Sherlock Jr. Review

Keaton said the whole picture existed for one idea: a projectionist falls asleep, and his dream self walks down the aisle and into the movie on the screen. Then the film cuts, and the world cuts around him: a garden bench becomes a city street, a cliff edge, a clearing full of lions, a desert, a rock in the sea, while Keaton holds his place in the frame, each position lined up with surveyor's instruments. It is film grammar turned into slapstick.

The dream half parodies a detective serial with gags stacked like a card trick: a pool game with a 13 ball rigged to explode, a leap into a small suitcase that swallows him whole, and a ride on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle through traffic and a line of ditch diggers. Keaton broke his neck on the shoot, under a water tower spout, and did not find out for years.

Preview audiences gasped more than they laughed, and Variety found it as funny as a hospital operating room. It placed 59th in Sight and Sound's 2012 critics' poll, and Woody Allen reversed its premise for The Purple Rose of Cairo. The plot is a pretext and the title cards sparse, but at 45 minutes there is no fat.