Review: “Sherlock Jr.” – 10 Lessons from 100 Years of Buster Keaton’s Classic

Movie of the Week #21

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Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of attending the Denver Silent Film Festival at the Sie Film Center. There were many wonderful films and programs over the course of the weekend, but I think the screening that left the greatest impact on me was watching Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. with a sold-out house, and seeing this silent comedy that is literally a full century old this year absolutely kill with a group of people in 2024, from start to finish. There are of course silent comedies that haven’t aged well – this screening was preceded by Keaton’s The Play House (1921), a film whose copious amounts of blackface make the humor difficult to engage with – but Sherlock Jr. is one of those classics that is truly timeless.

In fact, while watching, it occurred to me that so much of what can be learned or said about movies is contained within the relatively scant 50 minutes of Sherlock Jr. Plenty of filmmakers still learn all sorts of lessons from Buster Keaton, and proudly wear his influence on their sleeves. In fact, my two favorite movie franchises of the 21^st century – Mission: Impossible and John Wick – would not exist without Keaton, as the films themselves proudly tell us: Dead Reckoning’s final act riffs on many different train movies, but is principally indebted to The General, while John Wick: Chapter 2 opens with none other than Sherlock Jr. being projected on the side of a building, explicitly tying the mayhem to come to a century of Keaton’s echoes through film history.

There are, suffice it to say, countless lessons to be learned from Keaton’s filmography at large, and from Sherlock Jr. in particular. But in honor of the film’s 100^th anniversary, here are 10 lessons that struck me, about how movies are made and, just as crucially, about how movies are watched.

1. Structure matters, even (or especially) when it is upended

Sherlock Jr. is an oddly structured film. It tells one story, of a young man (Buster) trying to woo a love interest (Kathryn McGuire) until he is framed for theft by a rich rival suitor (Ward Crane), for about 18 minutes, at which point it transitions to a long, elaborate dream sequence where the boy imagines himself as a great (albeit unorthodox) detective having an increasingly outlandish adventure. This dream sequence lasts for over 25 minutes, only returning to reality for the final 5 minutes of the picture, where the first story is resolved. In fact, the resolution of the ‘real’ story is planted just before the dream begins, as Buster’s love interest, sensing something is off, goes to the pawn shop where Buster supposedly sold her father’s watch and learns the rich suitor was, in fact, the culprit. So the matter of Buster’s innocence is actually already taken care of (for McGuire’s character and the audience, if not Buster himself) before the dream even begins. Thus, Keaton suspends the forward momentum of the first plot just before its ultimate point of resolution, interrupting it with a different, more complex and comical plot in the dream, which is fully articulated and resolved before Buster wakes up for the final beat of the first story.

Needless to say, when one breaks the narrative down like this, it is clear no screenwriting manual would ever tell you to structure a film like Sherlock Jr. It is an odd and atypical shape even for a silent comedy. The film opens with “an old proverb which says: ‘Don’t try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both.’” This is nominally about Buster’s character working as a projectionist while he tries to be a detective, but it also reads as something of a dare from the film to itself, as Sherlock Jr. is not only telling two stories, but connecting the protagonist’s two vocations through the film’s two primary vectors of humor: Detective parody, and reflexive play with the nature and substance of cinema and spectatorship. In this way, the film is actually quite deeply structured – one side always helps articulate the other, the reflexive qualities enabling the outlandishness of the detective parody, and the absurdity of the detective plot fueling our awareness of the spectatorial play – but that structuring is wholly unconventional. Sherlock Jr. upends conventional narrative structure while displaying a deep understanding of how stories are told and where audience expectations lie; structure can be upended, but it cannot be ignored – form always matters. Sherlock Jr. is not purely anarchic, but quite wise in understanding form and structure and where and how they can be played with. Which brings us to our second point:

2. Conventions are made to be broken

Think of this lesson like the principles of rhythm and variation in music; a great pop song, for instance, needs a great bridge, a point in the progression where we break the established patterns and play with their shape and character. This is true in cinema, too. The master of patterns – which all great filmmakers to some extent are – will typically build their patterns to eventually be toppled; conventions become a playground, building blocks for creating new shapes.

Keaton does this in all manner of great ways in Sherlock Jr., of course. The central gesture of Buster stepping into the screen, with jump cuts transporting him between locations and scenarios (a moment we will attend to more closely in a later point), is entirely predicated on first establishing and subsequently breaking conventions of film language.