Sherlock, Jr. (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1924)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Immigrant the Spreckels Organ Society showed one of the most amazing films ever made: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), one of Keaton’s two best movies (The General is the other) and an audacious film about dreams and their power. The opening is an inspired framing sequence in which Keaton plays a small-town movie projectionist who’s showing a crime melodrama called Hearts and Pearls, produced by “Veronal Pictures.” (Veronal was one of the first sleeping pills marketed in the U.S. and Keaton obviously chose the name for its appropriateness in a film whose second half is the hero’s dream.) The impoverished Keaton is wooing a small-town girl (Kathryn McGuire), only he has a rival, an unscrupulous “sheik” (the success of Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film The Sheik had established “sheik” as a slang term for any unscrupulous young man who pretends to be rich in order to attract a woman) played by Ward Crane. Crane’s character steals a pocket watch belonging to McGuire’s father (played by Keaton’s real-life father Joe; Keaton’s real name was Joseph Frank Keaton VII and his dad was Joseph Frank Keaton VI) and pawns it to buy McGuire a $3 box of chocolates. Keaton is short $1 for the purchase price of the big fancy box, and though he seems to have made up for it when he finds an extra $1 in the trash he’s swept up at the movie theatre where he works, he gets a sob story from a young woman who pleads with him to return the dollar she lost. Then Keaton gets the same sob story from another woman who says she lost $1 in the theatre’s trash. After that Keaton encounters a man who seems to saying that he, too, lost $1 – only when Keaton offers him his last dollar, the man indignantly turns it down and combs through the trash for his lost wallet, which contains a formidable bankroll. Keaton goes back to the candy store, buys a cheaper $1 box, and alters the price on it to $4. He gives the box to McGuire, only he's upstaged when the sheik enters with the $3 box and slips the pawn ticket into Keaton’s jacket pocket. Dad catches Keaton with the pawn ticket, assumes he stole the watch, and bars him from the house again.

A disconsolate Keaton ends up in a chase scene in which he tails Crane’s character and passes by a train that’s being filled with water from a spout. Keaton designed a dangerous gag sequence that involved him being pushed to the ground full-force by the water from the tower, and that night he had splitting headaches but returned to work the next day. Eleven years later, Keaton was undergoing a routine medical examination when the doctor X-rayed him and asked, “When did you break your neck?” Keaton said, “I never broke my neck.” “Oh, yes, you did,” the doctor said, and showed him the X-rays to prove it. Then Keaton flashed back to the Sherlock, Jr. shoot and realized that that must have been when, where, and how he broke his neck. Ultimately Keaton’s character retreats to his job as a projectionist, and he literally falls asleep during the movie and dreams his way into the film. There’s a marvelous shot in which a dream-image Keaton emerges from the sleeping real one and grabs a dream-image porkpie hat from the rack in the projection room and puts it on. Once Keaton enters the film, first there’s a series of sequences in which the backgrounds of the film Keaton has walked into abruptly change before he can keep up with them. Then it turns out that the plot of Hearts and Pearls is strikingly similar to the real-life incidents Keaton experienced in the framing scenes: a gang of thieves headed by Ward Crane’s character is after a valuable pearl necklace belonging to a well-to-do woman. The crooks get wind that the legendary private detective “Sherlock, Jr.” is on the case against them, so they set up some dastardly traps against him, including an explosive pool ball (number 13, natch) with which they intend to blow him up during a game; a poisoned drink they intend to serve him; and a ceremonial axe with which they intend to decapitate him.

Sherlock, Jr. manages to evade all these traps, and he and his assistant Gillette (Ford West), a name that’s a double pun on the name of the shaving products company and also on William Gillette, the first actor to play Sherlock Holmes on stage, chase the crooks. In one audacious scene, Keaton as Sherlock, Jr. dives through an open window in which a round women’s dress container has been placed. He goes through the container and emerges in drag wearing the dress that was in there in the first place. Later there’s an even more amazing scene in which Sherlock, Jr. is cornered against a wall. Gillette is standing there with an open briefcase and gestures for Sherlock, Jr. to jump through it ¬– and he does even though the wall was apparently solid. I remember watching the 2010 film Inception (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/12/inception-legendarywarner-bros-2010.html), directed and written by Christopher Nolan, and marveling at how much more convincingly Buster Keaton had made a dream film in 1924 with only the most primitive effects technology (though he had a special-effects genius, Fred Gabourie, who for some reason was credited only as art director but worked out many of the still amazing shots in this film) than Christopher Nolan had in 2010 with all the state-of-the-art CGI at his disposal. And one of my favorite stories about Sherlock, Jr. came from an interview Keaton biographer Rudi Blesh did with him in the last year of his life. Blesh said, “How did you come to make a surrealistic film like Sherlock, Jr.?” Keaton, who unlike Charlie Chaplin disdained any heavy-duty intellectual readings of either his work or his life, regarded that as an insult and said, “I did not mean it to be surrealistic! I just wanted it to look like a dream!” Another oddball aspect of Sherlock, Jr. I hadn’t noticed before is in the posters outside the theatre where Keaton’s character works: one big one is for Rex Ingram’s Scaramouche (1922), a real-life blockbuster the director who’d discovered Rudolph Valentino and made him a star in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse repeated the process with Mexican actor Ramon Novarro. But the one that particularly struck me was for Mud and Sand (1922), a spoof of Valentino’s Blood and Sand (also 1922) with Stan Laurel as “Rhubarb Vaseline.” It’s an unwitting tribute paid by one of the screen’s greatest comic geniuses to another!