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.

The Keaton Shorts: 1922--The Frozen North

The Frozen North

The Frozen North is essentially a parody film, the target of ridicule being silent era superstar cowboy actor William S. Hart. As such, the film works well (too well--Hart refused to speak to Keaton for two years after seeing the film!). The only problem for modern audiences is that Keaton is infinitely more well-known than Hart, so those unaware of the parody might be shocked (as I was) at the despicable, melodramatic antics Buster is up to in this short.

The film begins bizarrely and never lets up. In the first shot, two-gun Buster emerges from a New York City subway station...into the middle of the frozen tundra. It's an inexplicable joke that doesn't pay off until the very last scene--a bold move to expect audiences to stick with you for the full twenty minutes, but it works. Buster trudges into town and immediately kicks off some mischief. He wants to hold up the local saloon, but he's only one man--what to do? Spotting a poster for Bull's Eye Ammunition, Buster cuts out the cowboy mascot (recalling his appropriation of Harry Lauder's kilt in The Garage.) Buster props up the fearsome-looking cowboy and robs the saloon. Only when a drunk knocks over the cut-out do the patrons realize they've been had and exact their revenge accordingly.

 

Keaton's cut-out cowboy and the "real" thing, William S. Hart. 

The Frozen North offers a sly but incisive commentary on the nature of authenticity in film Westerns, which is further complicated by Buster's own insistence that they film on location. Buster chose Truckee, California, a rustic spot on the Nevada border most famous as the sight of the notorious Donner Party. Keaton would later revisit to shoot Our Hospitality and Charlie Chaplin would use it in The Gold Rush. Keaton manipulates his authenticity as he sees fit, a careful auteur making sure he isn't parodied in the way he's ribbing Hart.

Fleeing the scene of the botched crime, Keaton commits a series of dastardly deeds in quick succession. Returning to his home, he sees a man and woman embracing--his wife and another man! Overcome with emotion, he guns them both down...only to realize he's got the wrong house! Oops. Arriving at the real thing finally, he and his wife instantly take to bickering, she screams and a passing mountie hears. Something accidentally falls from a shelf onto the wife's head so Buster, to avoid a domestic abuse charge, puts on a record and pretends to waltz with his unconscious wife. True to the implausibility of the entire short, the cop buys it. This scene marks the last appearance of Sybil Seely (the wife) in a Keaton picture, which is sad as she has nothing to do but get knocked unconscious in the entire thing.

Tough guy Buster

His wife of no use to him now, Buster gets changed into a fancy suit and goes looking for tail. He finds it in another man's wife (Bonnie Hill), who attempts to woo with a flower (which promptly catches on fire.) The wooing of the neighbor takes way too long and includes a chase (what else) on horse-drawn carriage, snowshoe and makeshift snowshoes (two guitars with Buster's feet smashed through the strings.) All in all, it's not too interesting but I imagine it would have been more prescient and enjoyable to a contemporary audience. The shorts' main fault is that it hasn't aged well, which is strangely not its fault, but merely the whim of film history.

The film ends lamely, with a reveal of Buster sitting in a movie theater, having dreamed the whole thing. He got caught up watching a Hart Western (although not too caught up seeing as how he managed to fall asleep!), and dreamed himself into the action. This accounts for the strange New York City gag, which is just Buster conflating the way to the movies with the way to adventure. This narrative structure attempts to say something grand about the transportive power (or perhaps impotence) of film and the germ of an idea is there, but it would be two more years until Keaton perfected his message in Sherlock, Jr.

The Keaton Shorts: 1922--The Blacksmith

The Blacksmith (Keaton & Mal St. Clair)

Buster is working at a hybrid service station of sorts, as a blacksmith who fixes cars as well as horses. The film opens with a clever series of jokes playing on Buster's inadequacies. His inflatable muscles are a far cry from the ideal. In one example, the "village smithy" is supposed to be standing under a chestnut tree, but Buster's leaning against a small, thin trunk. The camera pans up and up and up--all the way up to the top of a palm tree. It then cuts to an extreme long shot of the tree, with Buster's tiny five feet and six inches dwarfed even more by the lanky palm.

To compound Buster's physical inadequacies, he's also lousy at his job. In the film's major sequence, he screws up not once but twice. An equestrienne (Virginia Fox) comes in with a beautiful, spotless white horse who needs new shoes. Buster pantomimes an entire shopping routine, complete with mirror for the horse to check out how she looks in her new shoes. At the same time, Buster is also trying to fix the oil on a beat-up jalopy and every time he switches from the car to the horse, he's sullying the steed with his oily handprints. In a parallel scene, a snooty, well-dressed man comes in with a spotless, white car. Buster behaves quite the same way.

When Buster's boss (Joe Roberts) comes back, he and Buster get in a giant fight and the car is caught in the crossfire. Buster manages to break its windows, collapse its roof and set it on fire before escaping. Buster tries to run away on a horse carriage but the carriage stays still as the horse gallops away, leaving Buster hanging on for dear life at the end of the reins. The horse leaves him on the train tracks, Buster's foot stuck between the rails. Trying to pry his foot from the track, a train is barreling down behind him, this unbeknownst to Buster but plainly in view of the audience. The tension is unbearable, as it appears there are no diverging tracks or other tricks to divert the train. At the last possible second, the train merely stops. The engineers jump out and stare at Buster with disbelief. Buster, still struggling to free his foot, looks up, startled, and dashes away.

Next, he runs into Virginia Fox again, unwittingly saving her from a horse run amok. She rewards him with cash, but being the noble Buster he is, he rejects this offer and proposes marriage instead. Unbelievably, she agrees. They hop onto the departing train for marital bliss. But the film doesn't end there, but with this sly coda. An intertitle: "Many a honeymoon express has ended thusly," and then a shot of a train derailing. A-ah!, thinks the audience, just as I suspected. But no! We see Buster walk up to the train, in bathrobe and pipe, revealing the train to be a toy set. The shot irises out and it becomes clear we're in the couples' nursery, their baby rocking in its mother's arms. Buster walks towards the camera and pulls down a window shade, obscuring our view. The shade reads, "The End."

It's a clever ending that almost wasted on such a frivolous, slapstick premise. The Blacksmith is a disjointed series of gags, some clever, but most not. It relies too heavily on the kinds of humor found in Arbuckle-Keaton shorts like The Garage, but is hindered by the lack of inventive set pieces (cars and horses just don't cut it anymore).

The Keaton Shorts: 1922--My Wife's Relations

My Wife's Relations

This short is, unfortunately, not great. Many biographers have singled out the marital strife and cynical view of in-laws in My Wife's Relations as a commentary on Keaton's own marriage troubles. Keaton, they say, substituted burly brothers for the tiny Talmadge sisters, transferring his frustration onto the silver screen. Perhaps?

Buster Keaton, engulfed by Talmadges.

Whatever the biographical implications, My Wife's Relations is still a middling Keaton outing. The whole plot is propagated on mistaken identities. Buster is working as a taffy puller in a Polish ghetto, and gets in an entanglement (literally) with the mail man, who accidentally breaks a glass window. Running away from the irate letter carrier, Buster runs into (literally) a giant middle-aged woman (played by saucy Irish character actress Kate Price), who thinks he's responsible for the broken window. Ms. Price marches Buster right up the steps of the building to pay for the window. The owner of the window, it turns out, is a Polish priest, and, not understanding Price's complaint, marries them. It's an absurd bit of farce, which Keaton always detested, preferring his comedies to unfold in a believable order. An accidental marriage is not too plausible, but a language barrier might be a legitimate hurdle, especially in the cramped quarters of a New York ghetto. But I'm probably over-thinking things.

Buster quickly acquiesces to married life. As intimidating as the bride is, her brothers are infinitely more terrible. They abuse poor Buster roundly, tossing him around the house like a ragdoll. In one inspired bit, Buster, tired and hungry, and with no chance to spear a steak for dinner before they're all eaten by his ravenous in-laws, devises a ruse. During the prayer, he switches the date on the calendar from Thursday to Friday, and when the prayer is finished, casually indicates the date. Price and her brothers, being good Irish Catholics, can't eat meat on Fridays. Buster is more than willing to gobble down the juicy steaks for them.

Buster's luck changes, however, when Price finds a letter in his pocket (having got there in his scuffle with the mail man). The letter informs him that he will inherit a large sum of money, which makes Buster's new family infinitely friendlier. They buy fancy clothes and a new house with butlers and opulent adornments. Buster, unaware of the letter, is still clueless. When the time comes for them to pay the bills, Price orders Buster to open the letter, which he does. But, checking the address, he notices the envelop is smudged with mud. He wipes of the mud and, of course, the letter isn't for him. His in-laws fume. Buster runs. 

He escapes into the safety of a train bound for Reno, Nevada--the divorce capital of the United States.

The Keaton Shorts: 1922--Cops

Cops

Cops is usually cited as Buster Keaton's most famous and popular short film, which it certainly is. Although I still maintain The Boat is a more cynical picture, the inescapable, damning indictment of a laughable justice system and Buster's brutal mistreatment from an uncaring Fate has earned Cops a laudable reputation among fans of all things Kaftaesque. The popularity of the film stems from the simplicity of the plot and the absurdity with which the dangers escalate. Buster is a regular Joe who, through a battering of unheard-of rotten luck, becomes public enemy number one, with the entire city's police force on his tail. Cops is a prime example of things going from bad to worse in ludicrous and unbelievable ways. This is usually something I admire in a Keaton film, however, a few too many of the complications in Cops are a little too unbelievable, veering into the "cartoon gag" territory Keaton decried after what he considered the shortcomings of The High Sign. Despite some instances of impossible spatial continuity, Cops is a remarkably well-constructed picture. It's a rare treat for Keaton to stage such a coup de maitre in an entirely urban milieu (Buster being the master of faithfully recreated rural epics), but the vertiginous faces of Los Angeles buildings and the eerie, empty boulevards more than suffice for the lack of cliffs, rivers and trees from which to stage daring stunts.

But, let's back up and start at the beginning. Buster is talking with his girl (Virginia Fox) from behind bars. It appears to be a poignant jail scene of lovers cruelly parted by the law, but no! Cut to a wide shot and we see is talking to her through the girl's large front gate. It turns out the lovers aren't separated by legality, but by finance. She's the wealthy daughter of the mayor and gives Buster an ultimatum: become a big businessman or forget about me. Gulp. This is the kind of set-up Buster loved, getting into the mind of the audience and then subverting their expectations. The threefold, sudden-surprise-shock laugh is a hallmark of Keaton comedy.

And here is where the bum luck sets in. See, Buster is a good man who does good, moral things. He believes in hard work, in self-betterment--the American dream. Buster spots a rich man (Joe Roberts) drop his wallet. Buster races to return it to him. Roberts doesn't want anything to do with shabby-looking Buster and shoves him aside roughly. Okay, Buster thinks, if that's how you want it, then that's how you'll get it. Buster fakes a fall and the two men collide in a bit of vaudeville tumbling. The rich man gets back in his car only to discover his wallet is missing. Buster's come up with it, a reluctant, but not unwilling pickpocket. Crime number one.

Again Buster tries to do right, and again the universe screws him (if ever there was a moral to the Buster Keaton oeuvre, that'd be as good a candidate as any.) A ne'er-do-well spies Buster with the money roll and concocts a plot; behind him a family has just finished putting all their possessions on the curb for a moving man to collect. The ne'er-do-well cons Buster into believing he's been thrown out of his apartment and if Buster doesn't buy the possessions, his family will starve. Okay, Buster thinks, a good business deal and a kind deed. I'll do it! The owner comes out of the apartment and seeing Keaton loading the stuff into a horse cart, thinks he's the moving man, each blissfully unaware of the others' true identity.

The overloaded horse cart makes for a good comic prop shop. After being bitten by a dog while signaling for a turn, Buster fashions a turn signal from an accordion rack and a boxing glove. Allowing easy manipulation of the unwieldy vehicle, it's a stroke of inventive genius...until it decks a traffic cop. Twice. Buster skedaddles out of one scrape and into the hornet's nest--a police parade. Buster is baffled but enjoying the crowd's applause when suddenly--death from above! An anarchist's bomb is thrown and lands neatly next to Buster who, looking for a match to lit his cigarette, finds one pre-lit. How delightful! I couldn't find a match and here's this gift from the sky. Maybe my luck is turning... He tosses the bomb aside carelessly. It explodes in a crowd of uniformed policemen. Chaos reigns. Spectators (including his gal and her father, the mayor) scatter, a water main bursts, the cart collapses and Buster speeds away on foot, an accidental terrorist.

The chase, as the say, is on. Keaton milks it for all it's worth, orchestrating some of the most ingenious set-ups, gags and escapes every collected in a single picture. Hoards of cops fill the frame, descending like locusts on the scene of Buster's last suspected appearance. Buster, for his part, engages in a series of near-impossible gags, emerging from under umbrellas, the insides of trashcans, even from under the necktie he's using as a disguise. The sequence is a recast of Where's Waldo?, red and white striped beanie supplanted by humble porkpie.

In one brilliantly framed shot, Buster runs from off camera, straight toward the center of the frame, the apex of a triangular building. On either side of the building, policemen swarm to apprehend him. Buster feints left, feints right, and then nonchalantly walks through the door of the building. He lingers there only long enough for the cops to pass each other, then opens the door, looks right, looks left, and bolts back the way he came, out of frame. An immobile camera, a single shot. The symmetry of the image is deceptively simple but expertly executed. Like all of Cops, it's the shot selection, mostly in medium-long or long shots, that dwarfs Keaton, visually imprisoning him between buildings, telephone polls, under bridges and always in the thick of the police.

In another show-stopping gag, Buster runs up a ladder balanced over a fence. Just then, another cop tugs on the ladder and Buster shimmies to the other side. Watch out! Now cops are pouring in from either side, leaving Buster scrambling from either end of this makeshift seesaw. More and more cops are coming in from one side now, and Buster, sensing this, positions himself near the end of the ladder and hunches down. The force of the police on one side launches Buster into the air, whipping him across the street...straight into the rich man, Joe Roberts! Obliging even in the face of catastrophe, Buster begins to help the man to his feet, before he realizes it's the last guy on earth he wants to meet. Buster runs.

Meanwhile, we cut back to the poor moving family, still waiting for their possessions. The father, fed up with the wait, grabs his hat and jacket and turns towards the camera. It's a policeman's uniform. He's a cop. Of course.

Now we're hurtling towards an ending--the chase can't contain itself. In a medium shot, Buster runs into the shelter of a nondescript building. Finally, a sanctuary! The cops--dozens, hundreds--pour in after him. We cut to a wide shot and see the building is actually the precinct police station. Oh, poor Buster! Even more cops crowd inside. The gag is turned on its head. No longer is Keaton merely being hunted; the policemen are merely returning to work! But what's this? As the last policeman enters through the double doors, a small figure slips out and, locking the doors behind him, flips the key in a nearby trash can. Could it be? It is! Buster triumphant, complete with spiffy uniform. It's a brilliant touch not showing what calamities occurred inside the station, how Buster managed to obtain the uniform of the key. Just another example of Keaton's use of space, and static camera, to slowly sustain tension. No cutting, the scene merely plays out in front of you, the comic beats occurring naturally. The laughs come from not knowing.

Suddenly, Buster's girl appears, takes one look at his uniform, sniffs, and stalks away in a huff. A cop?! Not good enough for the mayor's daughter. Buster can't believe it (neither can we.) Resignedly, he retrieves the key from the trash, opens the doors and is yanked inside by the cops. The film fades out and we're treated to one of the blackest toppers to any comedy--

--a grave stone marked 'The End.' On top of the stone, Buster's trademark porkpie hat. No name, just a symbol. The anonymous man, a nobody, rejected by his gal and with no where to turn--a delicious dark comic prospect. 

As Rudi Blesh wrote in Keaton: "It is a man completely alone and fleeing before his fellow men. It is fate operating through accident and misunderstanding, nullifying good intentions, canceling hope, bringing ruin. In the police en masse against the lone individual, Keaton found the perfect embodiment of his hostile machine-man concept, of fateful accident without saving miracle" (Blesh, 199). Yeah, sounds about right.