This
short just screams Buster to me. It’s
one of my favorite shorts of his – so funny, so imaginative. The mechanical gags are fun, the circular
gags are topnotch, and the human-ladder climax is a positive showstopper.
Buster
is hopelessly in love with the girl next door, but their feuding fathers
threaten to keep them apart (not unlike Our
Hospitality and Steamboat Bill, Jr.
– Buster really liked Romeo and Juliet stories.) Passing notes through holes in the fence that
separates them and using their families’ shared clothesline as a means of
transport, they make every effort for love to win out.
The
gags in this short just sparkle, coming hard, fast, and funny throughout. There are some fantastic creative touches,
like Buster getting strung along the clothesline by his girl’s father, and the
human-ladder getaway has to be seen to be believed. The dialogue gets in some fun zingers,
too. It kills me when Buster’s dad,
trying to get him unstuck from the mud, angrily dismisses his neighbor’s advice
with, “He’s my son and I’ll break his
neck any way I please!” More points for
the human fly-swatter, the beltless wedding (oh my goodness, so funny,) and Buster’s ability to
baffle a police officer by only wiping half
his face clean of black (brown?) paint.
Speaking
of police, this isn’t Buster’s earliest short dealing with cops – that would be
Convict 13 – but it’s the first to
feature his patented pursued-by-officers-of-the-law street chases, which he
later employs so well in The Goat and
Cops.
Some of the cop gags are excellent; my favorite is Buster’s break into a
“don’t mind me, nothing to see here” jig when he accidentally stumbles upon one
of the police he’d thought he evaded. This
whole sequence is a bit of a detour as far as the story goes, but each part is
so fun and flows so well into the next that I don’t mind.
However,
I should mention that this short has some of the most racial humor to be found
in Buster’s work, and, since this was 1920, that can get uncomfortable. For the most part, I’m okay with the cops
mistaking Buster for a Black man when his face is covered in mud or dark paint,
because the joke is on the cops rather than Black people. The (Black) man originally nabbed for Buster’s
unintentional thwacking of a police officer gets away, and he later watches in
amusement as Buster confuses the cop with his half-and-half face. For me, the most insensitive part comes
later, when Buster hides in a Black woman’s laundry. As he rises, still covered by a white bed sheet,
the woman and her family all run away from the “ghost.” To be fair, the number of people, white or
Black, who appear to believe in ghosts in silent comedies seems to be wildly
disproportionate to the actual numbers, and Buster himself does his own “ghost
fright” double-takes in some of his movies, but doing the same gag with a Black
family feels stereotypical and uncool to me.
Virginia
Fox is cute as a button and a real delight as Buster’s girl. Big Joe Roberts plays her dad, and art
imitates life with Buster’s actual father Joe playing his dad here; their comic
roughhousing together doesn’t miss a step.
Warnings
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