Keaton's Sherlock Jr.: Brilliant Film Comedy, Brilliant Film Criticism

If The General (1927), Buster Keaton’s best-known work, with its steady narrative arc and character-driven gags subordinated to plot, shows the great comedian’s more classical side, Sherlock Jr. (1924) gives us the modernist Keaton, acutely award of cinema as a construct, of the role of fantasy in the movies, and of the curious nature of three-dimensional reality as represented in a two-dimensional medium.

It is a film in which Keaton essentially steps aside for a moment and stands with his audience, examining film itself before taking us by the hand and leading us through the looking glass of the screen. Keaton’s movie is, as Walter Kerr said, “simultaneously brilliant film comedy and brilliant film criticism.”

Sherlock Jr. shows at 7 p.m. this Saturday at the Castro Theater as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s annual winter event. The day also includes screenings of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness at 11:30 a.m.; the U.S. premiere of the original, uncut version of Abel Gance’s J’accuse at 2 p.m.; and at 9:15 p.m., West of Zanzibar, one of several collaborations between the great Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning, best known today as the man who gave us Freaks. Sherlock Jr. will be accompanied by The Goat, one of Keaton's two-reelers.

Sherlock Jr. opens with Buster as a movie theater projectionist who dreams of being a great detective. But when a rival frames Buster for stealing a watch from his best girl’s father, Buster is unable to unravel the crime to prove his innocence. He returns to the movie theater, dejected and forlorn, and after setting the reels in motion for a movie called Hearts and Pearls, he falls asleep.

Thus far the film retains the

classical form of the great silent comedies, and though he closes the film in a conventional manner as well, it is at this point that Keaton jumps the rails and turns Sherlock Jr. into one of the most inventive and modernist of silent films, a comedic rumination on the nature of the medium.

As Buster falls asleep, we enter his dreams as a series of dissolves show the characters on the screen in Hearts and Pearls transforming into the people of Buster’s own melodrama—his rival, his girl, her father. Then a meticulous double-exposure shows us a ghostly Buster leaving the body of the real Buster and descending to the theater where he vaults onto the stage and into the screen only to be firmly ejected by his rival.

So he tries another tack and approaches the screen from the side. But the film plays tricks with him, cutting quickly from one scene to another, leaving Buster sitting in the middle of traffic, now stranded in the ocean, now surrounded by lions, now upside down in a snow bank. He has left the real world for the reel world and has quickly found himself lost in the unique, fragmented language of film.

Throughout the sequence, the figure of Buster remains constant as the scene shifts behind him. It was not only a feat of imagination, it was a tremendous achievement in special effects. Cameramen and directors watched the film repeatedly in a vain attempt to divine Keaton’s technique.

Once Keaton places his character in this world, allowing him to pass through the screen, all cinematic rules are out the window. What follows is a madcap series of tricks and illusions as Buster, now transformed into Sherlock Jr., is able to pass through anything. He walks through a mirror; opens a safe and steps through it into the street; leaps through a window and is instantly transformed into an old woman; even dives through his assistant’s stomach when cornered in an alley and simply disappears.

And there’s much more: A masterly display of trick billiard shots; dangerous stunts that see Keaton riding atop the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle; a daring run across the top of a moving train where Keaton leaps for a water tower as the train disappears beneath him, the water slamming him to the tracks (Keaton only found out years later that he had broken his neck during that scene); and the surrealistic image of Keaton piloting his car across a lake, one hand on the steering wheel, using the car’s convertible top as a sail as he attempts to guide the sinking vehicle back to shore.

In Buster’s dream, he, as Sherlock Jr., the “crime-crushing criminologist,” solves the crime and rescues the girl.

But meanwhile, as Buster dreams, his girl has easily solved the mystery and proven his innocence, returning to the projection booth to offer apologies. Buster of course is not prepared for the next step and must peek at the action on the screen for cues as to how to hold and kiss his girl. But once again, the language of cinema intercedes as the happy couple on the screen quickly dissolves from a kiss to bouncing babies on their knees, leaving Buster scratching his head, baffled once again.

Fairbanks, Gish Headline 2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 14th year, screens a wide range of films each July at the Castro Theater, touching on various genres and styles from cinema’s nearly 30-year silent era. The festival starts Friday with a showing of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Gaucho (1927) and continues through the weekend with a program of a dozen screenings.

There were many stars in the silent era, but few could rival Douglas Fairbanks. Along with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, Fairbanks was at the pinnacle, one of the most beloved performers in the nascent medium.

Fairbanks made a name for himself between 1916 and 1920 with a string of breezy, acrobatic comedies. His ebullience, prodigious athletic abilities and considerable charm were on display in a series of brisk films produced at a brisk pace—four or five a year, sometimes more—in which genial, dapper Doug took on the world with gusto and a good-natured smile. He was the can-do, all-American boy, a variation on the same theme adopted by Harold Lloyd in his own screen comedies.

His first movie roles were under the direction of D.W. Griffith, the foremost filmmaker of his day. But there wasn’t much room for Fairbanks’ acrobatic and comedic talents in Griffith’s vision of cinema, so he soon set out on his own. In just a few short years he found himself at the top, one of the most universally admired screen actors.

And when he fell in love with and eventually married Mary Pickford, the first true movie star, and still, at that time, the biggest, they became the world’s first superstar couple, the pair for whom the term “Hollywood royalty” was coined.

It was around this time, 1920, that Fairbanks took a new tack. His ambition swelled with the creation of United Artists, an independent company he co-founded with Pickford, Griffith and Chaplin, that would give the artists greater control over the creation and distribution of their work.

Fairbanks’ notion was to merge his acrobatic brand of comedy with costume drama. He ditched the modern clothes for period attire, donning the garb of musketeers and pirates. Abandoning the casual spontaneity of his rapid-fire comedies, he followed instead in Griffith’s footsteps, producing fewer films—just one or two a year—with greater production values, more complex plots, more costumes, more sets, more drama.

Fairbanks had found a new formula, and he would stick with it for the greater part of a decade, enjoying great commercial success.

There were naysayers, however. Some critics bemoaned the loss of brisk, breezy Doug; they complained that his films were becoming longer, slower and more ponderous, with the trademark Fairbanks action reduced to just one or two reels of a total of 10 or 12, even 14. The jaunty Fairbanks of the teens had become a stately, costumed, dramatic figure, his devil-may-care charm and athleticism only coming to the fore in the closing sequences.

Fairbanks may have felt the same way, for in 1926, he began edging back toward comedy. The Black Pirate saw him costumed and swashbuckling as usual, but the old Doug was back in action; the film did not take itself too seriously and it was full of stunts, smiles, and much broad, comic acting.

He followed with The Gaucho, a darker, more serious film, but still with much comedy and derring-do. Fairbanks shared the spotlight with Lupe Velez, making her first appearance in a feature film. And Pickford even showed up for a ghostly cameo, appearing as a vision of the Virgin Mary.

After nearly a decade as a heroic, swashbuckling figure, Fairbanks decided it was time to say goodbye. He would make just one more film along these lines, The Iron Mask, his last silent film. He and Pickford teamed up for his first talkie, The Taming of the Shrew, but his careered tapered off and he retired from the screen in 1934. He passed away a few years later, in 1939, at the age of 56.

Friday’s screening of The Gaucho will feature the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra performing their original score.

Other festival highlights

Bardeleys the Magnificent (1926) screens at noon Saturday. The film reunites director King Vidor with John Gilbert, who had starred in Vidor’s The Big Parade, the blockbuster that earned the director the clout to make a smaller, more personal film, The Crowd, which featured a strong and affecting performance by his wife, Eleanor Boardman. Bardeleys was made before the couple married, and features Boardman as Gilbert's love interest. Live music by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Josef Von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927), one of the early gangster films, screens at 5 p.m. Saturday. The film helped cement the conventions of the genre, greatly influencing the explosion of gangster films of the 1930s. Live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

Following their success with The Scarlet Letter, actress Lillian Gish again teamed with Swedish director Victor Sjostrom (“Seastrom” in America) for The Wind (1928), a stirring melodrama showing at 7:30 p.m. Saturday that plays to the strengths of each.

Gish, perhaps the silent era’s best actress, puts her pantomime skills to work in depicting a woman victimized by a tempestuous man and an even more tempestuous physical environment. Having left Virginia for the unruly Southwest, her tormented life is made manifest by the ceaseless and unyielding winds which batter her home and shift the sands of the desert landscape.

Sjostrom, in his distinguished body of work in his native land, where he established himself as a master of the medium to rank with D.W. Griffith among cinema pioneers, had emphasized the landscape, shooting on location among the stunning vistas of Scandinavia. The mountains, the sea and the skies gave context to his plots and added comment to his characters; with The Wind, he employs that sensitivity to the natural world in the creation of a punishing and relentless force that nearly pounds his heroine into submission. Live Wurlitzer accompaniment by Dennis James.

Sunday will start at 10:30 with a series of Disney shorts featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, predecessor to Mickey Mouse. Live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

Quickly shifting gears, Erotikon (1929), a sensual Czechoslovakian film, will screen at 1:30 p.m. Live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

It may be hard to believe, but Vaudeville veteran W.C. Fields did pretty well for himself as a silent film star, before the talkies immortalized the comedian’s snide, slurring wordsmithing. So’s Your Old Man (1926) will show at 4 p.m. Sunday. Live piano accompaniment by Philip Carli.

There were two great adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. One was a 12-minute short, an avant garde American film that owed a great deal to German Expressionism; the other, a feature-length version that deviates from the original in many ways but stays true to Poe’s vision of existential and supernatural terror, will screen at 6:15 p.m. with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

The festival will close with an 8:15 p.m. showing of Lady of the Pavements (1929), D.W. Griffith’s last silent. The film stars Lupe Velez, Fairbanks’ co-star from The Gaucho, in a romantic drama that proved the great director hadn’t lost his touch. Live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin.

2009 San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Friday, July 10 through Sunday, July 12 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.silentfilm.org.

Motion and Emotion in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise

In its first year—and only in its first year—the Academy Awards split its top honors for best film into two categories: Best Picture and Unique and Artistic Production. And, having made manifest the schism between the commercial and the artistic in American filmmaking, in which the latter so often suffered—and continues to suffer—at the hands of the former, the academy immediately discontinued the practice. 

The 1929 ceremony honored films made in 1927, a watershed year in cinema. Over the preceding three decades, the technology of the moving picture had matured into the dominant art form of the 20th century, growing from nickelodeon novelties to feature-length productions of every style and genre. Cinema, both commercial and artistic, as well as everything between, was reaching its peak. The late 1920s not only produced most of the best films of the silent era, it produced a generous share of the greatest films ever made. And yet the medium was on the brink of dramatic change as the technology of synchronized sound, launched commercially in 1927 with the Warner Bros. gambit The Jazz Singer, would soon bring an end to the silent film. 

The first Best Picture award went to a film called Wings, kicking off Hollywood’s tendency to reward films that are quintessentially American—big, bold, brassy, sentimental, optimistic, and above all, successful at the box office. Wings was a love triangle set during World War I that contained little in the way of originality, but which was big on showmanship, featuring spectacular fighter plane dogfights, shot by cameramen riding in the gunners’ seats. 

The award for artistic excellence went to Sunrise, a Fox production directed by German emigré F.W. Murnau and starring Janet Gaynor, George O’Brien and Margaret Livingston. The film will screen at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14 at the Castro Theater as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s day-long winter program. 

F. W. Murnau had made a name for himself as one of Germany’s top directors with work as disparate as the horror masterpiece Nosferatu, the expressionist classic The Last Laugh, and a cinematic reworking of Faust. Hollywood was eager to recruit top European talent in those days and lured Murnau to America, where his varied interests would lead him to further expand his repertoire, directing “women’s pictures” and even documentaries. 

With Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Murnau brought Germanic technique and a palpable European sensibility to American filmmaking. The film is celebrated for its roaming camerawork, its evocative set design, its emotional range and fable-like qualities. The plot concerns a young country couple whose happy home is threatened when the husband is tempted by a footloose city flapper. Murnau sets up dichotomies that are almost allegorical: between city and country, love and lust, virtue and temptation. It is melodrama raised to the level of poetry, a fable of love, devotion and redemption. 

Murnau’s camera is almost constantly on the move, tracking characters along village paths, through marshlands at dusk, along the busy streets of a bustling city. Sunrise is a whirlwind of motion and emotion, from tense moments wandering in darkness, to a sun-kissed stroll that leaves the couple bewildered in the midst of a traffic jam, to the kaleidoscopic revelry of a nightclub sequence. The sets that contain this choreographic display were vast, yet they appeared even more expansive through clever design, Murnau having continued his European practice of building them in forced perspective: Distant buildings were built very small, and the horizons were peopled not by adult actors but by children, even midgets, and often driving miniature cars. 

This level of craftsmanship was typical of German filmmaking; theirs was a highly architectural cinema, meticulously planned and structured in every detail. The talent of actors, though valued, was subservient to the craft of directors, photographers, writers and set designers. But Murnau’s films allowed a bit more room for his actors to breathe, to improvise and bring a greater range of interpretation to their roles. 

Sunrise is considered one of the finest films of the silent era, and Janet’s Gaynor’s performance is one its greatest virtues. Gaynor was best known for playing something of a waif, a wide-eyed innocent, fragile but with great moral strength. In a sense, she was like the second coming of “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, both of whom were beloved by audiences for their down-to-earth demeanor and pixie-like charm. Gaynor managed to take seemingly limited roles and imbue them with an expressiveness that demonstrated virtue and nobility as well as a delicate vulnerability. The acting awards in those days were given for a body of work, and the restrained naturalism that Gaynor brought to her role in Sunrise, along with her performances in two other films that year, earned her the Best Actress Oscar. It is a subtle and at times profound performance, as Gaynor’s graceful, demure character undergoes dramatic changes, from loving and devoted to wounded and disillusioned, from frightened, endangered and mistrustful to redemptive, forgiving and strong. Her supple face and soulful eyes convey a range of thoughts and emotions that pages of dialogue could only suggest. 

By contrast, Sunrise was something of a departure for George O’Brien, who specialized in action roles. Though his acting is not as restrained as Gaynor’s, he combined a degree of naturalism with elements of expressionism. His performance, combined with the low-key lighting and expressive camerawork of photographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, even hints at noir, as it traces the darker twists and turns of a man’s psyche under the influence of a destructive obsession. 

Coming as it did toward the tail end of 1927, Fox released Sunrise in two versions, one silent and one with a synchronized score and sound effects. The latter version is available on DVD, but Saturday’s screening will be accompanied by Dennis James on the Wurlizter. It is one of four films showing at Saturday’s festival: Our Hospitality (1923), one of Buster Keaton’s first full-length features, based on the Civil War-era Hatfield-McCoy feud, shows at noon with piano accompaniment by Philip Carli; a Russian film, A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927), shows at 2:40 p.m., again with piano accompaniment Carli; Sunrise screens at 6:30 p.m.; and The Cat and the Canary (1927), a comic haunted house film directed by another German emigré, Paul Leni, will show at 9:30 p.m., accompanied by foley artist Mark Goldstein and by Dennis James on the Wurlitzer. 

Sunrise (1927). Showing at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14 as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s day-long winter program. Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.silentfilm.org.