Buster stands behind a man in a queue that never moves - finally realizing it’s a mannequin talks earnestly to a girl through bars before a different angle reveals not a prison but a gate writes from New York that he is cleaning up the city, at which point we see him street sweeping.īuster never used a stunt man, no matter how dangerous the scene. In films like Cops - two-reelers, or twenty-minute shorts - one funny bit followed another in quick succession.
And no one was better at creating them than Buster Keaton. If you wanted to keep the audience entertained, the storytelling had to be almost entirely visual. The only dialogue came in brief title cards between scenes. To appreciate Buster Keaton (1895–1966), you have to imagine a time before modern film technology: no CGI, no special effects, no color, no booming surround sound - or any sound at all, except for live musical accompaniment, usually a piano.
So when I had a chance to finally go to Los Angeles a few years ago, it turned into something of a pilgrimage to search out the locations where Buster shot some of my favorite scenes. He was, to my mind, the brightest of the silent film comedians, but not just that: he created films that are as funny today as they were a century ago. In eight brief seconds, the scene captures many of the things that make Buster Keaton unique: his athleticism, his plucky underdog persona, his fearlessness, and his sheer inventiveness in coming up with gags one after another. But other than that it involved some of the funniest stunts and wacky moments of any other Keaton film, although the ending was very sudden and the plot was almost too unbelievable at times.Buster shows off his ingenuity and daring in Cops. I personally enjoyed Cops a lot! It did escalate extremely quickly and ended up being quite jarring with the pace and lack of buildup to the absolute calamity that was the climax. They reflect the industrial advancement of America at the time, and follows an innocent but chaos-creating man who the audience can sympathise with in his struggles. The film is not expressionist either though, only using impossible stunts and structures to achieve comedy, as Keatons other films of the 20’s did.
#Buster keaton cops full
The film is similar to Keaton’s other films of the 1920’s, except Cops involves more outrageous and unbelievable scenes, such as Keaton outrunning hundreds of cops or catching a bomb and using it to light his cigarette while riding a cart full of stolen furniture, in the middle of a police parade! The film suspends realism to a large extent, featuring impossible stunts and scenarios that escalate into outright chaos, as his films often did, involving physical stunts to achieve comedy and reflecting the belief that cops were unnecessary at the time, including one aspect of realism.
#Buster keaton cops series
Here, Buster stokes the anger of an entire city’s police force, after a series of laughable events, and ends up outrunning them through some unique and crafty escape routes. Cops was written and directed by Buster Keaton in 1922, and follows the usual clueless and naive Keaton character getting into insane scenarios.
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