Can’t go wrong with this one. Probably Buster’s most astounding technical cinematic feat, with its veritable cornucopia of Busters, and it’s darn funny to boot. One of my favorite shorts of his – it never fails to amaze me.
Thinking about it now, the plot is thinner than in many of Buster’s shorts. While the recurring gags rise and fall masterfully, the story is mainly a series of vignettes centered around the hustle and bustle of a vaudeville playhouse (like the Fatty Arbuckle short Back Stage, it draws a lot of inspiration from Buster’s childhood experiences.) Buster plays an intrepid stage hand who, despite his talent for fouling up any act he comes near, continues to find new ways for the show to go on. Meanwhile, he deals with the pitfalls of being in love with one half of a twin act.
This short, of course, is most famous for its tour-de-force opening sequence, in which Buster dreams that he’s everyoneat the playhouse: a bevy of audience members, the conductor, every person in the pit band, the backstage crew, a dancing duo, and a nine-man minstrel act (yeah – not cool. That said, it’s mercifully short, and while the blackface is obviously terrible, the acting/jokes don’t seem pointedly offensive.) When we think of how impressive it can be to see the same actor performing opposite themselves on camera today – like on Orphan Black, where the double-/triple-/quadrupling is so seamless – seeing Buster do it in 1921 is practically magic. They’re all Buster, every last one of them. The man danced to a metronome to make sure he’d be in step with himself, shot anywhere from one-half to one-ninth of the frame at a time, and employed a cameraman who could hand-crank the film at preciselythe same speed in every take.
(I should point out that The Playhousehappened because Buster broke his ankle filming an aborted version of The Electric House and couldn’t do serious stunts or tumbling until it healed. First, I guess necessity really is the mother of invention, and second, this is what Buster taking it easylooks like, people – playing more than 20 characters in the same short!)
But it’s not just a technical marvel. It’s also delightfully funny, both in the dream sequence and in the rest of the short. I love all the Buster’s little touches throughout the dream, particularly the various gags in the pit – I like the conductor continually scratching his back with his baton and the clarinetist playing so hard he almost drops his clarinet – and the nicely-differentiated audience members. Later, there are some fun twin gags (including the hilarious closing image,) an amusing chase, an aquatic escape, an original and alarming application of breaking glass in case of emergency, and Buster doing an absolute bang-up job of pretending to be a monkey. Also, there’s a pair of one-armed veterans in the audience who both applaud by clapping the other guy’s hand, and they just kill me.
Unsurprisingly, we see a couple of familiar faces. Big Joe Roberts plays the temperamental stage manager (although to be fair, with Buster as a stage hand, he has good reason to be temperamental,) and Virginia Fox appears as the twin Buster has his eye on.
Warnings
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