SHERLOCK JR.

This marvellous comedy by the great Buster Keaton starts off quietly enough with an amusing routine with Buster (a cinema projectionist and all-round dogsbody) sweeping rubbish and finding some money.

From there the story proper starts with us meeting Buster's girl and the rival for her affections, the villain of the piece who steals a watch belonging to the girl's father and then frames Buster.

Fortunately Buster is an amateur sleuth and so armed with his guide as to how to be a detective he sets about clearing his name, which leads to another amusing sequence of him tailing the villain.  

This doesn't prove successful and somewhat discouraged he goes back to the cinema where the film showing happens to be a murder mystery.  At this point Buster falls asleep in the projection room and his dream self enters the film as the renowned detective Sherlock Jr. 

 It's a meta idea which Woody Allen could happily use in the 1980s in ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’ but which was so ahead of its time in 1924 that one imagines that the relatively unsophisticated cinema audiences watching it then must have struggled to get their minds around what they were watching, let alone find it funny.

For example there's a terrific but surreal montage sequence in which the film environment in which Buster now finds himself keeps changing rapidly.

Naturally both Buster's girl and the villain from the real world are now in the film, as the victim of a robbery and the thief respectively.

Buster as the imperious Sherlock Jr is funny in itself and there's a lot of fun around the villain and his accomplice trying to kill the detective by means of various booby traps.  In particular there's a very funny sequence involving Sherlock playing billiards where one of the balls contains an explosive.

From there we leave the stately home so to have all sorts of high jinks and chases.

When Buster wakes up it's to learn that his girl has solved the crime and cleared Buster's name, so all's well that ends well.

The film then ends on as fine a visual joke as one could hope to see.

The film lacks any really spectacular stunt that we associate with Keaton, but it's full of all manner of comic inventiveness, with every visual gag working, as well as the wonderful dream sequence.  

It was a commercial flop, but for me it's a masterpiece which is a joy from start to finish.

RATING: ✓✓✓ Absolutely Fabulous