Spooks!

Films: The Haunted House
Format: Internet video on laptop.

If you want to talk about silent movies, I’m much more likely to want to talk about comedies than any other genre. The reason for this is simple: a lot of silent comedies still work in the sense that they are still funny. That’s simply not the case for a lot of other silent genres. The dramas are more melodrama than drama, for instance. But a guy falling on his hinder is still just as funny when it’s soundless as when we hear the thump. When it comes to that, Keaton was among the best of them. I’ve seen enough Keaton to know he’s my favorite of the silent comedians, but until recently, I hadn’t seen The Haunted House.

Truthfully, while this is classified as both a comedy and a horror movie, it’s really just a comedy. In fact, nothing in the remotest way resembling horror appears for at least the first half of the running time. Essentially, Keaton is a bank teller who, through a series of misadventures involving a pot of glue, ends up looking like he tried to rob the bank. In fact, it was the bank manager who planned the heist, and then planned to hole up in an abandoned house rigged to appear haunted.

Keaton's End

Film: Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Buster Keaton is the most represented of the three best-known silent comedians on The List with five films. I’m fine with that, since he’s also my favorite of them. It’s with a little sadness that I’m writing up the fifth and final Keaton for this project. I simply couldn’t resist, though. I just can’t help myself.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. is also the newest of Keaton’s films on the list, although in the case of silent movies, “newest” is a relative term. Importantly, though, it’s also a film that came after the commercial failure of The General and thus lost control of his films. Sadly, as will soon become apparent, this shows through in the final product.

The story, as is typical with silent comedy, is simple. Bill Canfield (Ernest Torrence) is a steamboat captain in Mississippi. Unfortunately for him, he’s got competition from a man named J.J. King (Tom McGuire), who happens to be the richest man in town and is thus able to purchase a much nicer steamboat. As it happens, Canfield’s son, who he hasn’t seen in years, has finished school and is coming for a visit. Naturally, this is Buster Keaton. And, as naturally happens in such films, Keaton is madly in love with Kitty King (Marion Byron), J.J. King’s daughter, and the feeling is mutual.

It’s not too difficult to see where this film is going. In fact, while the details may not be clear or obvious from the paragraph above, you almost certainly have an idea of what the last couple of minutes are going to look like, no?

With Keaton, it’s all about the stunts, and with silent comedy in general, it’s all about the set up. Steamboat Bill, Jr. is about 2/3 set-up and 1/3 payoff. The set-up is all about turning the short, wimpy Junior into a real man, or at least into the sort of real man that Senior will accept. And that is what the third act is all about.

While the first chunk of the film is all about the set up, it’s also loaded with sight gags and jokes, and there are some good ones, and one that references Keaton’s typical persona that is quick and brilliant. And, as is typical with Keaton, the big set piece stunts that make up the end of the film are essentially tangential to the actual film. A huge storm whips up and destroys the town, which sets up the necessary situation for the end of the film. That said, much of what happens is there simply to showcase Keaton’s virtuoso skills at stunts and comedy. The storm is one of those classic scenes that is referenced in films, especially the part when the house front falls down around him.

It’s also interesting that there are shades of Romeo and Juliet in this in that we are dealing with feuding families and children in love with each other. Of course, this is far more comedic and far less tragic, but there are times when it seems that Keaton is attempting to directly reference Shakespeare’s play.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. is a marvelous piece of footage because of all of the stunts and ideas in it, but it is lacking when compared with other Keaton films that I have seen. There is something less joyful about it somehow, less manic than his earlier films. Had you asked me a few weeks ago, I’d have said that Seven Chances was the least of the Keaton films I’d seen, but sadly that has to be revised to include this one.

So, while Steamboat Bill, Jr. might be the least of the five Keaton films on The List, it’s the least of five films that are Master’s classes in how to pull of sight gags, stunts, and comedy. Keaton’s been better, but Keaton at 70% is better than most.

Why to watch Steamboat Bill, Jr.: It’s Buster Keaton. Why wouldn’t you watch it?
Why not to watch: It lacks a lot of the joy of his earlier films.

Old Stone Face, Part 2

Films: Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr.
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.

Who is the greatest early screen comedian? Fatty Arbuckle, scandalized, is all but forgotten. W.C. Fields is revered by some, but how many people who aren’t really serious about film have seen any of his films? Harold Lloyd was one of the greats, of course, but he’s less well-known than Fields. Which leaves us with Chaplin and Keaton.

I love Chaplin, but my money’s on Keaton here. His films tend to be much less complicated and tend to serve as a platform for tremendous sight gags. No doubt Chaplin pulled a lot of great gags, too, but his tend to be more in the service of story than Keaton’s. Keaton’s gags are almost pure in that they don’t really matter to the plot; instead, they’re simply as funny as possible. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Our Hospitality.

As tends to be the case, the plot here is simple. Young Willy McKay (Keaton) learns that he has inherited an estate somewhere in the antebellum South, so he heads there to claim it. What he doesn’t know until setting out is that his family is half of a legendary feud between the McKay family and the Canfields. In fact, his father killed the brother of Joe Canfield (Joe Roberts) while simultaneously being slain by him. What this means is that Willy is going to find himself on the business end of the revolvers of Joe Canfield and his two sons (Ralph Bushman and Craig Ward). That’s really it.

To add a little spice to the narrative, Willy rides down on the train next to a pretty young lady (Natalie Talmadge), and the two become acquainted. Naturally, she turns out to be the daughter of Joe Canfield, and when she invites Willy to dinner, all hell breaks loose. The Canfields want nothing more than to kill him, but killing him while he is their guest breaks their code of honor, so they must wait until he leaves their house.

This culminates in his desperate flight from the house, a series of misadventures, a long dunking in a river, and a climactic scene involving a huge log, a boat, and a waterfall that really must be seen to be believed. Throughout, there are characteristically tremendous stunts and some screamingly funny gags.

It’s the train ride that I find the most interesting. It lasts for a considerable amount of time, and nothing important happens save that Willy meets the girl, something that could have been handled in a couple of minutes. Instead, we are treated to a series of brilliant jokes, pratfalls, sight gags, and comedic bits. Essentially, this entire episode in the film exists for no reason than to give Keaton a chance to be really, really funny. And he is. No possibility is left unexplored, and he mines everything for its comedic possibility.

What I particularly like about Willy McKay is that he is a quintessential Buster Keaton character. Terrible things and bad luck strike him almost constantly, but he is smart, talented, and resourceful. It’s easy to root for him because his problems are not cause by him, but by other people or simple misfortune.

There are some additionally excellent visual jokes here as well. One of the most entertaining is the fact that Keaton is a good six inches shorter than all of the other men in the film, which puts him at an obvious physical disadvantage. Physically, he’s essentially the same height as the girl, so the two of them are constantly being loomed over by everyone else.

Sherlock, Jr. might now be my favorite Buster Keaton film, eclipsing even the epic The General. While much shorter, there’s so much going on in this film that it almost feels like he had so many ideas that he wanted to put them all in one place.

Our hero (Keaton) is a film projectionist, but he’d like to be more. He’s studying to become a detective. He’s also wooing a young lady (Kathryn McGuire), and finds himself in competition with the local rake and thief (Ward Crane). While he visits the girl, the rake shows up and steals her father’s pocket watch, pawning it to buy the girl a gift. He then slips the pawn receipt into our hero’s pocket, causing him to be booted out of the house and the girl’s life. He returns to his job at the movie theater and falls asleep while screening a movie called “Hearts and Pearls.”

And here’s where the magic really happens. While sleeping, he dreams himself into the film, which has a plot concerning a missing string of pearls, a plot that is disturbingly like what he’s experiencing himself. In his dream, the characters on screen are replaced by the players of his real life drama.

After a series of tremendous gags involving a series of jump cuts on the screen, he enters the screen narrative as the great Sherlock Jr., the greatest living detective. Again, a series of sight gags follow including the most tremendously funny game of billiards ever filmed. Of course, the great Sherlock Jr. solves the crime at hand and saves the fair maiden. Our hero wakes up to discover that in the real world, things are a bit different than they were when he went to sleep.

Again, Keaton uses the basic plot of the film here to include as many gags as he can regardless of how closely these gags track with the rest of the plot. The sequence when he first encounters the film world is a prime example of this. The series of jump cuts have nothing to do with the film being shown in the theater—this set of jokes is there simply because they’re really funny. It’s great to watch him walking down a busy street only to have it change to the edge of a cliff, or see him attempt to sit on a bench only to have it vanish from beneath him a moment later.

It’s the pool game that slays me, though. The two bad guys in the movie within the movie have placed a trick #13 ball on the table. The moment it is jostled, it will explode. What follows is a sequence in which Keaton completely clears the table of all of the other balls without the 13 ball moving an inch. Other balls come within in hair’s breadth of hitting it, but they never do. He pulls off complicated trick shots to sink the other balls without the 13 being struck. Throughout, the bad guys watch him from a safe distance. I can’t comment on how the scene ends without spoiling it, though, and it’s a moment that really needs to be experienced. Surrounding this is a series of additional gags about assassinating the great detective, all of which backfire amusingly.

Sherlock, Jr. never stops once it gets going. Keaton is like a comedy Energizer Bunny, throwing everything he can think of at the audience in the hope that something he does will get them to laugh. The gamble pays off, because there are plenty of things here that virtually anyone would laugh at. When watching comedies, even things that are really funny don’t typically make me laugh out loud, but Sherlock, Jr. does.

More to the point, Keaton makes me laugh. He makes me laugh a lot. A great deal of his oeuvre plays just as well now as it did back then, and there are a number of jokes in these films that still defy description. No one pratfalls like Keaton, and very few film comedians ever went as far as he did for a joke.

If I have a complaint about Sherlock, Jr., it’s the music on the copy I watched. The score for this version was created by a group called the Club Foot Orchestra. While some of it is quite good, a lot of it seemed not to match the action on screen. I found it distracting for about half the film, and almost would have rather watched in complete silence. Someone needs to create a score that not only matches this film, but that complements it.

Why to watch Our Hospitality: Plenty of quality Keaton stunts and bits.
Why not to watch: The plot takes forever to start.

Why to watch Sherlock Jr.: More ideas per minute than almost any other film.
Why not to watch: The hero actually doesn’t do anything.

War is Funny

Films: The General, To Be or Not to Be
Format: DVDs from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television.


Silent movies are a tough sell for a modern audience. I had a phone call today with a group of fellow college instructors, most of whom will be teaching a film class this coming quarter. I’ve taught the class once in the past, and another instructor and I helped rewrite a general curriculum as a guide this past quarter. One instructor, a veteran going into his fifth or sixth time teaching this class commented that he generally shows at least one silent to his class every year. He’s going with Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. this year, a film I’ll be watching eventually.

I asked him if he tends to go with silent comedies, and he confirmed this, saying that Keaton or Chaplin tend to be his choices. Silent films are a tough sell, but silent comedies still work. The reason is that funny is funny, whether it be in Technicolor or black-and-white, in Sensurround or with nothing but a guy playing the piano over it. And Keaton is damn funny, even today.

The General is, and I’m really trying not to overuse this word, Keaton’s masterpiece. It’s brilliant from start to finish. It’s funny, action filled, entertaining and wonderful. There’s a reason that it still shows up on greatest films ever made lists 85 years or so after it was created. Had the book that inspired this odyssey of mine been “The 101 Films You Must See…,” I’m convinced that The General would have made the 90% reducing cut.

The film begins just before the start of the American Civil War. We are introduced to Johnnie Gray (Keaton), who drives an engine for the Western and Atlanta Railroad. We’re told that Johnnie has two loves in his life: his engine, the General of the title, and his girl, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). Johnnie goes to visit Annabelle, and while he’s there, news comes of the attack on Fort Sumter. Annabelle’s father (Charles Henry Smith) and brother (Frank Barnes) go to enlist, and Johnnie follows along.

What happens next sets up the entire film, and has become a staple of comedies ever since. When Johnnie tries to enlist, he is refused. The reason is simple. He’s far more valuable as an engineer than he would ever be as a common soldier. He’s refused, but he fails to ask why, and the agents don’t tell him. A simple question from Johnnie would end the film. Instead, it appears to Annabelle and her family that Johnnie is a coward. Annabelle, heartbroken by Johnnie’s evident cowardice, tells him that she will not speak to him again until he is in uniform.

A year later, Johnnie’s train is stolen by Union spies. Unbeknownst to Johnnie, Annabelle is kidnapped along with the train. What follows, the rest of the movie in fact, is a merry chase as Johnnie pursues his beloved engine and girl into enemy territory and back, acting first as the pursuer and then as the pursued. Along the way are a number of comedic set pieces that demonstrate exactly why Keaton was so beloved in the early days of film and why he is still influential now. He deals with the problems of running his train solo, loading and firing a cannon, avoiding the shot from that same cannon, dealing with a torrential downpour, figuring out how to rescue Annabelle, and getting himself back across to friendly lines while having what seems like half the Union Army on his tail.

Keaton’s trademark, evident in this film as much as anywhere, is his constantly unchanging expression. He is capable of conveying almost any emotion with his notably stony face, often simply by the way he blinks in disbelief or holds himself. The cannon bit is perhaps the best example of this. After hooking up a car with cannon to his engine, Johnnie continues pursuing the Union soldiers. He loads the cannon and sets it to fire, but manages to disconnect the car as he climbs back to the engine. The cannon tilts down, aiming itself at Johnnie, who tries to get away, but his foot gets caught in a chain, leaving him trapped in the cannonball’s impending path. Eventually, he frees himself, the cannon fires, and the shot misses anyway.

What I like about Keaton’s films is how different they tend to be from many of the current comedies that feature main characters who are blindingly stupid and succeed only because the people set against them are equally stupid or because our supposed heroes are extraordinarily lucky. Keaton’s heroes certainly have their share of screw ups, goofs, and missteps, but they are also incredibly resourceful, and tend to be successful because they are smart, talented, or both. Johnnie Gray is that, which means that at least for me there is no shame in rooting for him to come out on top.

The great set piece here is the train crash into the river. This is before the days of great special effects, which means it was a real bridge, a real river, and a real train. The effect is still magnificent, and the train remained there until it was used for scrap iron during World War II.


Like Keaton, Jack Benny is a performer whose star has faded more than it should have—certainly more than even Keaton’s has. A major star in his own time, many people these days know virtually nothing about him. I’m just as guilty. Aside from knowing that he claimed to stop aging at 39 and was stereotypically stingy (answering “I’m thinking it over” to a mugger who asked for his money or his life during a comedy routine), I don’t know much about him, and have never seen him in anything until tonight.

To Be or Not to Be also starts at the beginning of a war, this time World War II. Set mainly in Poland, it follows the careers of stage actors Josef Tura (Benny) and his wife Maria (Carole Lombard, in her final role before a fatal plane crash). The Turas are the toast of Warsaw, and Tura is certainly the toast of himself. Something of a ham, Tura is both concerned with constantly getting the top billing and making sure that his wife is doing nothing she shouldn’t with men he doesn’t know.

Of course, the war starts, and Poland is caught in the thick of it. A young bomber pilot (Robert Stack) who is infatuated with Maria Tura ends up in England with a group of free Polish fliers. They wine and dine a Polish professor (Stanley Ridges) who confesses that he is heading to Warsaw on a secret mission. The young Poles give him the names of their relatives so that he can look in on them. The pilot, Sobinski, asks for the professor to look in on Maria Tura.

However, Sobinski becomes suspicious when it is revealed that the professor has no idea of who Maria Tura is. According to the still-infatuated Sobinski, it would be impossible for anyone in Warsaw to have not heard of her, leading him to suspect that Professor Siletsky is a Nazi collaborator. He is airdropped into Warsaw to warn the underground.

As it turns out, Sobinski is right; Siletsky is a Nazi, and he’s working on helping the Gestapo round up and destroy the underground movement. Now, Tura, his wife, and the remains of their theater company must stop Siletsky from reporting the members of the underground movement to the Nazis, do away with the man, and (with luck) survive. To do this, they must impersonate the local Nazi hierarchy and break into Siletsky’s hotel. Leading the way is Josef Tura, who, in addition to wanting to help save his country, also wants to give the performance of a lifetime and keep Sobinski away from his wife.

For such a serious topic, and it is gravely serious, this film is played constantly for laughs. Near the beginning, Sobinski has been sending Maria flowers anonymously. He finally contacts her, and she tells him to come to her dressing room when her husband, who is playing Hamlet, begins his “To be or not to be” speech. Moments later, Tura walks out on stage and begins the famous soliloquy and Sobinski stands up to head to the wings. However, Sobinski is in the second row, and his making for the exit causes a huge commotion.

This scene is the heart of this film. In addition to its plot ramifications, it is screamingly funny. Sobinski’s actions, however motivated, are the single worst nightmare of a serious actor—someone has decided to walk out during a key moment of the drama, completely spoiling the trance of the audience and ruining whatever effect the actor might want. There could be no bigger insult. Tura soldiers on, but the scene is ruined, and when the young bomber goes back stage, Tura’s marriage is suddenly in danger as well.

It’s interesting to note that both of these films, in addition to being comedies set during wartime, were critical and financial failures upon release. In fact, the release of The General caused Keaton’s film company to restrict him in the future, since the film had been so expensive to make and returned so little on the investment.

It seems like over and over authors and filmmakers both discover again and again that while war is hell, it also has the potential for humor. We laugh so that we don’t cry, or to cover our tears. We laugh because we have to, because that is all that keeps us sane. It’s what created M*A*S*H, Stalag 17, and Catch-22, and it’s what created these films as well. Mel Brooks remade To Be or Not to Be in the mid-80s with certain competence and a lot of humor, but it’s simply not the same as the original.

Why to watch The General: Perhaps the greatest silent comedy ever made.
Why not to watch: Silent films, even comedies, don’t play well today.

Why to watch To Be or Not to Be: You owe it to Carole Lombard and Jack Benny.
Why not to watch: You’re uncomfortable with the idea of humor and Nazis in the same place.

Old Stone Face, Part 1

Film: Seven Chances
Format: Internet video on laptop.





















A question I am asked infrequently, but regularly enough that I need an answer for it concerns silent films. “How,” people ask, “can you pay attention, or stay awake?” Silent films, goes the consensus, are boring, old, and not worth paying attention to.

I’ll admit that some silent films are ones I’m not looking forward to seeing. I find silent dramas tedious, for instance. Many of the film conventions of the silent drama don’t really work for a modern audience. The overacting is pretty evident, but was necessary for the time. We’re also used to having at least the dialogue spelled out for us, and with silent films, much of the dialogue is just mouths flapping, with title cards that give us more the sense of the conversation than the actual words. That’s a problem with drama, since a lot of the meat of a drama is in the conversations.

However, silent comedies, or at least good silent comedies, hold up. Chaplin is as funny now as he was 70 years ago. The same is true of Harold Lloyd, and the same is true of Buster Keaton. All three of these men were true masters of their craft. I’ve seen only a smattering of films of each of them, and thus have not yet fully formed an opinion of them, and at the moment, I can’t rank them. Each is brilliant in his own way.

A case could easily be made for Keaton being the best of a grand bunch, and a film like Seven Chances is a pretty strong argument for placing Keaton at the top of the list. Keaton’s films still work today because he doesn’t stick with a single type of humor. There are plenty of sight gags, and quite a bit of slapstick, but much of his comedy requires a little thought to process as well. As a viewer, I appreciate this, but I also appreciate the fact that the man was a physical genius, willing to risk himself bodily for his craft, and did his own amazing stunts, many of which hold up to this day.

Seven Chances starts slowly. We begin with Jimmie Shannon (Keaton, both actor and director) and his partner Billy Meekin (T. Roy Barnes), who are stockbrokers. Sadly, they’ve made some bad choices and are now in desperate need of cash. As it happens, a relative of Jimmie’s has passed away, and bequeathed a $7 million fortune on the boy, provided he is married by 7:00 pm on his 27th birthday. As it happens, the day he finds out about this inheritance is, of course, his 27th birthday. Now he has to find someone to marry him…now.

And that’s it. That’s the set up and the payoff. Jimmie essentially spends the movie proposing to anything he sees in a skirt and being repeatedly shot down for one reason or another. There’s some evident racism from the 1920s present here; one girl he chats up proves to be Jewish, which sends Jimmie running based on nothing more than her Hebrew-language newspaper. Beyond that, though, the proposals and reactions are consistently different and consistently comic. It starts slow—perhaps the first third of the movie is pretty straightforward set-up. After that, however, the jokes start coming and do not stop.

One does require some explanation. Jimmie buys his way backstage of a show to propose to the main attraction, whose name is Julian Eltinge. This is a missed joke for a modern audience, but certainly sent the 1925 crowd roaring—Eltinge was a well-known female impersonator. For a modern audience, substitute the name “Rupaul.”

What keeps an audience watching here is the magnificent stunt work. It’s important to remember that a lot of the stunts—Keaton leaping off a cliff or falling out of a tree—were done for real, with rudimentary or no safety equipment, by the guy starring in and directing the film. Each instance had to be a time to hold one’s breath for the entire cast and crew, but Keaton manages to pull off each one without even changing his characteristically stoic expression. That’s real talent.

So how do you watch a silent movie in this day and age of THX and Dolby and surround sound? You watch the stuff that’s still as funny now as it was when your grandparents were too young to take a date to the movies. That, now and forever, is the essence of Buster Keaton.

Why to watch Seven Chances: You’ll laugh a lot.
Why not to watch: You’re a Philistine.