Les ruses de Malec

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.