After some nice comic business about the way money and possessions can be easy come, easy go (Buster Keaton’s character bilks a rich guy out of some cash, but then is tricked into buying some furniture he doesn’t need, which doesn’t even belong to the guy who sold it to him), Cops turns fairly dark, while still being very funny. During a massive police parade, an anarchist tosses a bomb onto the street that falls into Keaton’s hands; he unwittingly lights his cigarette with the fuse, then tosses it aside, where it explodes amidst the policemen. And so an army of cops chases Keaton for the rest of the short. There are laughs—including a wonderful teeter-totter routine involving a long ladder and a fence—but as this lone little man scurries down the street with an ever-expanding mass of uniformed cops angrily pursuing him, you have to wonder if some sort of commentary on the overzealousness of law enforcement is at play. Or maybe that’s just the way a movie made in 1922 plays in 2022, when small-town police forces are armed as if they were military units. Co-written and co-directed by Edward F. Cline, Keaton’s regular collaborator during this phase of his career.
(2/22/2022)
