Sherlock Jr.
About Sherlock Jr.
A projectionist (Buster Keaton) who studies detective manuals is courting a girl (Kathryn McGuire). Her other suitor, a local sheik (Ward Crane), steals her father’s watch, pawns it, and plants the ticket in the projectionist’s pocket. The father, Joe Keaton, throws him out. The girl later takes the ticket to the pawnbroker and spots the sheik. Asleep in the booth, the projectionist dreams he walks into the film on screen as Sherlock Jr. Inside that story a villain and a butler try poison and a rigged pool ball, kidnap the girl, and lose her in a chase. He wakes. She tells him who the thief was, and he copies the love scene still running on the screen.
Cast & crew
More about Sherlock Jr.
Keaton directed, edited, and produced with Joseph M. Schenck. Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell wrote it. Elgin Lessley and Byron Houck photographed. Roscoe Arbuckle began as co-director under the name William Goodrich and was taken off after a clash. Metro released it on 21 April 1924, in five reels. Other listed dates are 17 April and 11 May 1924.
Themes
Making
Arbuckle’s Goodrich credit is the start of the shoot, not the finished direction. Keaton took the chair after they fought. The dream reel, with the projectionist stepping into the changing shots, is the passage he is remembered for.
Reviews
David Thomson calls it a breakthrough, “as if a filmmaker had at last learned the point of the whole thing.”
Look
Elgin Lessley and Byron Houck shot the booth, the street tailing of the sheik, and the dream film, including the cut that puts Keaton inside the movie he is projecting.
Music
Silent, with English intertitles.
Preservation
The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1991. Prints of the five-reel picture survive, including an Internet Archive copy.
Notes
- Grabbing a water spout from a moving boxcar, Keaton took a blast harder than the gag called for and struck his neck on a rail. He finished the scene. A 1935 X-ray found a fractured vertebra from that fall.
- Kathryn McGuire is the girl, Ward Crane the rival, Joe Keaton the father.
- In 2000 the American Film Institute ranked it 62nd on 100 Years…100 Laughs.
Scenes
- The sheik slips the pawn ticket into the projectionist’s pocket.
- Asleep in the booth, Keaton climbs into the film and the scenery keeps changing under him.
- Poison and the number 13 ball fail to kill Sherlock Jr.
- He wakes and copies the screen lovers’ gestures with the girl.
Also available
- Internet Archive (sherlockjr1924_201909)
- Wikimedia Commons (Sherlock Jr. (1924).webm)
