by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles came home from work just in time to join me for the
silent short TCM was showing to fill out their “feature,” The Ace of Hearts (a 1921 Goldwyn Pictures production of a play by
future screenwriter Gouverneur — pronounced “governor” — Morris, whose
Colonial-era namesake had been one of the drafters of the U.S. Constitution): The
Scarecrow, a marvelous 1920 short starring
and co-directed by “Buster” Keaton (that’s how he was billed then, with his
first name — the nickname bestowed on him by family friend Harry Houdini when
he saw the boy take a big pratfall as part of his act with his parents and
said, “Wow! What a buster!” — billed in quotes). It was made in the heady early
days of his independent filmmaking career under producer Joseph M. Schenck, who
had first encountered Keaton as a supporting player in the shorts he was making
with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. When Arbuckle’s zooming popularity propelled him
into feature-length films for a heady two years from 1920 to 1922 until the
scandal that cut short his career, Schenck had Keaton take over the shorts
series and Keaton made an hilarious debut with One Week (1920), in which Keaton and Sybil Seely play
newlyweds. Keaton’s father-in-law has given the couple a prefabricated house
and a lot to put it on, but the guy Seely jilted to marry Keaton is still upset
and for revenge mixes up the instructions on the house so it ends up looking
like no habitable structure in history. Seely turns up again in The
Scarecrow, in which Keaton and Joe Roberts
play farmhands who both are romantically interested in the daughter (Seely) of
the farmer they’re working for, played by Keaton’s father Joe. Joe Keaton and
his wife Myra pressed Buster into service in their acrobatic vaudeville act
when Buster was three, and at the peak of their fame they were billed as “The
Three Keatons, featuring Buster, the Human Mop.” Keaton inherited quite a lot
from his father, including a talent for slapstick and, alas, a taste for
alcohol; Buster departed his dad’s act when he could no longer trust that his
increasingly inebriated dad could maintain the split-second timing required to
perform the act without dropping and injuring him, and in the early 1930’s
Buster himself resorted to the bottle after both his independent career and his
marriage collapsed. (With Buster’s typical laconicism and utter lack of
sentimentality, in a later interview he said of this period in his life, “I
wasn’t an alcoholic — I was a drunk!”),
though in this film and several others in which Buster cast his dad one can see
where his style of performing came from.
The Scarecrow opens with a blatantly phony (almost certainly on
purpose) effects shot of a sunrise and a title indicating that all the rooms in
the house we’re about to see are one room — and then we see Buster Keaton and
Joe Roberts having breakfast together in a room with an elaborate series of
pull-strings and multipurpose appliances, including a phonograph that converts
into an oven and a table that, when the meal is finished, rises to the top of
the wall and becomes a large sampler reading, “What is home without Mother?” In
the meantime Keaton and Roberts serve themselves rolls from a miniature
railroad car, pull strings for the salt and pepper (the condiments go flying
through the air on their strings as the two men pass them to each other), and
even have a napkin on a flying string with which they can each wipe their
mouths during the meal. When they have to throw out the garbage, a lever
directly delivers it to the slop pan for the farm’s pigs; and when they drain
the dishwater it becomes a duck pond (which Keaton, of course, falls into
during a later slapstick scene). Keaton did these gags even better in a later
short, The Electric House, and
it’s possible that (as Charles suggested) they have their roots in vaudeville
and in particular the illusions created by stage magicians like the Keatons’
family friend, Houdini — but no vaudeville act would have possibly carted
around a giant and incredibly elaborate set like the one here. The
Scarecrow earns its title from a later
scene in which Keaton — having first been chased by a local dog (including a
hair-raising sequence in which the two of them run around the top walls of a
building which has lost its ceiling) and then made friends with it — is
disguised as a scarecrow to spy on Roberts as he woos Seely, the farmer’s
daughter; when Roberts gets too close for Keaton’s liking, the “scarecrow”
suddenly comes to life and kicks him. When Keaton drops to one knee to tie his
shoe, the girl thinks he’s proposing and actually accepts him — and there’s a
final chase scene in which Keaton commandeers a motorcycle and sidecar, then
literally runs into a minister and has him pronounce the marriage ceremony as
the cycle rides off and, out of control, ultimately drives into a lake just as
the preacher emerges to pronounce him and Seely man and wife: a marriage and a
baptism in one package deal! The Scarecrow isn’t one of Keaton’s most memorable films but it’s still screamingly
funny, and watching it I couldn’t help but wish it had been Keaton instead of
Larry Semon who made the 1925 silent version of The Wizard of Oz (a messed-up movie with only incidental resemblances
to the classic story).
