Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Dir.: Buster Keaton
Plot: An amateur detective falls asleep at his job as a projectionist and dreams himself into the movie, as the great Sherlock Jr.


To be honest, after seeing a couple of his movies I didn't think Buster Keaton was for me, but this absolute gem has changed my mind. I couldn't have felt more differently than I did when I watched The General (bored and drifting into a coma. An undercranked man running up and down a train for an hour, for Gawd's sake...). Anyway, for those yet to see it, Buster plays a detective-obsessed cinema projectionist who gets framed for pilfering his girlfriend's father's timepiece (it was really his rotten, moustachioed rival, of course). Too shy to properly defend himself and deeply depressed, he drifts off in his projection booth and, in a groundbreaking moment in cinema history, his dream self emerges from the sleeping body and takes a running leap into the movie screen. Inside the film, he scrambles to solve a missing jewellery case not dissimilar to his own - but this time as suave, canny detective 'Sherlock Jr.'.



Where do I start? Well, I guess everything that I had grudgingly liked in The General and The Goat, such as Buster Keaton's acting, the breathtaking stunts and the outdoor photography, was here in full force, maybe even more so than in the previous features. The sequence where Buster ends up hanging from a water tower is jawdropping when you know that he always performed his own stunts, and with very little trickery. In this one, he actually managed to break his neck - something he didn't realise for years afterwards - and yet, perhaps his greatest stunt is creating such a deeply sympathetic, likeable protagonist. In 45 minutes of frenetic action, there are very few moments in which Keaton can display much depth, yet he seizes every opportunity to do so. The Projectionist, who isn't even given a name, nonetheless emits the same kind of warm Everyman affection that Chaplin more or less patented, and by the end of the movie you're rooting for the poor chap, even if the fiancee really isn't anything to write home about... And on a side note: oh my God, fellow Arrested Development fans. The character of Gillette, Sherlock Jr's sidekick, must surely have been the inspiration for disguise-happy private eye Gene Parmesan. Every time he ripped off a fake moustache to reveal himself, I almost died laughing thinking about it.

Just sayin'

Most importantly, the film was free of the elements which had made my dislike (or rather apathy) outweigh those positives in the past. It has a strong, well-paced plot with good ideas. Man runs up and down a train for an hour is not a plot. Sherlock Jr. has a cool story and developed characters, some of whom even have more to do than chase our hero around looking angry and bewildered. It's not primarily a matter of straight-out gags, which works for me seeing as slapstick humour leaves me cold, although there are lots of funny little visuals. It is, in fact, its visionary approach to storytelling that make it immortal  - the surreal, fluid dreamworld that Buster enters is unique and hypnotising in its familiar strangeness. Buster leaping through a window and into a set of clothes, then jumping right through a suitcase are the perfect meeting of the real (and highly impressive) and the unreal. Even now, 87 years and thousands upon thousands of films later, that moment when he jumps through the screen still does something funny to you. The whole concept of walking into that cinematic otherworld is one that you dream about as a young child, and there's still a strange thrill about seeing it played out on screen, a tiny reignition of that dream.


9/10