into the picture
by
Douglas Messerli
Clyde
Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell, Buster Keaton (director, William
Goodrich [Roscoe Arbuckle], uncredited) Sherlock,
Jr. / 1924
Long
before Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of
Cairo (1985), in which an actor, bored with the role he is playing on film,
escapes into the real world, Buster Keaton’s young film projectionist (Keaton
himself), falls asleep and, in his dream, attempts to enter the film, playing
the role that in real life he is studying for, that of a detective.
Since he is in a dream, the film he enters, at first is much like a surrealist nightmare, a collage of a garden, an urban street, a mountain cliff, a jungle of lions, and a desert, all of which endanger the projectionist’s existence as he moves fluidly from scene to scene (to assure perfect continuity, the cameraman and technical director used surveying instruments to figure out the precise position where the actor was required to stand in order to move on to the next scene).
Finally—after the actual characters, now
resembling the projectionist’s girlfriend (Kathryn McGuire), her father (Joe
Keaton), the evil “local sheik” (Ward Crane), and other figures—regain control
of the story, they call for Sherlock, Jr., the would-be detective projectionist
to solve the theft of the heroine’s pearls.
In between Keaton takes himself and
Sherlock’s assistant Gillette, into dozens of terrifying encounters and
escapes, performed with such magic that the film still baffles special effect
directors today. Poisons, sword-blades, and a billiard game with an explosive
13 ball follow.
Of course, the cinema-bound projectionist
wins the day, returning the pearls to the girl’s father, and is awarded the
love of the girl herself.
In real life, however, just as in so many
of Keaton’s films, it is really the girl who saves the man. While the
projectionist dreams, the girl has visited the pawn shop to discover that it
was not the projectionist who pawned her father’s watch but her other suitor.
The projectionist awakens to her visit,
and is able to use the final scene of the film he is showing to romantically
instruct him on to romance his sweetheart.
Keaton’s amazing recognition of cinema as
being a strange mix of absurd narrative constructions with, nonetheless, true
restorative realities to its audience, was way ahead of its time. Keaton’s
always hapless heroes may have little control of their lives, but through the
magic of movies regain control over the worlds in which they live, allowing
them, so to speak, to get back into the picture.
I should add that the score of this silent
film as captured on the Kino DVD I viewed, was composed and performed by the
Club Foot Orchestra; with the score’s references to the Jazz era in which the
film was created and, at one point, even to the scores of the James Bond
movies, it was near perfect, and greatly added to the film’s general delights.
August 6, 2017
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