I’ve reviewed this before in the past at a screening with live accompaniment, but even with a recorded score by Carl Davis, this remains a classic of silent comedy, as much for that image that generally accompanies any mention of the film as anything else. It shows Harold Lloyd dangling off the face of the clock high up on what would have been considered a skyscraper back then (though in the film I believe he’s lost his distinctive boater hat by the time it gets to that bit). What isn’t often discussed is that as a film it’s rather in thrall to the extended sequence that is distinguished by that scene. The plot itself is fairly stock—he’s a small town guy in the big city of LA trying to impress his fiancée (visiting for the day) that he is in fact a big shot and not the lowly clerk he’s employed as. Still, within this framework—as generically unsatisfying and broad-stroked in its familiarity as (for example) any given opera—is where Lloyd’s comedic talent shines, as he brings to bear a sort of cheerful optimism of the era, of which the dapper hat and demeanour is all a part. He keeps the threadbare schtick going, and so when he’s climbing the building there’s a real sense of peril to everything, exacerbated by a pointlessly cruel and vindictive cop (cinematically, is there any other kind) who is chasing his friend who actually knows how to climb buildings and was supposed to be doing it in the first place, and do we even need to explain why, because by this bit in the film it’s moot. The point is the effects, the effort, the thrill and the fun of the climb. The film understands that, and it does it well.
CRITERION EXTRAS:
Included on this release are three of Harold Lloyd’s earlier shorts, two one-reelers (around 10 minutes in length) and one two-reeler (twice that, obviously). Take a Chance (1918, dir. Alfred J. Goulding) features his original partner, Bebe Daniels, as ‘the girl’ though it doesn’t really hold together narratively and has some ‘of its era’ content, including a perfectly normal looking woman who is apparently so hideous nobody wants to kiss her (though perhaps the joke is that the men aren’t exactly a picture of attractiveness either). By the end, Lloyd finds himself dressed up as a convict kicking the police as he passes them and who can deny him that fun given how brutal they are to him, who just happens to be wearing a convict’s uniform through no fault of his own.
The second one-reel short is Young Mr. Jazz (1919, dir. Hal Roach), probably my favourite of the three and again with Daniels as Lloyd’s romantic interest, a pleasantly random short silent comedy film that does what you want from the genre: well rehearsed gags, some physics-defying laughs (the snorkel in the sand in particular), and a whole lot of barely disguised brutality in the name of japes when they visit a dive bar for the dancing and the fighting.
The third is His Royal Slyness (1920, dir. Hal Roach), one of the first he made with the same leading lady as Safety Last!, later to become his wife, Mildred Davis. It’s a cute little film set in a Ruritanian kingdom (Razzamatazz), and involves a double of the Prince, played by Harold’s older brother Gaylord. I think this is all about the right length for this kind of plot which rather wears out its welcome though Harold does accidentally spark a democratic revolution in the kingdom which is a particularly nice touch.
Of the supplements made for this release, Locations and Effects is a 20-minute piece about the making of the film, particularly the visual effects that allowed Lloyd to make it seem like he was in genuine peril. We see how a building on top of a tunnel by a busy intersection made it possible to fake great height while actually just being a metre or two above a surface. These effects were shrouded in secrecy at the time, but it’s ingenious and innovative stuff.
CREDITS Directors Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor; Writers Hal Roach, Taylor and Bill Whelan; Cinematographer Walter Lundin; Starring Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis; Length 73 minutes. Seen at Odeon Leicester Square, London, Saturday 3 August 2013 (and more recently on Blu-ray at home, Melbourne, Saturday 16 December 2023).
This is the film in which Chaplin finally takes on that other notable world figure with the same moustache. And, suitably, he comes to him with comedy, and it is certainly always worthwhile ridiculing fascism. There are indeed some fine laughs in this film, well-constructed little asides that resonate with some darker undertow while also keeping the film fairly light on its feet—whether it’s Chaplin as a Jewish barber, dazed from being struck with a frying pan, doing a little dance up and down a street with boarded shops daubed with the stark words ‘JEW’, or Chaplin as the dictator Hynkel presiding over underlings demonstrating new technological advances that end up (somehow, comedically) killing them. As I’ve seen other critics note, the horror comes across effectively in these fleeting moments. Elsewhere it’s absurdity that he uses to undercut Adenoid Hynkel with his speeches (in some kind of mock-German) and his posturing, though the broadest pure comedy performance is reserved for Jack Oakie as the Mussolini stand-in, Benzino Napaloni, a true buffoon. It’s all approached with a deep earnestness, and I can appreciate that—the end has a touching quality to it that’s hokily undeniable—but the existential threat of fascism doesn’t ever really feel as if it’s captured, and the comedy never achieves more than just isolated moments of greatness. But that’s only my opinion; those who love it have purer hearts.
CREDITS Director/Writer Charlie Chaplin; Cinematographers Karl Struss and Roland Totheroh; Starring Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie; Length 125 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 27 August 2022.
I am, if I’m being realistic, more than halfway through my life, which for someone who watches as many films as I do, is late to be getting into Charlie Chaplin. Of his features, I’ve only seen A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), which is probably not considered the classic way to start (his last film, although it’s certainly interesting for its era). But Modern Times holds up: a lot of its critiques of workplace relations and management pressure hardly seem to have aged at all, even if some of the technology it imagines is rather fanciful. The comedy is focused mostly into those sequences with the machines—Chaplin’s Tramp on the assembly line, getting sucked into the cogs, and doing a variety of pratfalls around the factory. However, it does feel far more strongly as if Chaplin is interested in social commentary, as well as finding an emotional thread with his relationship with the similarly marginalised Paulette Goddard’s “Gamin” character (she’s also Chaplin’s real-life wife of the time, and though 20 years younger than him is at least in her 20s for a change, even if she’s playing a juvenile delinquent). Overall it has a clarity to its comedic setups that focuses attention on the mistreatment of labour and the fallout of the Depression on people in America, with an undercurrent of poverty and desperation that I think sharpens some of the satire. I think it will take me a little while to deepen my appreciation of Chaplin, though, and so I look forward to seeing more of his classics as my Criterion project goes on.
CREDITS Director/Writer Charlie Chaplin; Cinematographers Ira H. Morgan and Roland Totheroh; Starring Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard; Length 87 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 12 June 2022.
In marked contrast to the very long and very melancholic films screening at any given film festival, not least last month’s Whānau Mārama – New Zealand International Film Festival, is this Japanese film. It has a short running time and a very high concept, so there’s not much to it (certainly not much in the way of budget) but it’s made with love, an old-fashioned amateurism with all the etymological meaning of that word, and the enthusiasm shows.
This is undoubtedly a slender film, and not just in its concise running time. It’s a classic high concept premise elaborated on a shoestring budget (the closing credits show behind the scenes views of the filming setup) and feels rather like an extended short film in some senses. Like any time travel film, thinking about it too deeply is probably a mistake, but it throws so much energy at the screen that it’s hard to find time to do that thinking. Generally, it has the feeling of a farce put on a theatre company (which it may well be, after all) and the narrative follows its repetitious journey with small changes each time until eventually it’s all you can do to keep up with the almost infinitely recursive loops of time it creates. It’s as clever as it is silly, and would outstay its welcome if it were any longer, but it has a certain something.
CREDITS Director/Cinematographer Junta Yamaguchi 山口淳太; Writer Makoto Ueda 上田誠; Starring Kazunari Tosa 土佐和成, Aki Asakura 朝倉あき, Riko Fujitani 藤谷理子; Length 70 minutes. Seen at the Embassy, Wellington, Monday 15 November 2021.
This compilation of early cinema short films was presented at the London Film Festival. It was given an introduction by one of the programmers.
What with the recent release of Suffragette, it being the opening gala for the London Film Festival, there’s been a recent resurgence of interest in the so-called “suffragettes”, a media term of derision originally, referring to the militant wing of women agitating for universal voter suffrage. Hence there’s this compilation film of early archival short films from 1899-1917 touching on their cause, which has had a short release at cinemas aside from its Festival screenings. The newsreel footage is relatively slender, but we get key events like the trampling of Emily Wilding Davison at the 1913 Derby (such a brief snippet within the coverage of the race overall that you need only blink to miss it). Padding out the running time are some comedy short films, including two featuring the ‘Tilly girls’, two young Edwardian women with little regard for the stuffy conventions of their era, not to mention a silly film in which a husband fantasises about violent retributions on his nagging suffragist wife. In any case, my friend Pam has written much more volubly and eloquently on its contents for The Guardian so you’d be better off just reading her piece. As for me, I found it largely likeable, if sometimes (necessarily) challenging in its period attitudes. The clips are well contextualised by modern intertitles, and there’s an excellent new piano score by Lillian Henley.
CREDITS Directors Margaret Deriaz and Bryony Dixon; Length 75 minutes. Seen at Rich Mix, London, Sunday 18 October 2015.
At a certain level this film by ageing auteurist Peter Bogdanovich seems achingly archaic, a collection of neurotic New York archetypes owing more to a careful study of Woody Allen films (or indeed those of its producers, Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson) than anything resembling what one might recognise as real life or believable behaviour. Its heroine, Izzy (Imogen Poots, an English actor going for a broad working-class Brooklyn accent, the success of which will probably depend on who’s listening), isn’t much more rounded a one-dimensional muse/prostitute character than Mira Sorvino played in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and the pecuniary salvation offered by theatre director Arnold (Owen Wilson) is an almost offensively crass rehash of (the hardly any less crass) Richard Gere in Pretty Woman (1990). But that would be to miss the film’s point, as set up by its silent film-like title card invoking the ‘print the legend’ refrain of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), just one of many classical Hollywood films Bogdanovich tips his hat towards, i.e. that these are characters who exist solely in a self-referential world of films.
That’s not to say it’s a consistent delight, as it still requires the viewer to sit through these hoary clichés (women as wives/mothers/whores, men as desperate cheating cads, a hundred scenarios you’ve seen a hundred times before), however knowingly they’re deployed. And yet there’s a simple pleasure to a lot of it, especially the screwball scenes of characters all converging on the same place in various configurations. There are also some fine performances in roles large and small, as it seems Bogdanovich has quite an address book to call upon—Joanna Lumley gets a credit at the end for a scene that only plays while her name is on screen, while other name actors appear only fleetingly. For me (being hardly a fan of her filmic work), the biggest surprise is probably Jennifer Aniston as a straight-talking psychiatrist (another character only ever found in the movies), who delivers some of the film’s biggest laughs through her energetic mugging. It may not amount to much more than a slight pleasure to anyone watching it, but that doesn’t feel like a failure.
CREDITS Director Peter Bogdanovich; Writers Bogdanovich and Louise Stratten; Cinematographer Yaron Orbach; Starring Imogen Poots, Owen Wilson, Kathryn Hahn, Jennifer Aniston, Rhys Ifans, Will Forte; Length 93 minutes. Seen at Olympic Studios, London, Tuesday 14 July 2015.
As my knowledge of popular Indian cinema is still in its infancy, my understanding from commentary I found on the internet is that this film is a Bollywood (i.e. Hindi language) debut from Punjabi director Smeep Kang, but otherwise bears the stylistic imprint of films from that part of the world (the north-west of the country and Pakistan). It stars Punjabi singer Gippy Grewal as dashing divorcee Rajbir looking to remarry the sensible lawyer Gurpreet, though the actor playing her (Tina Ahuja) almost fades into the background, since most of the comedic to-do is given over to Rajbir’s philandering boss Ajit (Dharmendra, a stalwart of both Hindi and Punjabi cinema) and his ex-wife Neha (Geeta Basra), a colourful figure who is set on Rajbir’s alimony payments. There’s little point in me trying to recount the plot, which involves all kinds of slapstick endeavours by Rajbir to set up Neha with a new husband (not to mention playing match-maker and breaker with Ajit, Ajit’s wife, the local police sergeant, and others). Even the film seems to whizz through the various possible pairings with undue haste and little attention to believability, stopping entirely at one point, as is customary, to fit in what amounts to a music video. It’s probably a stretch to have set up the almost 80-year-old Dharmendra as a charming lothario, much though he’s looking good for his age, and too many of the slapstick set pieces are a stretch even for a script this slapdash. Added to this the comedy musical cues start to get wearing over the length of the film. That said, it coasts through on the photogenic charm of its leads, making it difficult to take against it too strongly.
CREDITS Director Smeep Kang ਸਮੀਪ ਕੰਗ; Writers Kang, Shreya Srivastava ਸ਼ਰੇਆ ਸ੍ਰੀਵਾਸਤਵ and Vaibhav Suman ਵੈਭਵ ਸੁਮਨ; Cinematographer Manoj Shaw [aka Manoj Gupta मनोज गुप्ता]; Starring Gippy Grewal ਗਿੱਪੀ ਗਰੇਵਾਲ, Geeta Basra ਗੀਤਾ ਬਸਰਾ, Dharmendra धर्मेन्द्र; Length 105 minutes. Seen at Cineworld Ilford, London, Thursday 16 July 2015.
Originally entitled Nailed and directed by David O. Russell, this troubled production began in 2008 and is only now getting a release, with Russell’s name removed from his directing and writing credits (in favour of “Stephen Greene”). If it remains remembered in future at all, it will almost certainly be for this story than anything actually in the film, though despite a healthy portfolio of negative critical reviews, it’s not actually all that awful. It’s disjointed certainly, with an uneven tone (slapstick is difficult to get right), and some of its jokes don’t land very well at all—there’s a scene of Gyllenhaal’s Congressman character Howard cringing through his fingers which could easily have been me at points. And yet Jessica Biel’s naïve small-town girl Alice has a winning charm not unlike that of television’s Kimmy Schmidt. Alice gets a nail accidentally shot into her head but is uninsured and so needs a change in the law to allow her to have it removed, thus avoiding long-term damage.
As a political satire, made at a time before President Obama brought in healthcare coverage, it does pretty well, giving a sense of the absurdity of the system, something you’d imagine the film’s writer might have experienced a little of as Al Gore’s daughter. It’s Catherine Keener’s conniving senior politician who is the film’s bad guy, though James Marsden’s schmuck-like local police officer Scott—engaged to Alice before taking it back, and overly fond of putting percentage chances on everything—comes close. I can’t in all honesty recommend Accidental Love wholeheartedly, but it certainly doesn’t deserve the beating it’s received from some quarters.
CREDITS Director David O. Russell [as “Stephen Greene”]; Writers Russell [as “Stephen Greene”], Kristin Gore, Matthew Silverstein and Dave Jeser (based on Gore’s novel Sammy’s Hill); Cinematographer Max Malkin; Starring Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Catherine Keener, James Marsden, Tracy Morgan; Length 100 minutes. Seen at Showcase Cinemas Newham, London, Sunday 28 June 2015.
As part of the regular monthly ‘Kennington Bioscope’ night, this feature was presented along with a number of short films, with an intermission between them. Piano accompaniment was provided by organisers Lillian Henley and Cyrus Gabrysch for the shorts, and by renowned silent film accompanist and concert pianist Costas Fotopoulos for the feature.
Crainquebille (1922). The more silent films one watches, the more one realises there’s a huge range of expression beyond the kind of hyperactive slapstick we’ve at length come to associate with the era (though some of the shorts, see below, fulfil this function more than adequately). Instead with this film, we see Belgian director Jacques Feyder expressively try his hand at a kind of proletarian social realism, with moustachioed Maurice de Fléraudy playing an honest working class protagonist ground down by the unfeeling, pettifogging machinations of the authorities. In this respect, it’s not unlike, say, Bresson’s L’Argent (1983), in which a chain of minor events build into tragedy, but the film I’m most minded of is Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), which also centres on a street peddler pushing around a cart of groceries.
For me, there’s something similar here to the way Fassbinder lays on the incidents and watches his character suffer under their weight. Feyder’s touch is lighter, though, and while things seem bleak at times, it never feels masochistic. The character of Jérôme Crainquebille (or “Bill” in the name given him by the original English-language release of the film) has a largely fatalistic approach to the way he’s treated, first arrested on a false accusation of abusing a bored cop, before being processed through the justice system and eventually released, shunned by his former customers. The scenes in the court, indeed, have an almost farcical quality to them, as we see defence, prosecution and judge respectively amuse themselves, showing little interest in what’s going on before them, and the statue of justice at the front of the courtroom turns and looks accusingly at the poor wretches in the dock.
What elevates the film is the almost naturalistic acting by Féraudy and the other minor characters (shopkeepers, cops, prostitutes and newsboys) who populate this world of street vendors based around the Les Halles market, itself long gone. The set design emphasises the dirt and shabbiness of these lives, punctuated a brief fantasy interlude in which Crainquebille imagines a life in the country, growing his own vegetables rather than selling them from his cart. And while tragedy at times seems inescapable, the film remains affectionate towards its impoverished characters, and allows for a little bit of hope to shine through the gloomy black-and-white.
The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912). A delightful film illustrating all the best qualities of this renowned Russian-born, Lithuanian-raised but largely France-based animator of the silent era, though this film dates from his Russian period. Starewicz (or Starewich depending on your taste for transliteration and anglicisation of the name) was known particularly for working with stop-motion animated insects, and here he presents a story of love and duplicity acted out by taxidermied beetles (the central couple), a floozy dragonfly and a jilted grasshopper. What’s nice is that the husband’s transgression in the Dragonfly cabaret is matched by the wife’s own fling with an artist, putting the two on equal pegging. The role of the grasshopper—playing the title character, a cameraman who gets his revenge by filming the husband’s dalliance first outside the cabaret and then at the Hôtel d’Amour—rather anticipates our own modern era of candid snapshots and handheld video footage being used in the court of public opinion.
Spring (1909). A very short and rather dull film involving a lot of sprites and nymphs, largely dressed in swirling diaphanous drapery, pirouetting around in the countryside, presumably as a form of moving classical painting illustrating the arrival of the season. Seems to have been one in a number of such portraits created by the prolific Feuillade, who is best known for his serials Les Vampires and Judex, but from looking at his filmography on IMDb, was clearly not lacking in work ethic.
The Frogs Who Wanted a King (1922). Another animated short by Starewicz, this one a later film from his French period, and using taxidermied frogs rather than insects. It’s a satire on democratic government, as the frogs collectively demand from Jupiter a monarch who can rule more effectively than their elected government, but get instead a useless carved totem. When they complain, a stork is sent, which starts gobbling them up.
Crazy Like a Fox (1926). A longer comedic piece from silent-era Hollywood which cleaves very much to all the slapstick ideals we’re familiar with from the Keystone Kops, Abbot & Costello, Laurel & Hardy and the like (indeed, there’s a brief appearance by Oliver Hardy as a mocked passer-by). The star here is Charley Chase, whose reputation has only recently started to be reinvigorated, and certainly he comes across as a dapper if unreliable romantic interest. He meets cute with a young girl at a railway station, as each of them is unwillingly on their way to an arranged marriage—with each other! Naturally, this misunderstanding leads to hilarity as Chase pretends to be crazy, as the title suggests. It’s not the most politically-correct of performances—involving as it does plenty of elastic facial gurning and use of wacky props — so the appearance of a grumbling blackface servant is very much of a piece with the rest. Still, it has a certain naïve charm, even if the denouement is entirely unsurprising, and there’s a nice comeuppance for the bride’s snobby father.
Now You’re Talking (1927). At first viewing, this feels like an instructional short, if a comic one, on the subject of telephone etiquette (and indeed, looking up its IMDb entry tells me that this is the case). It starts in live action, with a man failing to use his phone sensibly, before zooming into his cranium where an animation starts up which soon takes over the screen and has our phone lamenting his sad plight to a doctor, neglected and abused by simpletons who do not understand his precise technology and the new etiquette required for his use. Animated with a great deal of verve by the Fleischers, and filled with good gags, quickly transcending its instructional use.
Le Pompier des Folies Bergères (1928). A short uncredited work known chiefly for the brief appearance of artistic cabaret dancer and sensation of Paris, Josephine Baker. Although she is clothed during an appearance on a Métro platform, dancing in front of the title character (a fireman who has stumbled out of the Folies), everyone else he meets morphs through his viewpoint into a dancing naked woman. It turns out this rather soft-core short was made by the aforesaid Folies as something of an advert for the affecting charms of their shows, though the gurning hero suggests more of a Benny Hill figure of comic lechery. His drunken eyes goggle through successive scenes of first women on the tram, and then even his firefighting colleagues, dissolving into images of naked women.
CREDITS
Crainquebille (1922) [France] — Director/Writer Jacques Feyder (based on the novel by Anatole France); Cinematographers Léonce-Henri Burel and Maurice Forster; Starring Maurice de Féraudy; Length 76 minutes. Seen at the Cinema Museum, London, Wednesday 26 March 2014.
Crazy Like a Fox (1926) [USA] — Director Leo McCarey; Writers Charley Chase and H.M. Walker; Cinematographer Len Powers; Starring Charley Chase; Length 25 minutes. Seen at the Cinema Museum, London, Wednesday 26 March 2014.
Now You’re Talking (1927) [USA] — Director Dave Fleischer; Writer Max Fleischer; Length 9 minutes. Seen at the Cinema Museum, London, Wednesday 26 March 2014.
This screening was presented with live piano accompaniment from John Sweeney, whose work was excellent and deft as ever. I always worry I should try to have something more precise to say, but if he had been unduly drawing attention to his playing, it would hardly have been so successful; instead I was fully engrossed in the Keaton comedy.
There’s plenty of ink that’s been spilled over the years (although that’s not entirely an apt metaphor for this modern era) discussing the differences between the various silent film comedians, along with people’s personal preferences. I’ve not seen enough by any of them (although I did, rather briefly, review a screening of Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! last year) to contribute much that’s worthwhile to that discussion—which I can only hope will be a blessed relief to readers, who should be free to make their own judgement on this matter. I will say that of the famous ones, I’ve seen the most films by Buster Keaton, a disparity that’s hardly going to be rectified by the BFI’s current Keaton retrospective season. Amongst his fine body of work, Go West is it seems a little underappreciated, but over a series of vignettes set in the Wild West, Keaton mines plenty of humour, and even a bit of pathos.
Plot isn’t really what this kind of comedy is about, so much as the set-up. In this case, Keaton plays a friendless loner (called “Friendless” in the credits, indeed) who is evicted from his home and, exhausted by city life, hops on a train headed to Santa Fe, where he falls in to working at a cattle ranch run by a gruff but kindly Howard Truesdale. This of course motivates a series of comedic set pieces that test the untrained city-slicker neophyte against this new world, leading to slapstick pratfalls (primarily from donning chaps and spurs), incompetence (trying to lasso a calf, or milk a cow), imperilment (at the horns of some rampaging bulls) and fights (squaring up to a poker cheat). But Keaton’s Friendless also discovers a determination and tenacity prompted by his newly-kindled love.
Of course, being a comedy, the love interest angle is hardly straightforward. When Friendless shows kindness towards a cow named Brown Eyes, the cow devotedly follows him, which initially seems played for laughs—especially given the ranch owner has a daughter who is seen making eyes at Friendless. However, it soon leads to something akin to genuine pathos, as a mutual affection develops between the two that leads Friendless to want to save his love from imminent death. But this is hardly a proto-animal-welfare message movie: the last third of the film has him show loyalty to the ranch owner by trying to ensure his cattle are delivered to the slaughterhouse stockyards, which motivates a manic slapstick stampede through the local town.
Keaton’s touch is everywhere evident, not just in the unconventional relationship dynamic and in his trademark pork-pie hat (which he continues to wear even as a cowboy), but elsewhere in a number of little throwaway moments, like him catching his hat as it’s blown off in a passing breeze, staying in his stony-faced character as his poker-playing antagonist holds a gun on him and demands he smile, or leaping back onboard a runaway train so that he can comfort Brown Eyes rather than try to stop the train. There’s also a lovely sequence later on showing a black street dancer plying his trade while Friendless watches captivated, all of them happily oblivious to the growing number of stampeding cattle approaching from the back of the shot.
The film is really a framework within which to accommodate all these (and many other) virtuoso moments. There’s no point where things stop to deliver a message about character growth or the importance of friends; Keaton keeps things far subtler than all that. Instead, clichés of romantic love are skewered within the familiar fish-out-of-water scenario, and even the ‘riding off into the sunset’ shot gets a laughable twist. This film shouldn’t, therefore, be just for fans of Keaton or silent comedy: there’s plenty for everyone to love. Even farmyard animals.
CREDITS Director Buster Keaton; Writers Raymond Cannon and Keaton; Cinematographers Elgin Lessley and Bert Haines; Starring Buster Keaton, Howard Truesdale; Length 80 minutes. Seen at BFI Southbank (NFT2), London, Tuesday 21 January 2014.
filmcentric 