of a ten-foot brick wall, handstands his way through a river of mud to avoid getting his clothes dirty (he, of course, falls in some mud once he gets to the end of the muddy river), is chased by a dog (the payoff of the chase scene is one of the funniest gags in any silent comedy, a brilliant satire of the way silent clowns insist on creating trouble for themselves), and on and on and on and on. As the film is almost coming to a close, Keaton is about to be married. But the film is not done with us yet; instead of merely watching the couple ride off into the sunset, Keaton boldly follows them to the sunset as the two get married on a speeding motorbike. For twenty minutes, I forgot about the time I wasted watching Go West.

Story of two farmhand roommates, living in a flat that only Rube Goldberg could have come up with, who are vying for the attention of the farmer's daughter, while Buster's character has to fend off his roommate (Joe Roberts looking very much like Fatty Arbuckle), the girl's father, and father's dog (which actually belonged to Arbuckle). That's pretty much the plot, but the sightgags are what make the short really work. The breakfast scene, with the aforementioned Goldberg setting, is pure genius. A very good production all around and ranks as one of Keaton's best. Rating, based on shorts, 10.