So this is another Buster Keaton joint, which means it’s another physical-comedy/special-effects showcase, even more so than The General was.

Like, seriously, here is the plot: Buster Keaton goes to a store and buys a jewelry box for his wannabe-girlfriend. Then his rival, billed as “the local sheik” (which I assume is ’20s slang for a slick dude), steals her dad’s pocket watch, pawns it, and buys a FANCIER jewelry box. Then the dad finds his watch is missing, the “sheik” puts the pawn receipt in Buster’s pocket, they find it, and they kick Buster out. Then, while she goes to the pawn store to check this shit out, he goes back to his job as a movie projectionist and we have a dream sequence/movie-within-a-movie full of wacky action stunts, then the girl comes to him and says that she found out that the other dude really stole it and TRUE LOVE THE END.

So everything that’s interesting about it is the visual stuff in the movie-within-a-movie, which includes:

  1. Some trick photography where Keaton jumps from scene to scene, interacting with the landscape as it changes underneath him. This would be 100,000% boring today, because it’s basically “dude jumps around in front of a green screen.” But they didn’t have green screens then, and it turns out they actually a) filmed him in these locations, b) using surveyor’s tools to ensure that the angle and positioning was all correct so it would look like he was in the same position when the scene changed. Which is pretty cool and probably was amazing to audiences of the ’20s.

  2. Trick billiards shooting!

  3. Bike driving stunts!

  4. Train stunts (of course; film-makers of the ’20s loved trains almost as much as Eurogame designers)!

It’s actually pretty cool, and I’m sure that it expanded the possibilities of cinema and all, back when. From the perspective of a modern, though, where spectacle is ubiq, it’s pretty slight. But fortunately it’s just 45 minutes and it’s free on Youtube, so hey.