Director: Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline
Cast: Buster Keaton, Margaret Leahy, Wallace Beery, Lillian Lawrence
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: It would be pretty impossible to say that one might have a bad time during a Buster Keaton movie. Perhaps eve more than his contemporaries, Keaton just looks funny. He can stand there in his iconic pork pie, or a toga, or a pelt (in this instance), and people are laughing. Chaplin always had a wry awareness of the creation of his pathos, Harold Lloyd was always more willing to go the extra mile to make people think he might be truly insane, but for a century, no one has forgotten to laugh at Buster Keaton. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that if someone can make a person laugh more than a century after doing the thing that was supposed to be funny, that is a unique kind of magic. To my mind, those three people I’ve mentioned—with Keaton in the lead—and Mark Twain are capable of that sort of sorcery.
One might complain that the disjointed nature of the movie doesn’t quite come together like the great features of the era, but I would say that this very nearly qualifies as the first sketch comedy film, and its influence is certainly present in later movies like History of the World - Part I (1981).
But what I was most impressed by the film was in its special effects. Stop-motion animation for dinosaur appearances probably didn’t pass muster 100 years ago, but they probably play for just as many laughs then as they do now as well. Scenes depicting the Roman Empire have a surprising degree of production value. If I don’t quite believe that Buster Keaton exists among the gladiators, I find the degree to which they tried the most memorable thing about the film.