We think these two silent comedies are fantastic examples of Buster Keaton’s directorial genius. Seven Chances exaggerates the dilemma of a fellow who must marry on a deadline to inherit a fortune. An onslaught of women in wedding dresses becomes a (comic) nightmare horde. Sherlock Jr. can almost be described as experimental. The story involves treacherous girl-nappers, but Buster adds fantasy sequences that deconstruct cinema: his movie projectionist ‘enters’ a movie screen and joins in the storyline. The restoration is a collaboration between Kino, Blackhawk Films and the French company Lobster; the music scores are by Robert Israel.

Seven Chances & Sherlock Jr.
Blu-ray
Kino Classics
1924, 1925 / B&W / 1:33 Silent Ap. / 57 + 49 min. / Street Date November 19, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Buster Keaton, Ruth Dwyer, Snitz Edwards; Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton.
Cinematography: Byron Houck, Elgin Lessley
Art Director / Technical Director: Fred Gabourie
Music scores by: Robert Israel (2020)
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell
Directed by Buster Keaton

America loved Buster Keaton movies, but didn’t always appreciate his boldest, most daring cinematic efforts. Today we look at the peerless masterpiece  The General, and can’t believe that it wasn’t the most popular film of its year. Silent audiences, some critics opined, ‘didn’t get’ the mixing of a true historical Civil War incident with crazy comedy.

America’s entertainment coverage of the great silent comedians focused mostly on personalities. Only in 1949 did James Agee write the first serious reappraisal of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton for Life magazine. Some claimed that those essays reignited interest in silent films, which by then had been banished to museum screenings. In Europe, however, silent film comedians were still praised as great artists, and Buster Keaton was celebrated in a category all his own. As the most experimental director-writer-performer, Keaton’s manipulations of cinematic time and space went beyond comic-strip mirth, to express a genuine surreal philosophy.

The comedies Sherlock Jr. and Seven Chances were not Keaton’s biggest hits. When Raymond Rohauer was preserving the star’s silent filmography, Keaton wanted him to skip over Seven Chances entirely. He felt it was sub-par work done only because co-producer Joseph M. Schenck had already bought the original Broadway show. But the English and French film cognoscenti were crazy about both pictures. Not only did Keaton play clever games with physical reality, Sherlock Jr.’s dream sequences made a major statement about the nature of film-in-film reality.

Seven Chances
1925 / B&W with color sequence / 57 min.
Starring: Buster Keaton, Snitz Edwards, Ruth Dwyer, T, Roy Barnes, Jean Arthur, Constance Talmadge.
Cinematography: Byron Houck, Elgin Lessley
Art Director / Technical Director: Fred Gabourie
Music score: Robert Israel (2020)
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell from a comedy by Roi Cooper Megrue
Produced by Joseph H. Schenck, Buster Keaton
Directed by Buster Keaton

We UCLA film students were introduced to the Buster Keaton classics in Melnitz Hall, in perfect prints and accompanied by the music of Chauncey Haines on the mighty theater organ. There’s nothing like the silent comedy experience with a big crowd. We laughed at  Seven Chances for a solid hour … And Buster Keaton believed it to be his worst film.

Seven Chances’ plot is not sophisticated, but in form it is almost perfect. The stage play can’t have been similar, as much of the film is action that sweeps through a city and into a valley beyond. Along the way Keaton indulges technical tricks that could only be appreciated by his fellow filmmakers.

It’s all a matter of Sevens.

The idea for Seven Chances sounds like something for a two-reel comedy. Law partners James Shannon and Bill Meekin (Buster Keaton & T. Roy Barnes) have been suckered into an illegal stock transaction and are convinced that arrest and disgrace are unavoidable. They duck a summons server by hiding out at the country club. Their pursuer turns out to be Shannon’s own lawyer Caleb Pettibone (Snitz Edwards), there to tell Jimmy that a rich relative has died: he’ll inherit 7 million dollars, but only if he is married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday … which happens to be today, the 7th day of the 7th month. Jimmy fumbles a proposal to the girl he loves (Ruth Dwyer) by making it seem that any woman will do. She changes her mind and tries to send him a message, but Jimmy goes into panic mode and starts proposing to every woman in sight. He only succeeds in becoming the laughingstock of his Country Club. In desperation, Bill puts an ad in the afternoon papers for a bride, any bride, immediately. After an exhausting afternoon, Jimmy falls asleep in a church pew, and is therefore unaware that hundreds of prospective brides are converging on the church. The frazzled groom’s ordeal is just beginning.

Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances divides neatly into halves, with his many frantic proposals in the first, and most of the action and stunts in the second. The laughs build like the proverbial house afire. Jimmy’s disastrous communication skills insult his girlfriend, who is actually dying for his marriage proposal. The dozen or so society types at the country club have just as many ways of turning him down, each more blunt than the last. Jimmy’s romantic note gets torn into fifty pieces, and showers down on his head, a graphic substitute for a firm ‘no.’  A hatcheck girl with a haircut made iconic by Louise Brooks observes Jimmy’s ridiculous marriage offers with a suspicious eye, as if looking out for the interests of the female species. Jimmy keeps retrieving his hat, then turning it back in again and recovering his tip, until the hatcheck girl looks ready to kill him.  ↓

Freud had dreams like this, right?

The central joke in Keaton’s 1922 short film Cops is the spectacle of a horde of uniformed policemen pursuing Buster through the city. The human tidal wave in Seven Chances is similarly surreal, an army of brides of every shape and sizes, each convinced that they are one “I do” away from the fulfillment of their dreams. It’s the stuff of comic nightmares, but drop-dead hilarious.

Nowadays, a humorless political critic might fault Keaton’s gleeful lampoon of womanhood: Jimmy’s pursuers are a mob of plain, harsh and outright frightening-looking women. Some act coy and others are Old Bats that grab at Jimmy as they would a goose for the slaughter. He must run for his life from a female horde that destroys everything in its path — brick walls, a field of corn — and perhaps even Jimmy himself, when they inadvertently drop him onto the path of an onrushing train.

The final reels of Seven Chances show Keaton in constant motion, a blur in top gear. He races down city streets and past modest homes. A squadron of cops flees in panic when confronted by the flood of brides. Buster leaps gorges and is almost shot by duck hunters. He performs an incredible flip-flop tumble down a steep sand hill, an action we thought only a cartoon character could do. But he saves the wildest for last. Running down a long incline, Buster trips over one rock. It jostles two more, which start an avalanche of bouncing boulders. Predating video game graphics by at least sixty years, Buster must dodge and weave to avoid being crushed.  ←

An inverted Sisyphus debacle.

Even if the rocks are fake, they clearly have mass. Their path is erratic and unpredictable: one could knock Buster down or trip him up. Keeping the action in long shot gives the impression of a desperate man caught in a giant pinball machine. The preposterous predicament crystallizes a philosophy of life: just keep dodging disaster and hope for the best. The oft-told story is that Keaton finished Seven Chances without this big gag, but noted that preview audiences began to laugh when a couple of loose rocks ‘chased’ Jimmy Shannon down the hill. Back he went to film an elaborate rock slide set piece.

Keaton aficionados also applaud his technical prowess in two scenes that depict Jimmy ‘driving’ to and from the Country Club. In place of a driving sequence, Keaton gets in his car, which does not move, Instead, in a perfect dissolve, the location changes behind him. The car and Keaton remain perfectly aligned, even though he’s parked on a slight incline. We’re told that Keaton used surveyor’s tools to accomplish this effect, with a manual back-wind and double-fade dissolve created in the camera. Knowing the technical context, the ingenuity is dazzling — and the definition of Buster Keaton.

When Jimmy is proposing to every woman in sight, his embarrassing mistakes become increasingly outrageous. Jimmy thinks he’s gotten a ‘yes’ from a society girl, until she’s revealed to be an 11 year-old child wearing her mother’s coat. Keaton’s films had their share of race-based humor, though none of his jokes are mean-spirited. His girlfriend’s handyman and message carrier is a white actor in blackface. Jimmy also mistakenly accosts Jewish and African-American women on the street. His horrified facial expressions say everything to say about racial attitudes of the time. Urban audiences in 1925 would have recognized the real-life entertainer name-dropped in another of Jimmy’s ridiculous mistakes,  Julian Eltinge. Seeing an actress on a theater poster, Buster rushes backstage to propose. He gets his hat torn up as pictured in the illustration on the disc cover.

Seven Chances begins with a prologue that satirizes the romantic sensibility. Jimmy visits The Girl as the seasons pass, each time at her garden gate. The girl’s puppy grows up without Jimmy ever finding the nerve to propose, establishing him as a bashful suitor. The prologue was filmed in Technicolor to show off the new Two-Strip color process, and the series of color tableaux look like greeting cards. Raymond Rohauer’s 35mm prints only had it in B&W, dulling the joke; restored copies only look partly restored.

The switchboard operator in Jimmy’s law office is none other than future major star Jean Arthur.

Sherlock Jr.
1924 / B&W / 49 min.
Starring: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Erwin Connelly, Ward Crane.
Cinematography: Byron Houck, Elgin Lessley
Art Director / Technical Director: Fred Gabourie
Costumes: Clare West
Stunts: Ernie Orsatti
Music score: Robert Israel (2020)
Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell
Produced by Buster Keaton, Joseph M. Schenck
Directed by Buster Keaton

The experts tell us that one of Buster Keaton’s biggest hits was the 1928  College. It relies on tried & true stock gags, as opposed to other films in which Keaton explored wider possibilities in screen comedy. Also not a smashing success when new, 1924’s  Sherlock Jr. is now considered his most experimental achievement. Ever- intrigued by the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, Keaton kept his persona as more of a cipher, an audience surrogate. Rather than develop his character, he used the possibilities of film to construct a complex physical world around his famous Great Stone Face. Keaton develops his gags so precisely, we sometimes forget the limits of physical action. When he risks his neck in a dangerous stunt, our identification with him is total.

A plot description can’t communicate Sherlock Jr.’s special appeal. Buster is a movie projectionist frustrated in love because the object of his affections (Kathryn McGuire) is attracted to a dishonest Rival (Ward Crane). Buster is also an aspiring detective. When his girlfriend’s father’s pocket watch is stolen, the unscrupulous Rival contrives to make Buster look guilty. Rejected and alone, Buster goes back to work at the movie theater. He projects a melodrama that happens to have a love triangle around a similar domestic crime, but in a swank upscale setting. Watching the show, Buster experiences a bizarre daydream: he ‘enters’ the movie’s world. He dreams that he walks up to the front of the auditorium, steps right into the screen, and interacts with the fictional characters.  ↑  This brilliant sequence must have been the inspiration for Woody Allen’s excellent tragicomedy  The Purple Rose of Cairo.

A big section of Sherlock Jr. takes place in this sustained fantasy of wish fulfillment. The movie’s actors are replaced by The Girl and The Rival. Buster becomes the suave gentleman detective, ‘Sherlock Junior.’  Just by falling asleep, Buster replays his problems in an alternate cinematic universe. Keaton’s conceptual experiment toys with a key desire of moviewatching, to live vicariously through the characters on screen.

The tyranny of The Cut.

As Sherlock Jr. was premiered in 1924, film critics have been marveling at this central dream sequence for a full 100 years. Fighting his way back ‘into the screen,’ Buster becomes trapped within the filmic convention of The Cut. While the theater audience continues watching, Buster stays on screen as the film cuts between different locations. The scenes change, but he stays in place. Finding himself in a garden, Buster sits on a bench … but the scene cuts to a busy street and he falls backwards into traffic. The street changes into a rocky cliff, and he almost loses his balance. A few seconds later Buster tries to dive into the ocean. But the scene changes to a snowy landscape, and he ends up nose-down in a snowdrift.

One must appreciate the state of film effects in 1924 to understand the technical accomplishment involved. Some of the ‘movie screen’ scenes in the dream are clever double exposures, but others are built right into the movie theater set, where the screen should be. Keaton’s absurd transitions had to be measured with great precision to place him in the exact matching position across cuts. He leans against a tree just as the scene cuts to a garden; his position between the two shots is a perfect match.

The convention of ‘The Cut’ has nothing to do with normal human experience. The ability of a film to change angles, or jump instantly to a distant location, bends time and space as no other art form can. When movies were first exhibited, cutting in a scene had to be invented. Each scene would be one unbroken shot. Audiences had ‘acclimatized’ to every new cinematic device. We’re told that some viewers of early movies resisted the concept of a close-up. “I paid to see all of the actor. Where is the rest of him?”  ^*

Once the cutting games are over, the dream world becomes an exaggeration of Buster’s waking dilemma. As the master detective Sherlock Jr., he is summoned to find a purloined necklace. The thieves try to kill him with a trick chair and an explosive billiard ball, to no avail. Buster’s cinematic alter ego exhibits the self-confidence that the ‘real’ Buster lacks. This of course cues the thrilling physical stunts when Sherlock chases the villains.

The chase is one pell-mell action thrill after another, a cascade of beautifully engineered stunts. Buster rides a motorcycle while sitting on the handlebars, barely missing trains and trucks. He plummets unharmed from a tall building, and uses a surprisingly effective bit of stage magic to make an instantaneous costume change. The crime is solved and the girl rescued, all within Buster’s cinematic daydream.

A couple of wild stunts were accomplished with trick effects but others would appear to be extremely dangerous. We’re told that Keaton found a way to drive a motorbike while sitting on the handlebars, but that he had no way of applying the brakes. Buster attempts a leap between two buildings and doesn’t make it, a stunt that looks guaranteed to break one’s neck.

In another seemingly less hazardous gag, a train’s water spout causes Buster to fall onto some railroad tracks. Years later, a doctor informed Keaton of a hairline fracture in his neck that had gone unnoticed. From the doctor’s description, Keaton surmised that the injury could have happened on just this stunt gag from Sherlock Jr..

The new Kino Classics combo Blu-ray of Seven Chances & Sherlock Jr. continues the saga of Keaton releases on disc. Kino did an entire Blu-ray series about fifteen years ago, special editions curated by the label’s Bret Wood. The Cohen Film library followed with their own series, taken directly from Raymond Rohauer’s restored prints. According to Kino Lorber, these new discs are 2022 restorations from different sources. Seven Chances was remastered by combining scans from a safety print in the Blackhawk Film collection, with an incomplete 35mm nitrate print held by Lobster Films. The music scores, both composed and produced by Robert Israel, are just excellent, a terrific accompaniment.

Both comedies have excellent definition and sit stable in the film gate; the color sequence at the opening of Seven Chances is faded but gives an approximation of the Two-strip effect. The older Kino discs offered different audio commentaries. For these new releases Adam Nayman and Matt Singer each take a title, giving us informative coverage of what Buster had to say about the productions, and where he was in his career.

Retained from the old Kino discs are two short subjects. An okay copy of a Three Stooges comedy short (with Shemp) that uses the same story premise as Seven Chances. An ancient Edwin S. Porter short subject is just two or three takes — and no close-ups!  A mustachioed Frenchman puts out a similar ‘bride wanted’ personal ad, and is mobbed by prospective brides.

What we miss most from the old Kino discs are the location comparison essays — not included here — from John Bengtson. The houses that Buster runs by look very much like those in our Hollywood neighborhood, but Bengtson located them down near U.S.C.. The shot where the motorcycle cop falls off the motorcycle, was taken right outside Keaton’s studio near Vine Street and Santa Monica Blvd. The shot where he gets on the motorcycle, appears to have been filmed maybe 200 feet from this writer’s window, on Larchmont Boulevard.

Maybe someday I’ll see my own house in an ancient silent movie.

One location comparison demonstrated that another motorcycle shot for Sherlock Jr. was filmed not 200 yards from my house, at the intersection of Beverly and Larchmont Blvds. Here’s a frame grab of the shot in question, followed by a closer comparison of a building in the shot. It was filmed almost exactly 100 years ago, and the building hasn’t changed.

Seven Chances & Sherlock Jr.
Blu-ray rates:
Movies: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentaries:
For Seven Chances by Adam Nayman
For Sherlock Jr. by Matt Singer
1947 Three Stooges comedy short subject A Brideless Groom (17 min.)
1904 Edison short How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns, directed by Edwin S. Porter.
Deaf and Hearing Impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 6, 2024
(7220bust)

^*   The ‘where is the rest of him?’ objection to close-ups is echoed in the resistance of today’s film fans that demand to see the full open-matte frame of movies designed to be cropped widescreen. “I paid for the whole movie. Where is the rest of the movie?”

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