Our Hospitality/Sherlock, Jr. | Buster Keaton | DVD review | clown ministry | Reviews

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Buster Keaton - Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr. - DVD - Kino Video - digitally remastered from archival prints with original music scores

Editorial Review of Our Hospitality/Sherlock, Jr., courtesy of Amazon.com

Buster Keaton‘s second feature, Our Hospitality is his first masterpiece. He plays a New York city boy who travels south to receive his inheritance, only to discover he’s in the center of a generations-old feud. While his sworn enemies (the family of the girl he has fallen in love with, naturally) vow to gun him down, Southern hospitality forbids them from harming him as long as he’s a guest in their home. Plenty of comic mileage is mined from Buster’s desperate attempts to prolong his stay, and highlights include a deliriously surreal train (run by Keaton’s father, Joe) and a heroic rescue involving a rope, a log, and a mighty waterfall.

Sherlock Jr. is a delightfully surreal fantasy of a film projectionist and amateur detective who climbs into his movie screen. Like Daffy Duck in the famous cartoon “Duck Amuck,” Buster is at the mercy of sudden scene changes, sent from desert to snowstorm to lake in simple cuts while he remains helplessly fixed onscreen. (Even more astounding is that he accomplished this engineering marvel with nothing more than surveyor’s tools and an exacting eye.) Settling into his dream role as a master detective and society bon vivant Sherlock Jr., he chases the dastardly villains in a world as wild and unpredictable as the French serial Les Vampires: bombs are hidden in billiard balls and Keaton leaps through the torso of a peddler woman and into nothingness! No other silent film turns logic on its head with such grace and comic hilarity. --Sean Axmaker

Product Description of Our Hospitality/Sherlock, Jr.

The art of Buster Keaton is on spectacular display in two of his finest films. The wonderful film “Our Hospitality” (1923, 75 min.) is in many ways a companion piece to Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece “The General.” It stars Buster as a New York man who returns to his southern homeland only to find himself embroiled in a longstanding feud between his family and that of the woman he loves. Perhaps no other film offers as exciting a rollercoaster ride as “Sherlock, Jr.” (1924, 44 min.). Dramatizing the uproarious exploits of a meek theater projectionist turned amateur sleuth, the film blends the knockabout physical comedy normally associated with slapstick with more subtly crafted moments of humor.

Trivia for Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923)

During the shooting of the climatic waterfall scene, Buster Keaton inhaled so much water that he had to have first aid.
During the filming of the scene in which Buster Keaton is being swept downstream towards the waterfall, he was attached to a ‘holdback’ cable, concealed in the river. During the filming of the scene, the cable broke, and he was hurled down the rapids, battered by rocks and limbs, and was only barely able to grab an overhanging branch, which held him just long enough for the crew to reach and rescue him. This scene remains in the final print, and is fairly easy to spot. Just look for the point at which Keaton is being pulled downriver and 1) he suddenly looks back towards the camera, and 2) his speed in the water doubles, almost causing him to fly out of frame.
The diminutive steam engine used in the film was a faithful, mechanically-accurate re-creation of Stephenson’s Rocket. Equally accurate was the replica of the early bicycle ridden by Willie near the start of the film - so accurate, in fact, that according to Keaton it was requested by the Smithsonian for display.
The climactic waterfall rescue scenes were filmed on a set built over the swimming pool on the Keaton lot. Production stills kept secret until decades after the film was released show the entire set, including the miniature valley constructed below the pool for the long overlooking shots.
Joe Roberts, Buster Keaton’s career “heavy”, made his last appearance in this film. Big Joe suffered a stroke during the filming, and was hospitalized. He insisted on returning to work, however, and died very shortly after the end of filming.

Trivia for Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.

In one scene at a train station, Buster Keaton was hanging off of a tube connected to a water basin. The water poured out and washed him on to the track, fracturing his neck nearly to the point of breaking it. This footage appears in the released film. Keaton suffered from blinding migraines for years after making this movie and was unaware of the reason, until a doctor diagnosed him in the 1930s.
This film was selected to the National Film Registry, Library of Congress, in 1991.
Buster Keaton doubled for Ford West, the actor playing Gillette, in the scene where the motorcycle he is driving (with Keaton on the handlebars) hits a deep pothole and bucks him off flat on his behind.
Some filmographies credit Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle as co-director of this film. The confusion comes from the fact that Buster Keaton did originally hope to have Arbuckle work as his co-director, but Arbuckle was still too depressed over the scandal that had nearly ended his career three years earlier and had become difficult to work with, so Keaton went ahead as the sole director of the film. The claim that Arbuckle was a co-director on the film was made by Minta Durfee; however, her claim lost credibility because she also stated that Arbuckle was the sole screenwriter of the film. The script was definitely written by Joseph A. Mitchell, Jean C. Havez and Clyde Bruckman--Keaton’s usual team of gagmen from this time. Historians agree there is no credibility to the claim that Arbuckle ever directed so much as a frame of the movie.