Sherlock Junior

Sherlock Jr. is one of Buster Keaton's best films, and possibly his greatest. The film starts somewhat slow as it sets Keaton up to be a struggling wannabe detective. There are some comedy moments that play well and the opening is rather enjoyable.

But then, the film soon becomes 100x better as he literally steps into the movie that he is watching. We watch a sequence that maybe is not necessary for the overall story but what is a completely entertaining watch as the scenery changes in the movie he is in. Every cut is timed perfectly, even watching it back in slow motion is still a struggle to work out any unusual movements in his character between the scenery changes. It is brilliantly funny, especially when the scenery changes just as he is jumping into the sea to then jumping into a snow pit.

The rest of the film follows Keaton as he goes about as a habitually clever detective in the film he has entered. The gags are so brilliantly worked out that you don't know whether to laugh or to watch in amazement. You think that surely that gag was the greatest of the film but then he goes and tops it in the next scene. Keaton did all of his own stunts which makes it even more astonishing to watch, and sometimes rather intense especially when he passes over a train track being just inches from the moving train. It is a film that words cannot describe and that has to be seen to truly be believed. Sherlock Jr. represents the truly unique style of filmmaking from the silent era, something that you would never see any other time in the history of film.

If you're looking to get into silent film comedy, or just silent film as a whole, then Sherlock Jr. is a great place to start. Every part of the film is still as funny today as it must have been then. The timing is perfect. And the film is only 45 minutes long!

You can only marvel at the craft of Buster Keaton. The choreography and precision in coordinating these stunts and sequences would be astounding and breathtaking whatever period of cinema they came from but more so here as the medium was still in its infancy. For an imagination to conjure up such things, with the practice and patience to perfect them, can genuinely be considered genius. A performance by an absolute legend of silent picture perfection.

There ought to be a theater that shows nothing but perfectly preserved prints of the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon. There ought to be a lot of things, I guess. But anyone who thinks that silent film is nothing more than a crude and unskilled ancestor of today's motion picture need only spend some time on these great comedies to realize that, in this genre at least, the peak was reached in the 20s. Yes, there are funny movies with dialogue, but the humor is generally IN the dialogue...nobody--not the Marx Brothers, or W.C. Fields, or Abbot and Costello or the Three Stooges and nobody since--has achieved the sublime mastery of physical comedy these geniuses did. And the best of them all for pure comedy, to my mind, is Keaton. And the best of his movies is Sherlock, Jr. The dream sequence in which he becomes an actor in the film he's projecting is astonishing; the way in which this movie is a sort of window into a different and appealing age is charming--and the ending of this movie takes the breath away. Keaton made some of the great endings in film, I think. Check out "College" some time--just for the last minute or so. If you ever have the chance to see this film in a good print at the right speed with appropriate music, and you don't take that opportunity, shame shame shame. This is one I'd like to own.

Not only is this Buster Keaton's best film, but it is among the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, period. While it is not a feature-length film--and thus barred from most critics' lists of great films--it invented just about every single basic special effect known to movies (except for morphing). The story itself, about a film projectionist who desires to become part of the movies, and then does, by walking right onto the screen, made palpable the desire that we all have to be in the movies: To get the girl, to be an action hero, to outsmart the bad guys. Keaton invented meta-cinema before anyone even had a phrase for it.

This movie has entered our dreams.

My second silent film for the class that I viewed for my class was just as entertaining as the first, which was Charlie Chaplin's The Circus. Buster Keaton playing the role of the movie projectionist Sherlock Jr. was very entertaining. The story is simple, yet interesting and fun, and the movie comes in at much less than one hour, 44 minutes to be exact. While there are a few points in the movie that are disjointed and not as fun, overall you can stay engrossed enough until you get to some really cool and innovative special effects, which given the technological limitations when this was filmed in the 1920's are simply amazing.