This is a
fun one. I admittedly have very little
experience with early television, so I can’t speak to how common or uncommon
this might have been at the time, but I like how the show is just such a
free-for-all. Yes, there’s a little bit
of familiarity – often opening on the sporting goods store location – but this
is a show that does whatever it pleases in terms of plot leanings. Between this series and The Buster Keaton Show, we’ve seen an “African” expedition, some
rough ‘n’ tumble fighting, and now, in this episode, a noir-ish gumshoe spoof.
Buster
has to stay late at the store to accommodate a delivery, and while he’s
waiting, his imagination runs away with him thanks to a detective serial on the
radio. He envisions himself as Sam
Keaton, a purportedly ingenius detective who is much more impressive in theory
than in execution. Naturally, a
mysterious plot involving a knife in the back, a dame, and a Maltese canary
falls in his lap, and he’s hot on the case.
Sherlock Jr. is of course going to be the first
thing that comes to mind here, and the basic set-up is fairly similar, with Buster dreaming of himself as a detective,
but the two works are different enough that I wouldn’t really say this episode
borrows much from that film. The major
difference is in the genre that’s being sent up. While Sherlock Jr. is a suave gentleman
detective, Sherlock Holmes with just a dash of James Bond, Sam Keaton
definitely takes his cues from film noir.
So even though both plots involve a mystery and an investigation, the
atmospheres are completely different.
Overall,
I’d say it’s an amusing send-up. The
episode does seem awfully padded, like they couldn’t stretch out the concept to
a full 25 minutes – there’s some weird stuff with puppets in the middle that
really feels like playing for time – but during the parts when it’s more on the
mark, it does its job pretty handily. I
like the running gag of Buster narrating the dream in that classic noir
detective style, with just enough winking thrown in to make it fun; I
especially enjoy the bits where Buster narrates something definitively,
realizes that what’s happening onscreen doesn’t match what he said, then
hastily rephrases it.
The
actual mystery itself isn’t much, a bit of mysteriousness and a lot of film
nods wrapped around a flimsy excuse for Buster to play detective. Because that’s really the point here – Buster
playing a hardened gumshoe positively straight but making a hash of it to get
us to the comedy. Nothing too
substantial here, but it’s a nice bit of fun.
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