Cinecon 48 -- Day One

Cinecon may be a long haul, but Thursday evening is always a breeze. That's the festival's "half day," a relaxing evening show entree of four films. View the full festival schedule here.

This year, however, Cinecon really started with a bang. If you were to ask most classic film audiences who their crowd-pleasing favorite performers were, chances are you'd get a lot of votes for the Nicholas Brothers. We were treated to a short clip from "The Black Network" (1936), an all African-American short film. This was one of the duo's first Hollywood films. As you can see, they're babies.

But as if a Nicholas Brothers number wasn't enough, then the Cinecon audience got a real treat. Down the theater stairs came Cathy and Nicole Nicholas, Fayard's granddaughters, who perform their famous relatives' routines as the Nicholas Sisters. They took the stage (er...tap floor) for a choreographed performance, recreating Fayard and Howard's rendition of "Lucky Number" step for step. It was a real treat (not to mention a real trip!) to watch two generations of Nicholas dancers tap and shimmy some seventy years apart. An extremely cool way to kick off the festival.

The Stan Kenton Orchestra

If only we could have kept that energy going! The first official film of Cinecon 48 was a rather dreary musical short called Artistry in Rhythm (1944), featuring big band leader Stan Kenton and his Orchestra. It may not have been ol' Stan's fault, but this short, which also featured jazz singer Anita O'Day (perky & scattin') and a trio called The Tailor Maids (stiff & vapid), is pretty dull going. The camera cuts from long shot to medium shot...and back again. For a musical, there's no real movement in the whole thing. There seems to have been little done to transfer the nightclub experience to the big screen. One highlight, though: the unintentionally hilarious crooner Gene Howard, performing "She's Funny That Way." The ballad's opening line, "I'm not much to look at, nothing to see," drew some twitters from the audience; Gene Howard looked a bit like a gangly Fred MacMurray in a suit three sizes too big.

Continuing the theme of mid-'40s Universal musicals, the first feature of the night was  Always a Bridesmaid (1943), a starring vehicle for The Andrews Sisters. Appearing here at the height of their WWII-era fame, the sisters play themselves (basically). They're stars of a radio show called The Lonely Hearts Club, a matchmaking venture which attracts the desperate romantic as well as the con artist. An investigator (Patric Knowles) poses as a lonely bachelor who falls for a woman (Grace McDonald) who may or may not be playing him for a fool. Adding some much needed comic relief are veteran character actors Charles Butterworth as a corrupt colonel, and Billy Gilbert as the love-struck and tongue-tied sponsor of the radio program.

Always a Bridesmaid is a pretty basic "B," but the screenplay by Oscar Brodney (who later wrote Harvey!) does manage to get in a few memorable zingers. Some advice to hesitant lovers: "Getting married is just like learning how to swim--hold your nose and jump in!" When a tramp gets a little too chatty with our romantic couple: "I'm a hobo, not a hermit. I'm gregarious!"

By far the best part of the film, however, is the inclusion of Cinecon favorites, the Jivin' Jacks and Jills. The group of swingin', teenage contract players appeared in several Universal B-movies of the period. Their famous alums include Peggy Ryan and Donald O'Conor. In Always a Bridesmaids, these kids just keep popping up and crashing the adults' party. Good thing, too, as their high-flying dancing and slang-laced insolence keep the rote "sting operation" plot from sinking the ship.

The second film of the night was also the festival's first silent picture, The Drums of Jeopardy (1923). This is your typical silent film melodrama. Boy, what doesn't this movie have? The titular drums are twin emeralds attached to these little statuettes of half-naked Hindus. These Maltese Falcon-like maguffins carry with them--you guessed it!--a terrible history of misfortune, plague, and bloodshed. They caused the deaths of rajas! They brought down Imperialist Russia! Their incessant drumming forecasts imminent doom to whomever possesses them. So, of course the plot concerns everyone and their mother trying to get their hands on them.

Silent film star Elaine Hammerstein

The best part of this ridiculousness is a young Wallace Beery as the villainous Karlov, the Bolshevik bully who travels to America to reclaim the jewels with which he overthrew the Czar. It's clear that Beery, even early in his career, had already mastered the shifty-eyed snarl. I mean, he's one cape-twirl away from caricature here, but he makes it work. In fact, I wish everyone chewed the scenery as well as Beery, and his Russian villainess lover Maude George, who has a penchant for sporting outrageous, spangly headgear.

Our young heroes are played by Jack Mulhall and billed-above-the-title star Elaine Hammerstein (granddaughter of Oscar). Elaine is the free spirit daughter of a rich banker who falls for handsome Jack, but that's before she suspects him of offing her father. Oh, no. Elaine must find out who murdered her dad, who wants the emeralds and why, and then rescue Jack who has gotten himself locked in some kind of dungeon for almost the entire movie. Yes, it's over-the-top, but there's some fun stuff here. The best scene sees Elaine and Maude George pitted in an epic cat fight chock-full of amazing bitchfaces and outrageous outfits. It's like silent-era "Dynasty". Also featured: an imbibing butler, people hanging precariously from windowsills, and Wallace Beery smashing an old man's violin and laughing about it. That big meanie!

The cast of 15 Maiden Lane

Unfortunately, due to public transportation issues, I wasn't able to catch the last feature, 15 Maiden Lane. This is a real bummer because the movie has a lot going for it: directed by Allan Dwan (one of Hollywood's pioneers), starring Claire Trevor (for whom my alma mater's art school is named) and a young Cesar Romero. Young Cesar Romero! Ugh.

But tomorrow the trains will be running late, so watch out, Cinecon. I'm just gettin' started.

Buster & College

Gag picture for College, the Buster de Milo.

College (James W. Horne, 1927)

I'll just come clean: if it wasn't for the eye candy, College wouldn't be much of a picture. As an egghead turned wannabe athlete nerdily named Ronald, Buster spends most of the movie running, jumping, and flexing in short shorts and a tank top. And even though Buster is convincing as the doofus in a bow tie who can't tell Babe Ruth from Jack Demsey, as soon as he changes into his track outfit, it's like, c'mon. Keaton in his prime was one of most ridiculously physically fit performers of all time. Of course, it's always the case that physically adept performers play clumsy because they're the only ones who can perform those stunts safely. But still, as soon as you see Keaton in College, all the nerd cred goes out the window.

You're not fooling anyone, Buster. We saw Battling Butler. We know you could take that dude.

As for the plot, it's probably the thinnest of any Keaton feature, with the possible exception of Three Ages. Keaton plays Ronald, a bookworm on his way to his high school graduation ceremony where he gives a speech decrying the evils of athletics because, "What have Ty Ruth or Babe Dempsey done for Science?" Also in his graduating class are sweet Mary Haynes (Ann Cornwall) and meathead Jeff Brown (Harold Goodwin) whose introductory intertitle describes him as a "Star athlete, who believed so much in exercise that he made many a girl walk home." Mary and Jeff are going to Clayton College in the fall; they're also going steady. Buster (I refuse to call him Ronald) is, of course, in love with Mary and after convincing his mother he'll work his way through college, enrolls too. In the fall, Buster has one goal: becoming an athlete to win Mary's heart. And of course you already know where this is going and probably did three sentences back. 

The basis premise of College (nerd becomes jock to win girl) seems as old as time but it was hot stuff in 1927. In fact, this picture treads pretty hard on the ground covered by Harold Lloyd's The Freshman two year earlier. Featuring bespectacled Lloyd in a spectacular football finale, The Freshman was one of the biggest box office hits of 1925. Keaton's previous picture, The General, now regarded as his undisputed masterpiece and one of the finest films ever made, was, depressingly, a big-budget commercial flop. Although all of Buster's features were ostensibly produced by Buster Keaton Productions, he was never much of a business man and the money side was handled by Keaton's longtime friend and producer Joe Schenck and a new studio manager, Harry Brand. Brand was a budget-slasher and figured Buster needed a shot in the arm. Keaton was third in popularity and box office behind Chaplin and Lloyd and had a habit of spending a lot of dough per film; he was reigned in, budgetarily and creatively. College wasn't scripted by Keaton regulars and directing duties were handed over to James Horne, another suggestion of Brand's. Buster's lack of business sense never did him any favors. He didn't much care about screen credits, having always composed most of his films' plots, gags, and directions. But already in 1927, a year before his move to MGM, Keaton's pictures were becoming less and less Keaton-esque.

In spite of these barriers, College is not completely charmless. Even though the plot is thinner than paper, it does offer a spectacular display of just how skilled a physical comedian Keaton was. While this is evident in all his films, it's perhaps most plainly visible in College precisely because there is nothing else to look at: Keaton's stunts are the entire picture. Buster tries out for every sport on the campus, failing miserably at each. He runs like a man with two broken legs. In real life, Buster Keaton was a prodigious baseball player and in one of the best sequences in the film, he has to pretend he doesn't even know not to stand on the third base bag. He commits an escalating series of errors that cause his teams manifold embarrassments, the best being when Buster finally manages to hit a pitch, a high fly-ball, with two men on base and the little fellow is so excited, he runs all the way home before the ball is caught, causing a triple play.

However, the bulk of the film takes place in the track and field stadium, where Buster tries each and every sport from long jump to hurdles, javelin and pole vault. Buster manages to spear the Dean's (Snitz Edwards) top hat with his javelin, land head first in the high jump's sand trap, and terrorize a group of athletes on the field with an unwieldy hammer throw. During the hurdles, he really tries hard but knocks every gates down, except the last. Proud of his performance, he turns around to see all the knocked-down hurdles and dejected, knocks down the last one too. 

Fail. 

But Buster is our hero and although he may lose on the field, he's got to win the girl, right? Right. It seems Jeff really is a villain, having locked Mary in her room until she agrees to marry him (because that's a stellar engagement strategy). Hearing the news, Buster races across campus, leaping gracefully over hedges and across ponds, grabs a pole and launches himself into Mary's second story window. Inside, he pummels Jeff with the force of a true champion (reminiscent of Buster's fury in the climax of Battling Butler). Taking a fraternity paddle from the wall, he bats objects at Jeff and tackles him until he escapes out the window, exposing himself as the coward he is. Mary is awed and immediately attracted to Buster (he's an athlete now!!). They leave the dorm and immediately get married. I mean, actually immediately (Buster's still in his track uniform). The film ends on a weird, but awesomely pessimistic note, as the wedding fades into a shot of Buster and Mary contented in married life with three children, which then fades into the couple in side by side rocking chairs, in old age, and then fades into a shot of two headstones. THE END.

The Keaton Shorts: 1923--The Love Nest & Conclusion

The Love Nest

Onto greener pastures. Keaton's final silent two-reeler has the distinction of being the only one he's credited with writing and directing alone. Previously, he had been credited with a co-director (Eddie Cline, usually) and the writing credits were generally ignored. His collaborators have admitted almost all the work was Buster's but Keaton wasn't interested in self-promoting title cards, satirizing the practice in The Playhouse. The reasoning for this credit change is unknown (at least, to me--anyone with enlightening info, please share!). I suspect it was an attempt by Joe Schenck and Lou Anger to buff up the Keaton rep in anticipation of the release of his first full-length feature, Three Ages, which Buster was shooting concurrently with his last two short films. Perhaps The Powers That Be sensed the public's playful contempt for the egomaniac auteur (a la Ince) shifting to admiration; the success of Chaplin's The Kid in 1921 and The Pilgrim a month before The Love Nest surely helped the writer-director-comedian distinction gain prominence. Whatever the reason, The Love Nest remains the only silent short in which Buster Keaton receives written and directed by credits. 

The story is classic Buster Keaton. Opening with typically understated dour wit, the title card reads: "The story of a man who lost his interest in women and everything else." Rebuffed by his fiance, Buster decides to sail around the world on his boat, the Cupid. He informs his fiance in a letter, the envelope for which is moistened by his own tears. Buster grows a mopey, post-romance beard (generous greasepaint) and stares listlessly at nothingness, pondering no doubt the mysteries of the universe, like how stars are created and why women are such bitches. The Keaton deadpan is utilized to its utmost here: sullen nihilism in a flat hat. 

Drifting languorously, Cupid encounters The Love Boat, a whaler helmed by Joe Roberts as a homicidal sea captain with a penchant for tossing his crew members into the deep for the slightest provocations. You've gotta love these seethingly ironic ship's names. Having just tossed away another sailor, Joe makes Buster his new steward. Buster, however, isn't much of a cabin boy. (He takes the call for all hands on deck literally and soaks the captain with dirty water.) When caught admiring Roberts' rifle, he turns around, walks straight down a gangplank and into the ocean. We see a puff of smoke emerge from the waterline. Buster walks back up, fish in hand! He's parlayed certain death into dinner for the crew. Not much of a sailor, but one hell of an improvisor. 

When Capt. Joe gets tossed overboard (Buster's fault), Buster takes the opportunity to anoint himself the new captain. Big mistake. Roberts promptly climbs back aboard and in his ensuing rage, the rest of the crew jumps ship. Buster is left alone on the vessel with the angriest mariner on the high seas. 

Night falls. Buster sneaks back onto the ship (having slept on the gangplank) and plans his revenge. He picks up an ax and hacks a gaping hole in the ship's hull. Buster waits for the sink to ship so that the water is level with the deck and the life boat, the Little Love Nest, floats to sea easily. Having effectively drowned Joe Roberts, Buster rows into the silent ocean night a free man.

The final sequence in the film is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, cementing Keaton's status as a premier director as well as star. Buster moors himself to a large buoy, which, unbeknownst to him, is a naval target board. In trying to kill a fish, Buster shoots a hole in his boat (something his little fellow seems to be doing constantly), and must now take up residence on top of the target board. Facing away from the camera, Buster doesn't know the navy is just off screen, testing their powerful new gunships. In spyglass point of view, we get the practice montage. Fire...one! Another spyglass POV. Fire...two! Buster is on target number three. The way Keaton divvies out information, delaying the audience's expectations, taking the time to cut back from the naval commander to the target to the ships and back to the target, speaks to his maturity as a legitimate filmmaker. A frequent Keaton motto was to make every scene so true, it hurt. Kill 'em with accuracy, and it makes the humor truer, funnier. Such is the case here.

The naval commander calls out, 'Fire...three!' Cut to Buster, fishing innocently. A thundering splash to his left. They missed! Seeing only the resultant ripples, Buster casts his line over yonder (must be a big fish). Climbing on top of the target, again we get the spyglass POV, this time with a Buster-shaped figure on top. Fire--explosion! The Buster-shaped body goes flying. 

 

Cut to Buster, singed and battered, flying through the clouds, ascending to Heaven. Well, he's dead but at least it's a happy ending. Ah, but no. Buster's trajectory reverses and he begins to descend back to...well, erm, Hell. Or so it seemed. The film fades in to Buster, re-bearded, frantically flapping his arms, back on the Cupid. It appears it's all been a dream! 

But even so, it's hardly good news. Buster's out of water and hard tack. Hopelessly lost. Adrift. Alone. Clutching a photo of his dearly beloved ex-fiance, he crawls out to the prow to die. Just then, from off screen left, a woman swims by. In wide shot, we see that Buster's still tied to the dock. He's never even left! Grief-stricken, delirious, and more than a little daft, Buster has imagined the entire adventure--except the part about being ditched by his fiance. That part is still painfully real. 

The way the film ends, in a quick succession of reversals, is something Buster Keaton loved to do, to make the audience think one thing would happen and then go in a completely diametrical direction. The entire nautical section of the film is composed with such authenticity with footage of the whale, the naval carrier, the harpoon sequence and some very convincing looking sailor extras, so as to hoodwink the viewer into believability. In the entire film, land is nowhere to be seen. Although cast and crew were most probably anchored in a harbor somewhere, the effect is of total oceanic isolation. Coupled with Buster's convincing despair, we're never in doubt of the events unfolding before us. Although I wouldn't put The Love Nest in the most esteemed level of Keaton shorts, it's certainly an admirable second-tier entry, displaying Buster's interest in maritime mischief and his ability as a filmmaker to capture action in a docu-realist style. 

In our next installment, we finally (finally!) reach the features. Buster the caveman, the Roman, and the Jazz Age hero--Three Ages, next time!

The Keaton Shorts: 1923--The Balloonatic

This year, 1923, we only have two Keaton two-reelers to cover: The Balloonatic and The Love Nest. This is because this same year, Buster was given permission to begin filming his first feature film, a take-off on DW Griffith's Intolerance called Three Ages. Interestingly, Ages was divided in three parts (duh), each time period structured like a two-reel short. As Keaton explained, this was to hedge their bets. If the film wasn't successful or didn't turn out as Buster wanted, they could cut up the film and release it as three separate short films. This would have brought the hypothetical tally for 1923 to five short films, in keeping with Buster Keaton's previous yearly output. On to the films...

The Balloonatic

This short is kind of like Keaton & co. leafed through all their gag ideas, pulled three at random and glued them all together--presto!--The Balloonatic. The three main settings of this film, a carnival fun house, a hot air balloon, and the wilderness, neatly encapsulate Buster Keaton's primary habitats: the "fun" house (One Week, The Haunted House, The Electric House), the large mechanical prop, usually a form of transportation (The Boat, The Navigator, The General), and rural America (The Paleface, Our Hospitality, Battling Butler). If you want a crash course in the Keatonian method, you could do worse than this short. 

Themes and motifs aside, The Balloonatic is very loosely bound together. Fans of the intricacies and sophistication Buster would later perfect in his features might be charmed by the individual segments but not so amused that the elements never come together in any kind of consistency. 

Nevertheless, the first shot of the film is a beaut: in pitch darkness, Buster lights a match; we see the crown of his porkpie hat. He lifts his head up, fear evident on his harshly lit features. A bold cinematic opener to a mostly silly short. 

Petrified of the skeletons in the fun house, he's shot out through a trap door, landing backside-first in front of The House of Trouble. Buster gets out of there quickly enough and stumbles upon a balloon launch. The giant balloon is a typically gargantuan prop to dwarf Keaton's already undersized frame. The unexpectedness of its appearance (as opposed to common transports like cars or boats) lends this short an air of the fantastic. It also offers up a smooth thematic transition, from the amusement park (where Buster is denied any of its pleasures) to another form of Sunday afternoon merriment. 

Buster wanders into the balloon launch and a workman gestures for Buster to attach a good luck pennant to the top of the balloon. The ballooner (seriously, this is what balloon pilots are called) climbs into the basket, releases the ballasts, and...the bottom falls out. An unexpected and totally unexplained joke. The ballooner is left on the ground and no one, least of all Buster, is aware anyone is aboard the wayward dirigible.

Like a spider, Buster has to make his way carefully along the web of ropes and lines to the safety of the basket below. His jungle-gym efforts are rewarded with a bottomless basket! Poor, old Buster. The scene fades out, time passes, and fades back in. Buster has tamed the perils of hot-air balloon flight, having mastered the art of carefully balanced air travel. At ease in his new domestic digs, he attempts to rustle up dinner via duck hunt. The decoy birds are lowered. Buster spots a beauty clinging to his balloon. He fires. The balloon deflates and he falls and falls, and lands, in a tree. In the middle of nowhere. 

The remainder of the short plays out like Babes in the Wood. Buster meets a wild mountain girl played by Keaton newcomer Phyllis Haver. She's totally at home in the wilderness, a sporting fisherman and swimmer (whereas Buster nearly drowns several times). Buster can't fish traditionally, so he cheats, damning up a small stream and picking up the fish that get caught. Unbeknownst to him, there's a hole in the bottom of his pail. Buster definitely has a problem with bottomless containers in this movie. The dam bursts and Buster is sent rushing down the river, ending up right in the path of Phyllis' swan dive. City boy and country girl collide.

The next sequence involves a canoe Buster has built. He tries to fish from it, roasting his catch between two tennis racquets (and setting the canoe on fire). Now with a big hole in the middle of his boat, Buster is able to gracefully transfer from river to land. (Imagine the Flintstones' car as a canoe.) When Buster flips the craft going over a mini-waterfall, it's Phyllis to the rescue. She can't avoid it anymore; they're a couple. Buster embraces their union, serenading Phyllis on the ukelele. She, tired of having to save his skin from bears, begrudgingly goes along. 

On one of their romantic boat trips, the new couple is heading right towards a giant waterfall. Phyllis panics; Buster remains serene. No trouble, he indicates toward the sky. The canoe goes right off the fall and continues on. How...? It's attached to the balloon, now mended. The couple floats away, free to cavort among the clouds. 

The Balloonatic is unusually upbeat for a Keaton feature, positing the blissful freedom of nature as a retreat from a dreary urban milieu. At the amusement park Buster had no luck with women. In the Tunnel of Love he gets a black eye; he puts his jacket over a puddle, but is spurned by the girl's suitor and his car. At The House of Trouble, an overweight women falls on top of him, causing injury. (In the forrest, when Phyllis falls on top of him, it's love.)

Miraculously, in the wilderness, Buster is able to construct a canoe, and shoot and fish adequately enough to feed himself (apparently). All this rustic domesticity seems to come out of nowhere, as does Phyllis, which makes me wonder if prints of The Balloonatic are incomplete. As Keaton & co. never wrote anything down, there's no written record of the plans for the film, and Buster never (to my knowledge) mentioned the short as being incomplete or unsatisfactory. The beginning third of the film at the amusement park and in the balloon are my favorites; the majority of the picture in the woods feels like it's from another short entirely. In fact, the basic premise of the inept city boy and the country girl will be recycled in Keaton's later feature, Battling Butler.

The Keaton Shorts: 1922--Daydreams & Conclusion

Daydreams

Regrettably, Daydreams is an incomplete film. The premise is simple: Buster wants to marry his fiance but first he has to move to the big city and make good. If he doesn't, he's promised to shoot himself (the girl's father will provide the revolver). The film cuts back and forth between Buster in the big city and the girl at home. She reads his letters about the jobs he's doing (written in the vaguest of terms) and imagines his grand occupations. The reality is always a lot less spectacular. This joke is repeated throughout the short--exaggerated expectations dashed by banal (often cruel) realities. Unfortunately, the humor of this set-up is undercut somewhat because much of the footage of the fiance's daydream is missing, replaced in the KINO DVD version I watched with production photos.

Although the set-up/punchline scenario is the same, Keaton uses this opportunity to structure some very clever call-back gags. For instance, his first job is working at a pet hospital and his second job is as a street sweeper. In the first job, he puts a cat in a basket with a hole in the bottom; in the second job, he totes around a trash can with the bottom fallen out. Neither joke is the centerpiece of the sequence and the audience's knowledge of the running gag comes on gradually in a gentle peal of laughter.

The chase sequence of the film builds in Buster's third job and into his fourth. He writes home to say he is beginning a theatrical career. She imagines him as Hamlet (see above) but he's really part of a chorus as a Roman soldier with two left feet. It's a classic comedy sight: the petite Buster Keaton surrounded by burly Centurions--adding insult to injury, he can't even keep in step with them. This is a man who can't even walk right! Poor Buster. After wrecking the show, Buster is thrown off the stage and out of the building, still clad in his Roman costume.

Suspiciously outfitted, Buster is trailed by an inquisitive cop. Gradually, Buster's stride turns to a fast walk, then a jog, then an all-out sprint. The entire sequence is captured in a single tracking shot, a long take past parked cars and real Los Angeles locations. The chase careens into Chinatown and then past a clothing shop. In perhaps the film's cleverest sequence, we see a man pickpocket the store proprietor. When the owner accuses the man of stealing his money and calls a beat cop over to investigate, the thief slips the wad of bills into a pair of pants on a display counter. The store owner apologizes and the thief stalks away empty-handed. 

Enter Buster. The camera pans to reveal Buster perched on a clothing display, a stalk-straight living mannequin. Buster, desperate for a change of clothes, slips on the pants in which the thief left the cash. The store owner emerges to confront Buster in his newly acquired black suit and bowler (a reference to Chaplin's Tramp, perhaps?). Stuck between a cop and a hard place, Buster resignedly puts his hands in his pocket...but, wait, what's this? The wad of cash! Buster pays the store owner five dollars of his own money and then scampers away in his new duds.

Despite his evasive maneuvers, Buster is still being chased by the police. And not just one anymore but, in a recall of Cops, hundreds. He catches a passing trolley car and, in the film's best stunt, runs at pace with it until he allows himself to be carried away into the wind until he's completely horizontal, hanging onto the trolley rail by one hand--spectacular! Climbing onto the trolley, Buster thinks he's safe. He doesn't notice the car turning back around toward the police mob. He has to jump off the car and the chase is on foot once again.

A whole gaggle of cops chase Buster to the waterfront, where he makes a flying leap onto a debarking ferry. He makes the jump! Ah, success! He's doffing his porkpie to the coppers stranded on the dock, when...the ferry returns to the dock! The chase is back on. Desperate, Buster drops down onto the paddle wheel hoping to outsmart the cops. It seems he's home free...and then the boat starts to run again. And so does Buster--around and around, like a hamster. At first, it's a jaunty stride, then panic creeps into the gait. The water sloshes around his feet; he has to run!--which leads to slipping, falling, and tumbling, until he manages to grab hold of the outer wheel. Now he's securely fastened--and enjoying a nice head-soaking every 360 degrees. Finally, he makes a jump for it, into the ocean harbor. 

This sequence completes some nice parallel construction with the earlier tracking shot chase. Both are single shots of Buster accelerating into futility. It's a nice touch that reveals more about Keaton's genius as a director than perhaps the film does when taken on the whole.

Although free of the cops, Buster's humiliation is far from complete. He's caught by a crusty old fisherman and stung up with the rest of the fish. Back at the fiance's house, she receives a special delivery: Buster, battered and bruised with a crushed porkpie and a black eye. The girl's father doesn't miss a beat--he hands Buster the revolver. Off camera, we see a plume of gun smoke. The girl winces, her father comforts her. Is this the end of our beloved Buster? No, he missed! The father kicks Keaton squarely in the tuchus and right out the second story window. The End.

Daydreams has a lot going for it and I wish it was in better shape. It's easy to see Keaton's passion for staging authentic versions of every gag (if only the Hamlet scene was complete!). The film is characteristically dark, in keeping with the pessimism of Cops and the continuing suicide theme of Hard Luck and The Electric House. But even when little Buster fails and fails and fails, he never stops trying. Bullet-headed optimism in the face of preposterous, insurmountable odds is the Buster Keaton trademark, and the source of his pervasive popularity.

Next up, 1923: this year Keaton produces only two short films, as he begins his first feature,Three Ages! Two charming fantasies, Balloonatics and The Love Nest, next time...

The Keaton Shorts: 1922--The Electric House

The Electric House

The Electric House fuses plot points from One Week, The High Sign, The Scarecrow and The Haunted House and yet doesn't manage to entertain as well as any of those shorts. The premise is this: Buster plays a botanist on his graduation day who, through a mix-up of diplomas, is mistaken for an electrical engineer and hired to electrify a rich man's house while he's away on vacation. Simple enough. But even from the first scene, there are signs of trouble. The opening scene, with Buster in graduation gown, runs an agonizing three minutes. The only information conveyed in this scene is that Buster is a botanist, the woman next to him is a manicurist and the man next to her is the electrical engineer. They mix up their diplomas and Buster is hired by the man whose pretty daughter (Virginia Fox) helps convince Buster he's the right man for the job despite his lack of qualifications. Easy. It should have run one minute tops. Instead, because of the scene's prolonged length, the entire film runs long and similar pacing problems plague The Electric House throughout.

The film is also structured rather strangely. Instead of watching Buster electrify the house while Roberts and Fox are on vacation, we cut immediately to their return and Buster tours the new improvements for them, as well as us. In the beginning everything runs smoothly. The scene is pure show-and-tell. We're treated to a myriad of ingenious devices like an electrical bookshelf that dispenses the books on its own, a bathtub that moves on a track from bathroom to bedroom, and a retractable bed. The centerpiece of the house is the electrical staircase: an escalator. In a strange coincidence, 1922 would also mark the year "escalate" became a proper English verb, although the escalator had been in use since the turn of the century.

One of the key features of the new house is the automatic swimming pool, which drains and fills simply by pulling a lever. Buster also shows off an electrified billiard room complete with automatic pool table where the balls rack themselves. For discreet refreshment, a hideaway beverage consul emerges from the floor. At the dinner table, the chairs push themselves in and the food is serves on a train set that runs around the table and back to the kitchen (this device Keaton would later use in his own life). In the kitchen, Buster had created a dishwasher that deposited the clean crockery on a conveyor belt for the servant to dry.

Then, of course, everything goes wrong. The family invites guests over to celebrate the newly electric house and the real engineer (the one with Buster's botany degree) slips in and spends the evening crossing the wires and wreaking havoc. In an inspired bit of business, Buster begins to think the house is haunted. Like a reverse The Haunted House, the mechanical mishaps fool Buster into seeing "ghosts" (actually, the maid in a sheet) and ghastly disembodied hands (belonging to the house guests).

The final straw comes when Joe Roberts chases the rival engineer up the stairs and is thrown out the window and into the swimming pool. Buster soon follows suit. Virginia Fox helps her father up. Buster is left to struggle out alone. Rejected and dejected, Buster picks up a nearby rock and rope, fashions a noose and dramatically falls in the pool. Fox pities him and throws the lever to drain the pool. Her father, however, has other ideas and fills the pool back up. Buster is caught in the middle of this, flopping around the bottom of the pool like a floundering fish. The water is drained once more but this time, Buster is no where to be seen! He's been washed away down a giant sink plug and ends up on an embankment right next to the real electrical engineer. Abruptly, the film ends.

In addition to cribbing from the superior Keaton shorts already listed, the tacked on suicide gag recalls Hard Luck. However disappointing a film it may be, the behind the scenes history of The Electric House is fascinating. Keaton originally meant to release the picture a year earlier but early in filming, his oversized slapshoe (size 11.5 for his 7.5 size feet) got caught on the escalator and snapped his ankle. A devastating injury. He was out for five months. The original footage of The Electric House would be destroyed, never to be seen. In the meantime, Buster released the long-shelved The High Sign. Unable to work, he decided to get married. The title house is actually Buster and Natalie's own house, one of the more modest they would own in the course of their marriage. The interiors, of course, were shot on set but the shot of Buster sitting on the curb in front of the house gives a good idea of their comfortable, Spanish-style home. The behind the scenes trouble no doubt contributed to the lesser quality of this short. We're left to speculate on the nature of Keaton's original vision, perhaps a more daring and inventive film that was scrapped in favor of safety.