The Cartoon Logic of Buster Keaton
Note: This is the hundred-and-fourteenth in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my fourth favorite 1921 film, THE HIGH SIGN, directed by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton.
The cartoon logic of the 1920s and ’30s has always owed much of its DNA to slapstick film comedy from as early as the 1910s (and from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios in particular). Therefore, it also owes a lot to vaudevillian antics from even earlier. And if there’s someone who defined vaudevillian antics on screen, it’s Buster Keaton. Oh sure, there had been many vaudeville comedians to transition to the screen before and after him. But as a lifelong member of the stage and one of the foremost screen comedians, Keaton’s influence cannot be understated. And in shorts like THE HIGH SIGN, you can see that influence on, specifically and as mentioned, the wacky animated worlds to come.
It might be reductive to link Buster Keaton and, like, Looney Tunes because they’re both goofy, but there is a certain warping of reality that happens in THE HIGH SIGN. Well, that reality warp is necessary for any comedy, but Keaton takes it to a more pronounced, visual place, as befits a visual medium. The oft-praised opening of the film establishes that we’re not in Kansas anymore. Keaton is kicked off a train somewhere, sometime, and for some reason, and now he’s got to find a job. We’re not dealing with a normal human here; we rarely are with Keaton’s nonplussed, stonefaced character.
Keaton worms his way into working at a shooting gallery, which by the way is already an out-of-reality establishment as it is. But before that, he finds the listing in a comically huge newspaper that just keeps folding out to expand even further, eventually landing Keaton on his ass. The sight of the paper steadily dwarfing the star is one of the highlights of the film, and it happens within minutes.
Keaton worms his way into the job by pretending to an expert shot with his typical Rube Goldberg-y ingenuity, which is hilariously disrupted by a component of his machinations: a living, breathing dog. The ostensible owners of the shooting gallery, however, take his apparent skill at face value. And they’re a gang of ne’er-do-wells, the Blinking Buzzards, who utilize a silly gang sign that lends the short its name.
Thinking him a man with a special set of skills, they hire (well, intimidate) Keaton into killing a man. And the man and his daughter, thinking him capable of handling violence as well (but without knowledge of his other charge), hire him as a bodyguard. Of course, Keaton doesn’t want to actually kill anyone, and his sympathies lie with the man and his (pretty) daughter.
But what happens when he’s in the house is a tensely humorous play between a gang spy planted in the household as a butler and calm reassurance for the benefit of the father and daughter. And as a matter of fact, the house is full of booby traps to catch any intruders. That’s when, beyond the opening moments, THE HIGH SIGN veers into comedic pandemonium that foreshadows the acrobatic, action-packed climaxes of future Keaton features. The gang invades and Keaton evades, in his inimitable style, dropping his attackers into numerous traps while miraculously avoiding them himself. It’s slapstick ballet, and if there’s a good way to describe Buster Keaton, it’s “slapstick ballerina.” And when it comes to the animation world to come, the dance of squash and stretch feels like an extension of not only Keaton, but Chaplin, Lloyd, Langdon, Laurel, Hardy, et. al.
