Genius is offering a metacommentary on film form and pulling off a banana-peel gag in the same movie—a 45-minute one, no less. Sherlock Jr. presents Buster Keaton at the peak of his powers, as director and star. He plays a film projectionist and amateur detective who is falsely accused of stealing a pocket watch that belongs to the father of the woman he admires (Kathyrn McGuire). Falling asleep while projecting a film (about a stolen pearl necklace), he imagines himself entering the movie and solving the case as “Sherlock Jr.” It isn’t only the (relatively simple) trick of stepping into the screen that makes this one of the first meta movies; it’s also the comic montage that follows, in which Keaton, as Sherlock, finds himself getting zapped from location to location with each edit, always in the most inopportune position. (His seat on a boulder in the desert, for instance, becomes more precarious when the scene changes and he finds himself perched on a rocky little island amidst roaring waves.) There are other bravura set pieces—Keaton running atop a train toward the right of the screen, while the train itself screams to left, the opposite movements keeping him perfectly in the center of the frame; when the convertible that he and McGuire are driving goes flying into a lake and Keaton calmly lifts the top halfway up to create a convenient sail—yet Sherlock Jr. is also stuffed with quieter gestures of ingeniousness, as when he taps a footstool out of his way, sliding it under a couch, in an expression of confidence before the father. As director and actor, if not always character, Keaton had a supremely calm command of chaos.
(4/26/2022)
