silent

THE “HIGH SIGN”: Buster on the verge

by
THE HIGH SIGN: Buster Keaton and the Blinking Buzzards flashing the gang sign

The High Sign is 20-minutes of Buster Keaton’s rapid-fire comedy from 1921. Buster plays a young man who cons his way into a job managing an amusement park shooting gallery and inadvertently becomes entangled with a murderous gang of thugs. The plot exists to set up two exquisite comic set pieces. In the first, Keaton sets up an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to trick the boss into believing that Keaton is a master marksman. And the second is a triumph of Keaton’s ingenuity, as the gang members chase him through a cutaway two-story house, complete with trap doors and secret passageways.

Of course the gang itself, the Blinking Buzzards, is ridiculous, especially when they flash their secret gang sign. There’s also humor in the contrast between the towering gang leader (6′ 3″ Joe Roberts) and the diminutive (5′ 5″) Keaton.

The High Sign is a two-reeler, a 20-minute short film.  The conventional wisdom among early movie studio heads was that a comedy could only be sustain audience interest for 20 minutes. Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd would soon dispel that myth.

In fact, The High Sign came just before Keaton unleashed his string of comic masterpiece features:  Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and The Cameraman (1928).  After The Cameraman, Keaton’s new studio took away his creative control, and his career (and personal life) crashed.

I saw The High Sign at Cinequest, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ, before Steamboat Bill Jr.  I recommend Sal Pizarro’s excellent profile of Dennis James in the Mercury News.

Also known as The “High Sign”, the film plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies and possibly bootleg versions can be streamed on YouTube and Vimeo.

Buster Keaton in THE HIGH SIGN

Cinequest: THE WIND

by

Lillian Gish in THE WIND

The Wind is usually named as Lillian Gish’s top silent film performance. Gish plays a young pioneer woman who is stranded in a vast sparsely populated Western desert.  She marries one of her several suitors and takes up housekeeping in an isolated cabin, with only the perpetually howling wind for company.  She has to “wash” her dishes in sand.  Unsurprisingly, she can’t take it and is driven to desperate measures.

Fortunately, I got the chance to see The Wind at Cinequest on the big screen of a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

Dennis James traveled with Lillian Gish as accompanist when she would present movies.  For The Wind he added two colleagues on wind machines.  Before the film, James read a florid movie mag account of a visit to the set of The Wind in the Mojave.   I recommend Sal Pizarro’s excellent profile of Dennis James in the Mercury News.

James’ organ accompaniment and the large audience made all the difference.  I had watched The Wind by myself on tv and started using the fast forward on the remote.  But there’s lots of humor embedded in The Wind which is activated by the laughing of audience members.

It’s easy to appreciate how Gish rose to stardom.  Her slight, delicate frame is offset by her spirited charisma.   She’s great when three men propose to her on the same evening and she’s not feelin’ it.  Gish, Dennis James’ Wurlitzer and the California Theatre made for a wonderful cinema experience.

THE WIND