Preceded by ONE WEEK (1920, d. Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline, 23 mins) with Buster Keaton, Sybil Seely, and Joe Roberts
When Sherlock Jr. opened, in April 1924, it was only a modest success, and Buster Keaton regarded it as not one of his big pictures. It had no developed storyline and the impatient and dissatisfied comic kept cutting the film shorter so that his patron, Joseph Schenck, and his distributor, MGM, implored him to flesh it out to feature length. Thus Sherlock Jr. often feels like no more than a notebook of ideas the comedian had, without attaining the organized elegance of his masterworks. It has a casual, unconcerned air, but a hundred years later that’s what makes the film sublime and modern.
So what did Keaton think he was doing?
You can say he was intrigued by the notion of a small-town movie projectionist who wants to become a master detective. But is Buster that interested in the plot in which his guy wants to woo the girl (Kathryn McGuire), gets her a box of chocolates, and becomes a rival to the lofty, dishonest Sheik (Ward Crane)? The detective jokes are pretty corny until our guy finds himself at a pool table where his dastardly foes have made the 13-ball a small bomb waiting to blow him up. It’s not that we care, or not until the absent-minded Buster clears the table in a series of shots that manage never to kiss 13. The geometry of the game, and the farcical skill suddenly command attention, as if it has a fluency so you feel the game should go on forever, and you marvel that the expertise is so offhand. As if Buster and his gagmen hadn’t quite paused to appreciate what they might do beyond the pool routine.
Still, there’s dull stuff that has to be forgiven—like the antique axe that may execute Buster if he sits in a certain seat, or the glass of dark poison that gets passed around like a hot potato. The girl is pretty, the Sheik is suave, and Buster is that frozen-faced pierrot whose lasting trick is to ignore any peril he faces without a glimmer of self-pity.
These routines come and go, and it’s not hard to imagine Keaton trimming and cutting them until too little was left (the film is only forty-five minutes). He’s not convinced by his own story. It’s as if he’d reached a point in his career where he’s getting bored with what he’s doing. Until the revelation occurs: he gets the idea that this absent-minded projectionist could fall asleep on his job and somehow enter the screen his machinery is filling.
Keaton would say that this was the gag or the possibility that had led him into doing Sherlock Jr. In which case—I think—we have some reason to wish he had worked harder at it. There are moments of lovely surprise, poised questions hovering over the nature of film and reality. Like the way, in his movie theater, he simply strolls into the screen as if it is another room ready to have him as an inmate. Or the entranced look with which he watches a romance on the screen and then copies it for his girl.
There is also his realization that a plain cut can make a magic out of film that we seldom have the time to appreciate. So Buster’s pose can carry him from here to there—from a sheer ledge in the mountains to a jungle tableau where lions are too relaxed to eat him. The potential of any cut is obvious enough, and what we call the art of editing and transformation had seized on it years before Sherlock Jr. But Buster’s calm view of every jump carries a secret wondering: aren’t all of us in the age of cinema stepping from one reality into another, from actuality to fantasy, quicker than the viewer’s eye can close and stop the riot? In Battleship Potemkin, only a year later, we are both the brutalized citizens and the immaculate soldiers with their rifles and sabers. Life got so complicated after film.
A hundred years later, trying to surf the chaos of the TV ads at the 2024 Super Bowl, and reconcile them with not just the game, but with Travis Kelce’s prowess and Taylor Swift’s winsome presence, one can reel back from the Pandora’s box of reality and the virtual that Buster Keaton was on to. If you think of Swift and Kelce as Juliet with Caliban you begin to see the metamorphosis lurking in mixed metaphor. It’s fine to say Buster had foreshadowed the wit of films like The Purple Rose of Cairo. But it’s more to the point that he foresaw—in his dreamy, non-censorious way—the confusion of realities that is now taking us over.
Of course, that window on the future was appreciated a while ago, not just by Woody Allen, but by Les Carabiniers where Jean-Luc Godard had one of his loutish heroes trying to get into the screen so that he could join the girl in her bath. There was a threshold on offer here, one that can seem terrifying now, on how the medium that had seemed so engagingly lifelike for several decades has increasingly given up on life or nature. As if our fond companionship with reality is no more, wiped away by a hi-tech wipe.
But there is more to marvel at in Sherlock Jr., and it is the affirmation of light, space, and actuality. A hundred years later, the delight of this abbreviated film are the sequences where the chase takes us out into the dozing suburbia of Los Angeles and the dusty light of southern California. This looks quaint now, but you know it felt alive and up-to-date as the 1924 camera turned. It was excited by its own Now.
You can say such scenes are matter-of-fact, part of the urge to find a few streets or dirt roads where the unit can do a chase scene in peace. But that dismissive attitude fails to match the ecstasy of Buster on the handlebars of a rogue motorbike hurtling down wide empty boulevards in the mistaken comfort that there is a driver sitting behind him. Or the rapture in distances and clear views, and the feeling for a frontier where the city drifts off into semi-desert or what was wilderness just a few years earlier. I love this dapper guy, trying to get along in life and decency but like a lost spirit in the vastness of America. This is enhanced by the speed of the tracking shots and the exhilaration of being out in this sunny open putting people and machines in frictionless motion.
By our time, in the frenzy of going from a to b in one cut, we can comprehend how the thrill of seeing life unfolding on screens lets us feel we were in the promised land, the shining on which the project of America was based. These days, in movies or screened stuff, it’s quite rare to see a headlong tracking shot or the kind of light that lets you think, “Oh yes, it feels like four o’clock in the afternoon.” Instead we suffer that rather aspic digital light that falls short of brightness. Sherlock Jr. just looks so cheery.
It’s up to us whether we decide that Buster Keaton is a genius or a hard-working comic entranced by mise-en-scène (by constructing gags and situations in terms of camera placement). But in the chase scenes there’s no room for doubt: his sad-faced guy was having fun and in love with what he was doing. To such an extent that you could consider him soaring past his real being (not the happiest life in Hollywood) and stepping into the light of romance and motion—the screen. We love Buster, but there was a demon behind his fixed gaze. Pierrot le fou.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra