Neighbors (1920)

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

Slapstick violence and some racially-insensitive humor.