In The Scarecrow, Buster Keaton gets to play around with Luke the Dog one last time. Which is nice.
After the relative disappointment of Convict 13, The Scarecrow is a pretty triumphant return to form. The plot as it is involves Buster and Joe Roberts wooing the farmer’s daughter, which culminates in a high speed wedding on the back of a motorbike, which is exciting enough, but the lead up to that is also probably the most consistently funny Buster Keaton film I’ve seen, with almost constant invention and boatloads of charm in just about every single scene.
There’s even some piglets. I like piglets.
So yeah this one’s great. Hooray.
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Notes
1. I watched this on blu-ray, but grabbed the screenshots from this version on youtube
2. This was the first Buster Keaton film I ever saw.
3. And I loved it just as much now as I did then.
5. What I noticed this time (that I had no scope of reference to notice last time), is how easily this one could have been another Fatty Arbuckle Buster Keaton double bill.
6. With Joe Roberts here in the Fatty Arbuckle role.
7. There’s the big man/small man dynamic, the chasing after a girl, Luke the Dog, everything.
8. Joe Roberts even does the coy, fluttering eyelids, thing when he sees Sybil Seely for the first time.
9. Although if this was still a Fatty Arbuckle production it’d have been him getting married at the end I suppose.
10. And also there’d probably have been at least one seen where he does something sort of stomach churningly crass, I suppose.
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Film Information
Title: The Scarecrow
Directors: Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline
Year: 1920
Duration: 20 minutes
Watch: youtube