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Movies that Changed My Life:
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Welcome to Movies That Changed My Life - a weekly column in which I take a look at a film from cinema's storied history that changed the way I look at movies.
Jackie Chan stars in this week's release, The Spy Next Door, which opens this week, and for some of us, it’s a bittersweet moment.
Nowadays, Jackie Chan has found a niche in the family comedy genre, and before that his entries in the Shanghai Noon and Rush Hour franchises grossed over $100 million per film.
When I was in college, the late, lamented U.C. Theater in Berkeley showed a different double feature every day of the week. Once a week, my buddy Zach and I headed to the U.C. for Hong Kong Cinema Thursdays. That’s where I got to see Chan’s early run of the most madcap martial arts films ever made.
Jackie Chan is the anti-Bruce Lee: Lee flows, Chan is choppy; Lee is cool and all badass-'70s glamour, Chan is frantic and funny. Even in the midst of performing his most extreme stunts, Chan makes with the funny. And those stunts? Jackie does them for real. At the end of his movies, he shows clips of all the stunts gone awry, and it’s all about the broken bones.
When I heard that Jackie Chan owed the inspiration for his stunt work and screen persona to Buster Keaton, I should've immediately gone and watched everything Keaton ever did -- but the dude was in black and white films, so, like, why bother? But when Keaton’s movies came up on my list, I learned my lesson. From 1920 to 1929, Keaton had an unparalleled run of masterpiece after masterpiece, each one hilarious, death-defying and, its own way, darkly romantic. Case in point: 1924’s Sherlock Jr.
Like Guy Ritchie’s recent Sherlock Holmes, Keaton goes far afield from the Victorian sleuth with whom we’re familiar. He plays a film projectionist who dreams of being a 
detective, but just doesn’t have the focus to pull it off. Doomed to be a film projectionist his whole life, he does what many of us do: He escapes into movies -- quite literally. Keaton’s dreaming projectionist walks right into the movie screen and becomes reborn as the great detective Sherlock Jr. -- which sets off one of the greatest series of comic bits in film history.
In one famous stunt from the film, Keaton leaps from the roof of a two-story building to a raised railroad crossing arm just as it’s swinging down, landing him in the back seat of a moving car -- for real, just like Jackie. (Check out the video, below.)
What does it take to make a guy like that? Buster Keaton began his work in the American Vaudeville -- in an act where his father used a suitcase handle sewed into the back of Keaton’s costume to throw him around and bust up the scenery. The name of the show? The Roughest Act That Was Ever in the History of the Stage.
Maybe it was all that early training that allowed Keaton to maintain his trademark deadpan, regardless of the hijinx going on around him. It’s that deadpan -- that neutral mask -- that draws us into his world. When the disgruntled projectionist of Sherlock Jr. dreams his way through the silver screen and into the movies, we go with him, and Keaton captures that very thing that we all long for when going out to the movies.
So if you’re stoked to see The Spy Next Door, or if you dug Rush Hour, treat yourself to some early Jackie Chan in the form of something like Drunken Master II. If you like that, I promise you’ll love Buster Keaton, a truly great American entertainer.
Come back next week, when I check up on the Commies. I’m sure they’re up to no good.