Convict 13 (1920)

*Disclaimer: When I first reviewed this short, I neglected to mention a racist joke involving Buster’s caddy on the golf course. It’s one that I didn’t initially connect to the caddy being Black – when he hears a whistle blow, he instantly sits down in the middle of the green, on his lunch break – but when I rewatched the short for 100 Years of Buster Keaton, I realized it was probably a link that audiences in 1920 would have made. Being a fan doesn’t mean you can’t be critical.*

 

This early Buster Keaton short is just a wonderfully good time.  It’s fun, fast, creative, and irreverent, with Buster – as usual – displaying his quick thinking almost equally with his tendency to leap from any frying pan into the fire (brief spoilers.)

When Buster knocks himself out golfing (as you do,) he’s happened upon by an escaped convict desperate to trade his striped jumpsuit for something less conspicuous.  Soon, Buster wakens a wanted man, and it’s only a matter of time before he lands in the clink.  It takes all his Busterly cunning and nerve (and a little help from his friends) to survive life on the inside.

This is a short that brims with Buster’s inventive touches.  While its various sequences are very different from one another, each leads logically into the next, and each is packed with terrifically-entertaining gags.  Off the top of my head, I love 1) Buster putting from the middle of the water hazard (and then using his club to propel/steer his raft, 2) the delightfully-long penny-drop waiting for Buster to realize he’s just landed himself in hot water, and, of course, 3) Buster taking his pulse as his heart literally beats out of his chest.  So goofy – so Buster.  There’s also a great sequence reworked from Buster’s vaudeville days involving a rubber ball on a rope that’s really well-realized, as well as nicely adapted to suit the needs of the story.  Finally, I get a huge kick out of Buster’s absolute dedication to breaking his neck for the sake of hitting a golf ball; taking such tumbles over something so inconsequential makes that sequence even funnier.

Convict 13 is sometimes talked of as one of Buster’s darker shorts, mainly because the convict who switches places with Buster was due to hang, and guess who has to go to the gallows instead?  I wonder just how far afield that was for comedy in 1920.  I did notice that the short takes care to set up and show us Buster’s “out” before the actual hanging takes place, so we know exactly what’s going to happen.  Was that needed to reassure audiences?  Would they not have accepted it as a comedy if they really worried that his character was going to die?  Granted, the hanging scene is small potatoes next to all the breaking bad Buster does a few years later in The Frozen North, but I’m sure it was still fairly radical for its day.

It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed a short with Sybil Seely playing the girl.  Every time I see her, I remember how much I like her.  Besides being cute as a button, she has a nice character to work with here, playing a smart, proactive young woman who helps Buster out of a major scrape – this is no out-of-nowhere love interest for Buster!  Big Joe Roberts is the prison’s most fiercesome inmate.  For whatever reason, as he grabs the guards coming to subdue him and tosses them around like rag dolls, I’m oddly reminded of King Kong, which is fun.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a little actual gallows humor.