Seven Chances (Joseph M. science Prudictions, Metro-Goldwyn, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When the projectionist cued up the opening of Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925), a lot of people in the audience were surprised to see that the main credits were in color. Raúl Prieto Ramírez, who has the annoying habit of thinking he knows more about absolutely everything than anyone else, immediately decided that the film must have been colorized and made a bad joke about it. In fact the opening sequence was actually shot in two-strip Technicolor (to my knowledge Keaton is the only one of the great silent comedians to use two-strip Technicolor), and though the sequence is badly faded (and no one involved ih Keaton’s cinematic legacy has tried to restore it), it’s still a charming prologue in which Jimmie Shannon (Buster Keaton) keeps showing up at the flower-strewn cottage where his wanna-be girlfriend Mary (Ruth Dwyer) lives but is too shy to tell her he loves her. He brings along a dog, and as the year progresses the dog gets noticeably larger in each scene. Seven Chances is not a Buster Keaton original; it was originally a Broadway play by David Belasco (who’s probably most famous today for the two plays, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West, which were turned into operas by Puccini) and a writer named Roi Cooper Negrue gets credit for adapting it for the screen. (Negrue died in 1927 at age 44, though seven of his 12 credits on imdb.com are for films made later than that, including The Bachelor, a 1999 remake of Seven Chances with Chris O’Donnell in the Keaton role.) Regular Keaton collaborators Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell get credit for the actual screenplay, though given the way comedy movies were usually written in the silent days they were most likely part of a writers’ room (originally invented by Mack Sennett, by the way) with Keaton himself in overall charge.

The plot kicks off when an attorney shows up at the offices of Meekin (T. Roy Barnes) and Shannon. A title explains that the firm “had been tricked into a financial deal that meant disgrace – and possibly prison – unless they raised money quickly.” Needless to say, both Shannon and Meekin run away from the lawyer, thinking he must be a process server connected with the deal that threatens them with disgrace and possibly prison. The attorney finally shows up and tells Jimmie that he’s in line for a $7 million inheritance, but only if he’s married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday. “Whern is your 27th birthday?” Meekin asks Shannon. “Today,” Jimmie shame-facedly tells his partner. He first runs over to Mary, the woman he actually loves, but she’s predictably upset when he tells her about the inheritance and she assumes he just wants to marry her for the money. Meekin offers Jimmie the titular “seven chances” – single women from his little black book – but he strikes out with all of them, including one who tears up the “Will you marry me?” note he wrote her and drops the teared pieces over him, where they fall in a slow-motion pattern two years before Josef von Sternberg did a similar effect with the feathers in Evelyn Brent’s boa in the film Underworld. There’s a famous scene in which Jimmie approaches a theatre stage door with a portrait of an attractive woman on the bill – only it turns out to be Julian Eltinge, a famous female impersonator of the time, and Jimmie leaves after clearly having been beaten up by Eltinge. (One wonders who the writers of The Bachelor used for this gag – assuming they kept it in. Maybe RuPaul.)

Meekin goes to the offices of the local evening paper and gets them to print a story about Jimmie’s predicament – and literally hundreds of women in bridal gowns and veils show up at the Broad Street Church to see if they can grab him and a share of his millions. (Before that we’ve seen Jimmie finger two train tickets: “Niagara Falls,” the famous honeymoon destination, and “Reno,” the equally famous locale for divorces.) When Jimmie arrives at the church he sits alone in one of the pews and falls asleep; when he wakes up the church is full of would-be brides and the minister tells them they’ve been the victims of a practical joke. The brides-to-be chase Jimmie through the streets and are angry enough to tear him limb from limb. Jimmie flees them, in that remarkable way Buster Keaton had of running – with his legs moving with the regularity of pistons – and he stumbles into a construction site and is literally lifted off by a crane and swung overhead in mid-air by one of the women who has taken it over. (As usual, Keaton did this stunt himself and it was every bit as dangerous as it looks on screen.) Amazingly, when Keaton previewed the film, the chase scene, with the women showing the same grim determination to get him the police showed in his marvelous 1922 short Cops (a wickedly funny parody of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 – the radical politics in Keaton’s films may not have been as obvious as they were in Chaplin’s, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there!), almost nobody in the audience laughed. The only laugh Keaton’s antics got was when he tripped over three rocks on screen, and the rocks rolled towards him.

Realizing that he had to take desperate measures to save the film, Keaton decided to build a whole series of papier-maché rocks and have them chase him as well, producing one of the most audacious comedy scenes in film history. Meanwhile, Jimmie’s girlfriend Mary has thought the better of her rejection and sends a Black servant on horseback to “ride like the wind” to catch Jimmie and give him a note that she’ll marry him after all, only he takes the slowest horse in creation and at one point he misses Jimmie’s car as it zips by. Meekin gathers up the minister from the church and tells Jimmie he’ll have the officiant at Mary’s house if he can make it by 7 – only he just misses the deadline and he thinks he’s sunk. Mary offers to marry him even if he ends up penniless, disgraced and possibly imprisoned, but at the last minute Jimmie looks at a public clock in the town square and it says it’s still a couple of minutes before 7. The two finally get married, and the dog from the prologue shows up and is now enormous. I have no idea how close Seven Chances is to the Belasco play on which it was nominally based, but I suspect Keaton and his crew radically reshaped it to turn it into a Keaton vehicle – and as such it’s a masterpiece, a brilliantly funny film that’s remarkable for the sheer audacity of the gags and the marvelous way they’re staged so they build on each other – a seemingly lost art of comedy construction, though I remember Charles and I going to the old library and seeing Scott Prendergast’s great 2007 comedy Kabluey, a brilliant satire of the dot-com boom and bust, and the number of ruined lives it left in its wake. Like Chaplin and Keaton, Prendergast directed his film as well as starring in it, and he created an old-style comedy even though the content was up-to-date.