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Buster Keaton's approach to cinema is certainly admired by Magritte, find a frame and you've got the portal between life and reverie. The august fellow dons magnifying glass and fake mustache, so absorbed in his sleuthing fantasies that he neglects his duties: "Say, Mr. Detective—before you clean up any mysteries, clean up this theater!" Case of the purloined pocket watch, his rival (Ward Crane) did it but he gets the blame, his sweetheart (Kathryn McGuire) tearfully rejects his ring. He nods off at the projectionist's booth and the matinee melodrama (Hearts and Pearls, "or The Lounge Lizard's Lost Love") is suddenly full of familiar faces. Getting into the act is just a matter of stepping into the rectangle before audience and orchestra, the medium's revolving spaces (busy street into mountain's edge into lion-filled jungle into cactus-studded desert) are there to welcome the hero, register editing, and mock continuity. Parallel worlds, dreams within dreams, Keaton's incomparable magic show. Enter "the crime-crushing criminologist," his mirror is a passageway and his vault door is an exit. (Edwards' Clouseau is born in his dapper dodging of falling axes and exploding billiard balls.) From moving train to water tower and from rooftop onto moving convertible, out a window and into a costume, through the faithful assistant's torso in a moment that would've had Méliès rolling in the aisles. Down the road on the handlebars of a riderless motorcycle, past charging locomotives and crumbling bridges and synchronized ditch diggers. "I never thought you'd make it!" Keaton's wondrous dénouement has him awake again but still taking advice from the screen, emulating hugs and kisses until hitting the enigma of censorship. Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète is the ultimate tribute, unless it's Jones' Duck Amuck. Cinematography by Byron Houck and Elgin Lessley. With Joe Keaton, Erwin Connelly, and Doris Deane. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |