Sherlock Jr & Our Hospitality (2pc)

Sherlock Jr & Our Hospitality (2pc)
Buster Keaton's second feature, Our Hospitality is his first masterpiece. He plays a New York city boy who travels south to receive his inheritance, only to discover he's in the center of a generations-old feud. While his sworn enemies (the family of the girl he has fallen in love with, naturally) vow to gun him down, Southern hospitality forbids them from harming him as long as he's a guest in their home. Plenty of comic mileage is mined from Buster's desperate attempts to prolong his stay, and highlights include a deliriously surreal train (run by Keaton's father, Joe) and a heroic rescue involving a rope, a log, and a mighty waterfall.

Sherlock Jr. is a delightfully surreal fantasy of a film projectionist and amateur detective who climbs into his movie screen. Like Daffy Duck in the famous cartoon "Duck Amuck," Buster is at the mercy of sudden scene changes, sent from desert to snowstorm to lake in simple cuts while he remains helplessly fixed onscreen. (Even more astounding is that he accomplished this engineering marvel with nothing more than surveyor's tools and an exacting eye.) Settling into his dream role as a master detective and society bon vivant Sherlock Jr., he chases the dastardly villains in a world as wild and unpredictable as the French serial Les Vampires: bombs are hidden in billiard balls and Keaton leaps through the torso of a peddler woman and into nothingness! No other silent film turns logic on its head with such grace and comic hilarity. --Sean Axmaker
Customer Review: And from here what?
I saw "Sherlock Jr." some years ago when I was in film school, and it stayed with me ever since. I was curious about the "Other" feature in the DVD they played to us. So here I am, watching "Our Hospitality". The marvelous gags are something that you expect from Keaton, and also some spectacular slapstick. What took me by surprise was the incredibly dangerous stunts near the end of the film. Talk about a cliffhanger! If you are somebody that only likes summer popcorn movies from the 2000s, you still owe to yourself to watch the climax of "Our Hospitality". You will be not disappointed. (Think about Tom Cruise at the end of "Mission Impossible", but done in 1923, and probably better).
Customer Review: Two of Keaton's best feature films
These two films were made sequentially - "Our Hospitality" in late 1923, and "Sherlock Jr." in early 1924. "Our Hospitality" was Keaton's second feature film after he went from making two-reel (20 minute) short films to feature films in 1923. It is a comic take-off on the Hatfield and McCoy feud of the 1880's, but here Keaton takes you back to 1830, primarily so he can introduce the main mechanical gag of the film, - a mechanically-accurate faithful re-creation of the early locomotive - Stephenson's Rocket. The train moves so slowly that Keaton's dog runs alongside the train and has no trouble keeping up. The jist of the story is that Keaton plays Willie McKay, the surviving McKay after the McKay/Canfield feud of roughly twenty years before. Willie travels to his ancestral home in Appalachia to inspect some property he's inherited, and on the journey there begins to fall for the young lady with whom he is traveling. She turns out to be a Canfield, and when her brothers find out that a McKay is in town they go for their guns. However, the patriarch of the family (Big Joe Roberts) warns his sons that it is against their code of hospitality to shoot someone inside of their house. Willie, who has been invited to dinner, learns of all of this and does his best to not leave the house. The other feature, Sherlock Jr., is only 45 minutes long. It actually failed when it was released, but today it is considered ground-breaking. Keaton performs some stunts such as appearing to jump through a woman backed up against a fence that remained a secret for years. He also, at the beginning of the film, jumps into a motion picture that is running in the theatre where he works as a projectionist. Once on the movie screen, Keaton has to adjust his strategy as the scene changes from the front steps of a house, to the edge of a cliff, to a lion's den. The presence of interesting film tricks doesn't mean the absence of a plot though. The film is about a boy (Keaton) who dreams of being a great detective. The girl he pursues is also sought after by a dishonest employee of her father's who frames Keaton's character for a theft. As a result he is ordered to never to return to the girl's home again. The boy goes back to his job as a projectionist, falls asleep, and dreams of being a great detective - Sherlock Jr. If you're unfamiliar with Keaton's work, this is a good place to start. These DVDs were released when DVD technology was relatively new, so the pictures are not as crisp as perhaps they could be. However, the video quality is still quite good. My main complaint would be that Kino didn't put any kind of extras or commentary on this disc.