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.'.
