Multimedia Collection
Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr.
DVD
119 minutes
PN1995.75 .O974 2001
Perhaps no other film offers as exiting a rollercoaster ride through the golden age of comedy than Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. Dramatizing the uproarious exploits of a meek theatre projectionist-turned-amateur sleuth, the film blends the knockabout physical comedy normally associated with slapstick with more subtly-crafted moments of humor - such as the sequence in which Buster leaps "through" the silver screen and lands in the midst of the action.
Packed within its modest 45 minutes is enough comic material for several ordinary features, but Keaton chooses to compress it all into a dazzling display of cinematic inventiveness that races along like the driver-less motorcycle hurtling through a traffic-clogged city in the film's unforgettable climax - with a stone-faced Buster perched obliviously on the handlebars.
This DVD also features the wonderful film Our Hospitality. In many ways a companion piece to his 1926 classic The General, it stars Keaton as a New York man who returns to his southern antebellum homeland to find himself embroiled in a longstanding feud between his family and that of the woman he loves.
What might have been an ordinary comedy of manners is transformed into a spectacle of visual surprises, with no farcical opportunity left unexploited. The sequence in which Busters travels southward by rinky-dink locomotive is a most sublime example of the director's craft - a truly astounding series of comic vignettes that represents but a tiny portion of the extraordinary talent that characterizes The Art of Buster Keaton.
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