Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. a Silent Comedy Gem

1920s movie shows Keaton's best as silent star & technical genius

Oct 29, 2009

Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924) is a classic silent comedy film that goes beyond slapstick to capture a dreamscape that challenges the boundaries between reel and real.

Buster Keaton has been acclaimed as the greatest of the silent clowns (Walter Kerr) and the “greatest actor-director in the history of movies” (Roger Ebert, 10 Nov 2002). Keaton’s work showed imagination, courage, and optimism – and in none of his films is this more evident than his 1924 feature film, Sherlock Jr. Its film-within-a-film structure was as unique as it was entertaining and showcased Keaton’s technical and comic genius. Maybe if Hamlet had had Keaton around, his play-within-a-play would have turned out differently!

Sherlock Jr. is ranked by the American Film Institute in the top 100 American comedies while Time goes a step further to rank it in the top 100 films of all time – not bad for a film considered lost until actor James Mason bought a rundown mansion built by Keaton and found a treasure trove in a tumbledown tool shed (Meade, 1997).

To understand Sherlock Jr. and its layered construction, it is perhaps best to look at it in three parts: the main story which sets up the characters, the movie within it that opens the door to an imaginative reality, and the epilogue that reconciles the two realities.

The plot is simple: a projectionist at the local cinema (Buster Keaton) longs to be a detective and to impress his Girl (Kathryn McGuire). The villain (Ward Crane), a rival for the Girl, frames our hero for the theft of her father’s (Joe Keaton) watch. Out comes the manual, "How to be a detective," and Sherlock Holmes's namesake is on the job—to expose the villain, prove his own innocence, and get back his Girl.

There are gags aplenty--a sticky flyer, a shtick around finding and losing dollar bills, and a banana peel that finds the wrong foot. The funniest gag finds our hero shadowing the villain, directly mirroring every movement from only inches behind—until the villain traps him in a boxcar. In a daredevil stunt, Keaton escapes by running atop the moving train, jumping to a water spout which then gushes open, sending him to the ground (and actually breaking Keaton's neck as he slammed into a rail).

Sherlock Jr. Shifts to a Movie-Within-a-Movie Fantasy

Exhausted, our hero returns to work and the evening show: "Hearts and Pearls." As the film rolls, the sleepy projectionist begins to confuse the theft of pearls in the movie with the theft of the watch and the characters onscreen merge with those in his own life. Thus Sherlock Jr. can emerge as “the greatest detective in the world”—with natty tails and top hat to boot.

What ensues as he nods off to sleep is one of film’s most magical turns: the projectionist’s dream body steps out of his real body and enters the movie on the screen. At first, he gets tossed back out into the auditorium. On his next try, he is sent through a whirlwind of scene changes—tripping over a suddenly appearing garden bench, reeling out of the path of a street car, and tossed from brink to brink of disaster through a lion-filled glade to the desert, the ocean, the snowy mountains, and back to the garden. The technical feat is a delight to watch and totally baffled others as to how it was done.

Keaton’s Vaudeville Magic and Motorbike Stunt Amazes

This “other” reality is so captivating that one momentarily forgets the original plot. Keaton uses this as a license for slights-of-hand that joins slapstick with vaudeville magic (Smith). A billiards game involving an exploding ball is perfection in its buildup of tension and humor. Then laughter shifts to amazement as Keaton’s motorcycle ride unfolds; even after the driver falls off, the detective continues on, riding the handlebars through traffic, under showers of dirt from a road crew, and across a broken bridge just as two trucks converge to provide a solid surface. His escape from the pearl thieves, jumping through a window into a change of clothing and jumping through the briefcase (and body!) of his assistant are astonishing (especially as they are not camera tricks) as is the launch of the escape car across a lake for a brief romantic sail.

As the car sinks, the original storyline returns. The Girl, whose own detection uncovered the thief, finds our hero and apologizes. Some of the magic remains though—the timid projectionist takes his cues from the onscreen scene to hold her hands, return his ring to her, and finally, in a leap of courage, kiss her – a kiss Filmsite.org rates as one of film’s greatest.

Others have built on Keaton’s work. Grigori Alexandrov stages a Cinderella/godmother sequence in his Soviet-era musical The Shining Path (1940) using Keaton's "ghost image" technique. Jackie Chan has paid homage to the motorcycle scene in several movies. And, Woody Allen inverts the open-screen-boundaries concept in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), allowing a screen character to step OUT of the screen and then refuse to return.

What Keaton did best in Sherlock Jr. was to explore the dreamlike nature of films, testing the limits of illusion captured through a camera. Not since French film pioneer Georges Méliès had anyone pushed the boundaries of reality and fantasy on camera in such interesting ways. And not even Méliès did it with the combination of extraordinary stunts and subtle humor that makes Sherlock Jr. a perfect gem of a movie.

Smith, Imogen Sara. (2008). Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. Gambit Publishing.

The copyright of the article Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. a Silent Comedy Gem in Classic Film Comedies is owned by Susan Z. Swan. Permission to republish Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. a Silent Comedy Gem in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.