Three Ages in many ways straddles the line
between a short and a feature. After
all, an hour-long film that tells the same story three times in different
settings is essentially three two-reel shorts, divided into segments. The gags also feel more reminiscent of a
short, silly bits that Buster would call “cartoon gags.” The features that came afterword are
definitely funnier and better made, but there’s still good comedy to be found
here.
Stone Age Calling Card
I get a
huge kick out of the Stone-Age and Roman-Age anachronisms, and this one might
be my favorite of all: Buster presenting
his “card” before entering someone else’s cave.
The fact that it’s a stone tablet is funny enough, but I love that it’s just a very simple
carving of his face.
Collapsing Automobile
No idea
how he did this one. Normally, with the
really impressive bits, it’s easy to find the play-by-play for how Buster made
it happen, but I’ve never found an explanation for how he got that car to fall
to pieces. The sight gag is absurd, and
the timing is just impeccable (and I wouldn’t have thought collapsing cars were
known for their comic timing!)
Chariot Race
There
are some fun chariot sight gags earlier in the film (I love that each of his
four horses/donkeys are such mismatched sizes, and the spare wheel on the back
cracks me up,) but this whole sequence is terrific. The old Buster ingenuity is in full force
here, swapping out his wheels for skis and his horses for dogs when the big
race comes on the heels of a blizzard. I
also love that he has a “spare” here as well, an extra dog to trade places when
one gets tired.
Police Chase
The
mere fact of this fantastic circular gag that takes Buster from the police
station, across the city, and back again is awesome enough; the transitions of
falling in through the open window, sliding down the firemen’s pole, dropping
onto the fire truck, and riding straight back to the burning police station are
pitch-perfect. But, of course, it’s made
even better by the rooftop-jump that Buster doesn’t make, the one he was supposed to clear and was laid up for a
few days over. He decided the footage of
him missing the ledge was funnier than it would’ve been to make it and shot a
few extra gags to show how he broke his fall.
Now that’s the mother of
invention!
In the Lions’ Den
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