Our Hospitality (1923)/Sherlock, Jr. (1924)

  I've been trying to see this Buster Keaton double feature for ages.  It's been in my queue for at least three years, just making its way up the ranks.  It finally got to the top while I was in Puerto Rico.  I got an email saying that it had shipped, then a day later, another email saying that it had been returned.  I obviously wasn't home to receive it and no one would have put it back in the mail so I don't know what happened there.  As soon as I got home, I pushed it back to the top of the queue and Netflix shipped it out again.  I've had their service for about six years now and this is the first time I've ever had this happen.  It's fixed now and everything's fine but it was very odd.

Willie McKay (Buster Keaton) was only a baby when he was sent away from his family home by his mother (Jean Dumas) in the hopes that he would never fall victim to the decades-long feud between the McKay's and their neighbors, the Canfield's.  When he becomes an adult, Willie receives a letter from a lawyer to come and claim his father's estate, so he travels back to his original town.  He meets a young lady (Natalie Talmadge) on the train and falls in love.  Unfortunately, she turns out to be the only daughter of the Canfield's and her father (Joe Roberts) and brothers (Ralph Bushman and Craig Ward) have vowed to murder Willie and put an end to the McKay line.  Willie is invited to dinner by the Girl, which stymies her relatives who cannot offer a guest violence while he is under their roof.  Willie overhears this and must come up with increasingly ridiculous reasons not to leave their property.

Buster Keaton was an early master of physical comedy and this movie holds up just as well today as it did in the 20's.  The parody aspect is well done, all the jokes land, and the scenes in the river are just as tense.  I also found it an added amusement to see Keaton, who was 5'5", standing next to his beloved's brothers, who were 6'2" and probably 6'0"  (I say probably because Craig Ward's IMDb page is incomplete and he doesn't exist in Wikipedia, but based on him standing next to Bushman, I'd guess he was two inches shorter.)  You don't see that kind of height disparity much in movies anymore.  

  A poor film projectionist (Buster Keaton) longs to be a detective but can barely make enough to woo his girl (Kathryn McGuire), especially once he is framed for theft by a disreputable ladies' man called the Sheik (Ward Crane).  Disheartened, the projectionist falls asleep during one of his shifts and dreams that he is world-famous detective Sherlock, Jr. and on the case of a missing string of pearls, which necessitates a car chase, disguises, and a showdown with the villain to rescue the girl.

This is also a very entertaining film, but I don't think it survives at quite the same level as Our Hospitality.  The "movie within a movie" bit has been done so much since 1924 that seeing it here feels a little old hat.  The physical comedy is still top-notch but the plot is pretty weak.  As a double feature, though, these are a great pair of movies.