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Delightfully witty, replete with surprising visual legerdemain and expert comedic timing--a type of robust physical comedy which has long been extinct. Buster plays a movie projectionist who falls asleep and dreams himself into the movie he's showing (an obvious source for Woody Allen's comparatively sluggish i Purple Rose of Cairo and one-gag i Zelig); which furnishes a grand opportunity for all sorts of cinematic high jinks and tricks, as Buster literally steps haphazardly and haplessly from one scene into another, the world itself seeming to be in rebellion against him; and all this beautifully realized by sheer brain power and imagination, without any of the intrusive impersonal technical manipulations of today. There's a chase scene (of course) of remarkable dexterity and skill (how in the world did he tumble through an open window into that woman's dress?). The play on the unexpected is always light and richly fanciful. So many, besides Allen, have copied from him, for example, Peter Sellers, even Thurber ("The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"). He's my favorite silent film star, even better than Chaplin. (This screening at the Pacific Film Archive was accompanied by an ensemble which calls itself Dactyls of Phrygia, a pun as intellectual, remote, and dry as the music itself, a type of i outré cleverness-for-the-sake-of cleverness so typical for Berkeley-San Francisco, e.g., Clubfoot Orch., Beth Custer, etc. I, for one, would have preferred to enjoy the rhythms of the film unimpeded by those of the band.)
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