Top Five Gags: Hard Luck

 March 14^th, 1921 – the day Hard Luck was released. Its ending was famously lost for years, but a muddy archive print of the final gag was discovered a few years ago. Kind of a middling Buster Keaton short, if only because it’s not as tight or cohesive as some of his best. But even if the various meandering directions it takes don’t all quite hang together, there are still some spectacular gags here (spoilers.)

 

Hanging Fail

The series of failed suicide attempts in the first part of the short are some of my favorite bits in this one. I get a kick out of Buster using the noose he’s made to hoist himself up to the tree branch like a pulley, and his “goodbye, cruel world” blown kiss winds up being for naught when he realizes he never actually tied the rope to the branch. Whoops!

 

Car Fail

Another failed suicide attempt. This is a great sight gag – seeing headlights approaching in the darkness, Buster runs out into the road, but it turns out to be, not a car, but two motorcycles, who naturally swerve around at either side of him.

 

Going After Big Fish

This one’s a classic. Buster goes fishing, putting each fish he catches back on his hook as bait for an even bigger one, until he inevitably hooks something too big and it drags him into the water before breaking his line. The penultimate fish is so absurdly enormous, and the extra little business of Buster tenaciously trying to find the time to roll and light a cigarette between reels puts it over the top.

 

The Uncooperative Stirrup

Roped into an unexpected fox hunt, Buster struggles with his horse, whose stirrup is made of some kind of stretchy material that won’t give Buster any leverage for a leg up. Ever resourceful, Buster finds a number of creative ways to mount his horse over the ensuing sequence. I especially like him hooking the stirrup onto his foot from the ground level and “riding” it up to the saddle (I can’t describe it – it has to be seen,) as well as clambering up the horse’s neck while it’s bending down to eat grass. Bonus points for producing a saltshaker out of his pocket (of course) to season the grass first!

 

Rigging the Shotgun

When the unsavory Big Joe Roberts and his gang take over the country club and kidnap Virginia Fox (there’s always gotta be some kind of peril,) Buster uses his ingenuity to try and save the day. Unable to get a clear shot at Big Joe without hitting Virginia, he mounts the gun onto the wall, rigs up a rope system to the trigger, and then goads Big Joe into stepping into the line of fire. Unfortunately for Buster, tugging on the rope isn’t enough to make the gun go off – and that’s including when Big Joe unwittingly tries to do it too! It doesn’t defeat the bad guys, but it’s still very funny. I also love Buster’s attempt to casually stroll away when he realizes it’s not working. Total Buster move.

Hard Luck (1921)

Hard Luck is a bit of an odd short for Buster.  Like some of his other midrange work (The Goat comes to mind,) its construction feels haphazard at times, but it has a host of topnotch gags and comic business.  That makes its quality hard to classify.  While it’s not up there with the greats like (for me) Neighbors or The Scarecrow, it’s way too funny to discount.

As the title suggests, Buster plays a down-on-his-luck fellow here.  Everything has been going wrong, and as a result, he’s decided to take matters into his own hands and off himself.  However, his luck isn’t any better when it comes to committing suicide than it is with anything else, and he’s continually thwarted in his efforts.  In time, though, he’s swept up in an adventure involving a beautiful girl who might just have renewed his will to live.

The main detractor here is the meandering plot.  There are four or five major sequences making up this short, and while I see the thin but plausible threads connecting each one, I don’t know why these particular sequences were put together in the first place.  There’s no real reason for a man hellbent on killing himself to end up on a fox hunt, for instance.  Hard Luck isn’t the only Buster short where the story jumps around, but it’s the one where it feels most noticeable to me.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe because the premise is laid out so clearly at the beginning, and it’s almost entirely dropped for at least half of the short?  At the same time, the failed-suicide-plots conceit wouldn’t have been enough to carry the whole short on its own – while darkly funny, it’s not a story in and of itself, so it definitely needed something more.

But although the short is rather a miss in terms of story, its comedy is first-rate.  All the suicide gags are grim but hilarious, from Buster’s “goodbye, cruel world” blown-kiss farewell in his aborted hanging attempt to the sheer refusal of any vehicle to run him over.  Naturally, it’s not until he’s prepared to live that he finds himself in any real danger – he nearly blows himself with his own campfire, and who but Buster could accidentally tied themselves to a bear?  Disaster-prone doesn’t begin to cover it.  And really, the gags are fantastic throughout, even in sequences that feel extraneously to the story.  I’ve mentioned before how much I love the recurring gag of Buster trying to mount his much-too-big horse with faulty stirrups (the fact that he keeps coming up with new ways to mount after he’s already found a method that works is so, so Buster,) and the scene where he somersaults through a window just in time to receive a cup of tea is as funny as it is precisely-executed.  The short’s ending gag is most of Buster’s most famous, perhaps in part because it was thought lost for a number of years.  In Kino Video’s boxed set of Buster’s independent shorts and features, intertitles explain the missing gag and offer a surviving photo for a visual, but the scene has since been recovered and can be found online.

The short also features – who else? – Big Joe Roberts and Virgina Fox.  Roberts’s outlaw villain here is just shy of a mustache-twirler, and it’s the first role that usually comes to mind when I think of his work with Buster.  And Virginia Fox as the latest “girl” actually gets a bit of physical comedy.  It makes me smile when she tumbles headfirst over the back of the couch.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and gunplay, plus an implied lecherous rogue of a villain.