Our Hospitality/Sherlock, Jr. [DVD]

Movie / Show Details

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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

Product Description

The art of Buster Keaton is on spectacular display in two of his finest films. The wonderful film “Our Hospitality” (1923, 75 min.) is in many ways a companion piece to Keaton’s 1926 masterpiece “The General.” It stars Buster as a New York man who returns to his southern homeland only to find himself embroiled in a longstanding feud between his family and that of the woman he loves. Perhaps no other film offers as exciting a rollercoaster ride as “Sherlock, Jr.” (1924, 44 min.). Dramatizing the uproarious exploits of a meek theater projectionist turned amateur sleuth, the film blends the knockabout physical comedy normally associated with slapstick with more subtly crafted moments of humor.