The Scarecrow

Buster Keaton was one of the greatest motion picture performers in the history of motion pictures.

One reason was his athleticism, allowing him to do hilarious stunts, and his timing, as exemplified in "The General," and his dead-pan face that still portrayed an emotion.

In this short film, he uses all of those skills and abilities and still gets upstaged by Luke the Dog for much of the movie.

His female co-star is as cute as anyone could be, and we could only wish she had been around even longer.

Al St. John, later known as "Fuzzy," is here, uncredited, very briefly, and a "pastor" is not given his real name even here at IMDb, which is quite unusual.

Buster Keaton was always great, and sometimes, in fact often in his talkies, was greater than his script.

Here, he was star, co-director and co-writer, and everything came together very well.

I saw this in a TCM Sunday Night Silent, and am grateful to that network, which has, I'm sad to say, deteriorated in quality in recent months, showing an awful lot of very non-classic movies. TCM begins to redeem itself, though, with such films as "The Scarecrow." I recommend "The Scarecrow," and hope you get to see it next time it plays.

... as the scarecrow gag is just one gag in a two reel short that is full of them.

Buster and Big Joe Roberts are roommates and fellow farm hands. Probably the best part of this short are all of the gadget related gags at the beginning as the two farmhands eat breakfast and prepare to meet the workday. As the pair get ready to leave the house, one bed becomes a piano, the other a couch, and a phonograph doubles as a stove. Keaton always said he would have been an engineer if he hadn't become a comic and his mechanical bent shows in this short.

Keaton seldom used captions as he tended to show you not tell you what's going on. But there's one line here that is odd for a Keaton comedy - "I don't care how she votes - I'm going to marry her." This short was made the first year that women had the Constitutional right to vote. Also Prohibition went into effect this year. Thus the line ""My stomach's as empty as a saloon." It's rare that you need to know something about history to appreciate Keaton, after all, he was not Alice Guy-Blache.

This very funny short comedy is an excellent example of Keaton's amazing inventiveness, and it deserves to be one of his best-remembered short features. The first part is especially good, and has to be seen to be appreciated - it's just Buster and a roommate going about their daily routine in a house filled with wacky gadgets and all kinds of unexpected features. There's a lot of great material, much more than you can catch all at once. It would be hard for the rest of it to live up to the first part, but it is pretty good, too - lots of slapstick and chases, plus the actual "Scarecrow" scene. This one is a bit more piecemeal than most of his comedies, but all of the material is very good. Most fans of silent comedies will really enjoy this movie.

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.

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.