Silent Movie Monday

Tonight I went to Silent Movie Monday: A Buster Keaton Festival
An annual tradition at the historic Paramount Theatre, Silent Movie Mondays celebrates the works of Buster Keaton with ten films during the month of September. Each film is accompanied by Dennis James, on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ.



"A cinema operator falls asleep at his machine and dreams he is a great detective—the kind that only the cinema can produce"



The impeccable comedian directs himself in an impeccable silent comedy. The man with the flat hat and the dead pan face has a night job as a movie theater projectionist but daydreams about becoming a famous (and natty) master detective. In real life he is falsely accused by a shameless cad of stealing a watch from his girlfriend's father. At work that evening he sleepwalks himself into the film he's projecting (its plot eerily mirrors his real-life problem) and solves the crime in a series of magnificently imaginative, physically perilous, perfectly orchestrated gags. Things work out all right for him as well in the waking world. Is this, as some critics have argued, an example of primitive American surrealism? Sure. But let's not get fancy about it. It is more significantly, a great example of American minimalism—simple objects and movement manipulated in casually complex ways to generate a steadily rising gale of laughter. The whole thing is only 45 minutes long, not a second of which is wasted. In an age when most comedies are all windup and no punch, this is the most treasurable of virtues.