After finding that the brand of humor practiced by the Marx Brothers didn’t really work for us, I thought we might try something from the silent era. Charlie Chaplin would be the obvious choice but everyone has watched something by Chaplin. However I’ve never seen anything by Buster Keaton and he seems criminally under-known in Asia, so Keaton it is.

At only 45 minutes long, Sherlock, Jr. barely qualifies as film. Apparently Keaton, who also directed this himself, aggressively edited it down in response to audience previews. Here he plays a young man who works in theater but dreams of becoming a detective. As usual in such stories, there’s also a girl that he’s chasing after and a villain who is competing with him for the girl. He tries to apply instructions on how to be a detective on his problems, and since this is a comedy, hijinks ensue.

Right off the bat, I’d say that Sherlock, Jr. immediately works for us in a way that the Marx Brothers never did. This is probably because once you take language away, all you’re left with is physical comedy and physical comedy is universal. Large portions of it are basically live action Looney Tunes-style cartoon skits. It’s not high-brow stuff and you probably won’t laugh out loud but they’re good for some chuckles and it’s rather impressive to watch Keaton stylishly pull off what must be some very physically demanding routines. Watching him ride on the handlebars of a  bicycle and make it unscathed through a series of increasingly risky encounters would merely seem amusing in a cartoon but it looks really dangerous with real-life people!

What surprised and impressed me most however is the creativity and technical innovation that went into this film. This is a huge spoiler, so go away if you want to watch this for yourself. A major twist in the story is that the protagonist dreams himself into a film. In one scene he literally walks to the front of the cinema and into the film that is showing there. Sure, we’ve seen this many times times, for example in Last Action Hero, but it’s very cool to see Keaton do it in 1924. This is used to set up a skit in which the scene in the film keeps changing while Keaton appears to stay in place. It’s crude editing work by today’s standards but it must have been mindblowing back then.

This device also allows Keaton to play the super-competent detective of his fantasies who is so many steps ahead of the villains that he runs rings around them. Most of this stuff is again fun but not really anything you haven’t seen already, such as the villains repeatedly trying to kill him only to be hoisted by their own petard. Occasionally however Keaton manages to work in some really cool ideas, such as the way he literally jumps out of a building filled with villains and right into a disguise.

In the end, I found this to be funnier, and more importantly more creative, than I’d expected. Even the frame story, as clichéd and simple as it is, actually makes some kind of sense. It’s not a must-watch by any means but it does make for good light entertainment and with it being so short, it’s not like you have much to lose.