Life with Buster Keaton: Unknown Episode Title 2 (1951)

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.