Lynne Hanson April 2022 Artist of the Month

LYNNE HANSON

Ice Cream in November

 

 

 

Okay, just let me say how much I adore Lynne Hanson. She has been called “Canada’s Queen of Americana,” though her self-assessment is that she’s “too tough for folk and too blues-influenced for country.” Hanson is as likely to wail on her Gretsch as warble to her acoustic. Small wonder she’s an independent artist, though I’m pretty sure that’s as much her choice as that of the music industry.

 

Hanson has just dropped–as in today–her 9^th solo album, the wonderfully named Ice Cream in November and, no, it’s not a sweet metaphor or a flight into nostalgia. To make certain she didn’t fall into the trap of repeating herself, Hanson worked with Blair Michael Hogan, who cowrote nine of the album’s dozen songs, joined her as a sideman, and helped her veer in different directions. The title track is sonically adventurous and requires a singer with Hanson’s power and timing to carry the song and keep us in a melancholic mood. She sings that she’s as lonely as ice cream in November because too many look away and cast their gaze at, Beauty queens/That no one remembers/Dancing across the screen/A plastic dream machine/Screaming look at me. In her own subtle way, Hanson puts the hurt on the shallow attachments of a squeaky wheel culture.

 

Hanson tries on lots of hats on this record. The surf guitar treatment on “Shadowland” makes it deliciously retro in that too-bluesy-for-country way she noted. And she sure wasn’t aiming for Nashville-style wholesomeness with lyrics such as, My daddy was a preacher/I didn’t know him all that well/One hand on the Bible/Both feet bound for hell/Truth, lie, no surprise/You can’t unring that bell/Tell me all your dirty secrets/I promise I won’t tell. It’s also one of several times she turns back the clock ever so slightly. Listen to “100 Mile Wind,” in which she mixes dollops of Western music, outlaw balladry, and a giddyup structure to blend past imagery (Bonnie and Clyde) with the dust and drugs of modern-day Oklahoma. (Yeah, another person who understands the U.S. better than its native-born.)

 

If you’re looking for Hanson’s Canadian roots, she has two that take her observations back home. “Le Bon Moment” is sung in French and is another song that implores us not to look away. At one point she evokes Romeo and Juliette, reminds us it’s a tragedy, and in the next breath pleads, me n’oublie pas (don’t forget me). If I had to pick my favorite song on Ice Cream in November, though, it would be “Hip Like Cohen,” which is simultaneously is hip, but is also laced with tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humor. Musically it hops, bops, and features smart (and smart ass) writing like, Sipping sidecars while posing/Lining up to be seen/Proud to be postmodern/Without really knowing what that means. It’s simply an infectious song that’s cool when she sings it with a band or sits on a stool and belts it out unplugged.

 

Every track on this album sparkles and Hanson certainly succeeded in breaking her own mold, even though I’ve never found anything particularly repetitive about her music. Like Mary Chapin Carpenter, her deeper tones resonate perfectly with her mature outlook on life, intuitive sense of how to shape a song, and the wisdom to know when to ramp up the power and when to let herself drift with well-considered melodies and solid beats. This is a polished, gutsy, and substantive release.

 

Rob Weir

 

Discover Milton Avery at the Wadsworth

 

 

MILTON AVERY

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Hartford, Connecticut

Through June 5, 2022.

[Click on works for larger viewing size]

 

The acknowledged greats of art generally deserve their exalted reputations. Yet, most people who like art have a fondness for someone who is ranked a notch or two below on the esteem scale. Milton Avery has long been on my list of underappreciated painters. The Wadsworth show in Hartford organized by London’s Royal Academy of Arts might put him on your list as well. Funny that London took the lead on this show, given that Avery (1885-1965) was on the New York/Connecticut shuttle for most of his life and the Wadsworth owns several of his best works.

 

Avery was an important American Modernist who is sometimes called the “American Matisse.” Like Matisse, Avery took to a Modernist style that emphasized color, line, shape, and form over symbolism, allegory, and representationalism. That is, that’s where he ended up. Like a lot of painters, he began more conventionally. As we see at the Wadsworth, his earliest works dabbled in landscape. T’is a wise person who pivots when realizing the mundanity of such works. 

 

Avery vs. Hartley

 

 

 

 

His father was an artist and Avery married one himself, Sally Michel, with whom he raised a daughter named March. Avery wasn’t very good at portraiture either, unless it was caricature, such as his deprecatory self-portrait. (He actually did have protruding ears, though!) Note the hints of work from his friend Marsden Hartley in his self-portrait. Avery’s blockier style was an offshoot of cubism, as were many Hartley’s. Avery’s self-portrait even hints of Hartley’s homoeroticism, though he wasn’t gay and Hartley was. (I often wonder why few critics have picked up on David Hockney’s debt to Hartley and Avery.)    

 

 

His daughter March was one of Avery’s favorite models. He painted her with a Picasso-like mask when she was young and in different moods and settings throughout her life. She got a long neck, not her father’s ears! 

 

 

 

Avery was often playful. Blue trees to represent a New England autumn? An aerial view of beachside homes that look like pianos crossed with staples a spit of land? Why not? Who doesn’t need an abstracted lizard to grace a still life of flowers? 

 

 

 

One of the things I really like about Avery is that he’s one of those people who reminds you of a lot of other painters yet once he hit his stride, he managed to be entirely himself. He befriended Mark Rothko and even did a few three-color panel canvases like Rothko when they painted together. Can you paint just three color blocks and make it look different? He managed.

 

 

 

He also flitted through a phase in which he painted with acidic colors reminiscent of the German expressionist Ernst Kirchner mixed with a splash of Lucian Freud. But other projects hint of fauvism and surrealism, which he admired, or the troubled thoughts of Edvard Munch. (By most accounts, Avery was not a tormented soul.) He went to Coney Island and captured its surrealistic energy in ways analogous to Reginald Marsh, but with a different take.

 

 

Avery (top) vs. Marsh

 

 

 

Ultimately, though, Avery’s greatest success came via addition by subtraction evocative of Matisse. By this I mean he began to simplify. He painted in ways that told a story in as few lines and shapes as possible without journeying into chaotic distortion. Check out this beach scene that reduces sunbathers to pyramid-like rocks. Those red slashes in the water are a swimmer knifing through the water. 

 

 

 

Much of Avery’s work is calming because he gives just enough information to invite you to fill in details without giving away what he intended or telling the viewer what to think.  And often it’s not supposed to be anything other than people wiling away the time. He didn’t even need to bother with any sort of Art 101 perspective. Who knows? Maybe he wasn’t much better with perspective than he was at landscapes or portraits, but I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Matisse also dispensed with illusional 3-D perspective. Who says you need it to convey emotion or infer anything other than what’s on the canvas? 

 

 

 

Milton Avery–an American original. Even when he reminds you of others.

 

Rob Weir

A Slow Fire Burning: Hawkins Scores Again

 

A SLOW FIRE BURNING (2021)

By Paula Hawkins

Riverhead Books, 307 pages.

★★★★ ½ 

 

 

 

Several bodies, a passel of damaged people, houseboats on a canal, and a gifted writer spinning a yarn. What could better? Not much. There’s a reason why so many novices want their works to be compared to those of Paula Hawkins. A Slow Fire Burning takes us to South London. Most visitors seldom stray beyond its usual tourist sites such as the London Eye, the Tate Modern, and Tower Bridge as much of the rest is residential and some are among the most crime-ridden of London’s fringes.

 

The one described by Hawkins surely is. The story pivots around several people who either live on canal boats or spend a lot of time there and in nearby neighborhoods.  It is loaded with people associated Daniel Sutherland, a murder victim. Is it a coincidence that Daniel’s mother died just a few weeks before him?  Are several other deaths from less than natural causes?

 

Miriam Lewis finds Daniel’s body and swings into action of trying to sleuth out his killer. She is not, however, any sort of Sherlock Holmes. Miriam was traumatized in her teens when she and a friend did something fatally stupid. Miriam is now an overweight busybody who is so friendless that she has few social interactions other than occasional customer who enters the adjacent floating bookstore where she works part-time. That’s fine by her, as she’s even more fixated on a book she wrote titled The One Who Got Away. Based on a tip, Miriam thinks that Theo Myerson stole her ideas. Insofar as detectives are concerned, there’s a lot about Miriam that makes her a suspect.

 

Theo certainly has demons to battle. He is a divorcee whose son Ben died before he was four. He blames Ben’s Aunt Angela, Daniel’s mother, for his son’s death. One witness recalls that Theo made Angela cry, which was the second-to-last time she was seen. Maybe Theo killed both of them. Then again, Theo’s ex-wife Carla is also wiggy, might have been sleeping with Daniel, and has her own theories about why Ben died.

 

Other dodgy people float through the plot. There is Laura, who Miriam thinks had sex with Daniel. Laura is unstable, hears voices, despises her mother-in-law, and has a limp courtesy of being hit while cycling by the man who became her deceased mother’s second husband. She’s such a psychological mess that her mantra is “it’s not my fault” to all situations, even when it is indeed her bad. Plus, she found Angela’s body and has Daniel’s watch. This makes her a person of interest, though she insists Miriam offed Daniel. Is it happenstance that Laura helps 80-year-old Irene, a widow who also happens to have been Angela’s friend?

 

If murder is, as so often reported, the product of damaged minds, who do you want to finger? Things become even messier when there are confessions that the police doubt and arrests that don’t stick. Hawkins thickens her plot even more via the use of a book-within-a-book technique and you can probably guess the identity of the other book. The mystery centers on clues from that book, plus a missing dog, the dog’s leash, a door key, a St. Christopher medal, a man in a wheelchair, and the assumption that all old people are just in a holding pattern waiting to die and know nothing about technology. There are also attempts at framing both innocent and guilty people, plus numerous other incorrect assumptions and one that turns out to be true with a twist added.

 

As you can infer from the above complex web, A Slow Fire Burning is an intricate story that places attention demands upon the reader. There is no Mis Marple or Hercule Poirot to explain the clues; you need to do the mental work yourself. It’s that rare work that’s a page-turning murder mystery that is more than just mindless escape. If anything, the book might be more complicated than it needed to be, but kudos to Hawkins for not resorting to any sort of happy ever after ending. Even after murders are resolved there are still folks in serious need of therapy. Just like real life.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

The Dig: A (mostly) True Story

 

THE DIG (2021)

Directed by Simon Stone

Netflix, 112 minutes PG-13

★★★★

 

 

 

Among the drawbacks of the dwindling number of cinemas is that movies are now subject to bidding wars by competing streaming platforms. Too often, decent movies get overlooked if you don’t subscribe to the service that distributes it. Such a film is The Dig, made by Clerkenwell Films but distributed by Netflix.

 

It really is about a dig, an archaeological one involving the spectacular trove from Sutton Hoo in the Suffolk region of England. It came to light in 1939, quite literally on the eve of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany. There were 18 mounds on the Sutton Hoo estate of Edith Pretty (1883-1942), a widow enriched twice over from her father’s bequest and that of her husband Robert, who died in 1934. Pretty was unconventional. She gave birth to a son–also named Robert–when she was 47 and, though she had a massive estate and a house full of servants, she bristled at stuffy pretense. When offered a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), Britain’s highest honor, she refused it.

 

As this story unfolds, Pretty (Carey Mulligan) hires excavator Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to determine whether the mounds contain anything historically significant. She has a hunch about a particular mound, but Brown steers in another direction before a near tragedy steers him back to Pretty’s choice. Sure enough, Brown begins to uncover what he think is a 6^th century Anglo-Saxon ship. How did it get there and why is it so complex? Prevailing wisdom held that no Dark Ages society had much to offer culturally. But what would Brown know; he’s only an excavator, not a trained archaeologist. Forget that he’s a roughhewn autodidact with more experience and publications than a lot of university-trained experts.

 

Word gets out about the ongoing work and a team of Cambridge scholars led by Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) arrives like a cloud of locusts to take over from Brown. Pretty stalls as long as she can–the experts must wait to see if human remains are present–but they bully themselves in and an insulted Brown pedals back to his farm and his understanding wife May (Monica Dolan). Luckily, he is convinced to come back as he’s right; it’s an Anglo-Saxon site, not Viking.

 

In the movie a neophyte digger named Peggy Piggott (Lily James) unearths a Merovingian coin that proves Brown’s thesis and before you know it, they are pulling gold out of the ground like so many turnips. Peggy’s story is overlaid by her disintegrating marriage to Stuart (Ben Chaplin) and her attraction to Pretty’s cousin Rory Lomax (Johnny Flynn), who is about to be called up by the Royal Air Force.

 

Nitpickers objected that Peggy was actually highly qualified and that Lomax is an invented character. Lily James is perhaps too beautiful for the role of Peggy, but her nephew John Preston wrote the novel upon which The Dig is based, so I’ll give that a pass. It’s clearly stated from the outset that the film is adapted from a novel. Memo to Nitpickers: Novel = fiction. There are other things in the film that didn’t happen either. Edith Pretty died in 1942, not in 1939, and in a hospital, not the hollow of the Anglo-Saxon ship. Remarkably, though, most of the rest is pretty close to what actually occurred.

 

I suppose one might also object to liberties taken on the sentimental side of things–Peggy didn’t divorce Stuart until 1956, and young Robert is depicted overly much as an adorable and precocious 12-year-old–but the battle for control over the Sutton Hoo treasures was real and the academic community and the British Museum did indeed try to write Brown out of the story. (He wasn’t fully acknowledged until 1985.)

 

For whatever inaccuracies seep into The Dig, director Simon Stone knows a good story when it’s handed to him, and that actors like Mulligan, Fiennes, James, Stott, and Dolan don’t need much coaxing to give believable performances. Cinematographer Mike Ely adds lovely shots of Suffolk that capture well its sunny day/teeming rain contrasts. I wouldn’t call The Dig a masterpiece, but it does what it intended and does it well. If you can find The Dig, it’s a diverting way to spend two hours. There’s no way to exaggerate the importance of Sutton Hoo, as I discovered the several occasions I gazed upon the finds in the British Museum.  

 

Rob Weir

The Stranger in the Lifeboat: Would You Know a Savior?

 

 

THE STRANGER IN THE LIFEBOAT (2021)

By Mitch Albom

Sphere, 204 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

One of the older values clarification exercises is the lifeboat scenario. If you don’t recall it, an accident crowds too many people into a lifeboat with too few resources. If circumstances forced it, how would you choose whom to sacrifice to boost the survival chances of others?

 

Now let’s consider another mind game. Have you ever thought it unusual that most of the world’s major religions rely on centuries-old texts? Isn’t it odd that those that believe in a living deity assume that God has had nothing more to say to humankind in thousands of years? Here’s another dilemma. If a savior appeared today, would anyone recognize that person as such?

 

Mitch Albom is a Christian. Of that there is no doubt. Some people are put off by his novels as they find them proselytizing. The Stranger in the Lifeboat is, however, not entirely what you expect because it places the reader inside of both of the scenarios outlined above. Name whatever deity, prophet, or savior you wish. Once you freeze an image in your mind, can you get past whatever bearded, robed, turbaned, and/or miracle-wielding personality you invoke?

 

Lifeboat storylines are generally straightforward, as is this one. Jason Lambert, a ridiculously wealthy mogul, has invited a veritable who’s who from the celebrity, sports, political, and business worlds to join him in Cape Verde to schmooze, fish, and luxuriate on the maiden voyage of his super yacht Galaxy. His allegedly indestructible vessel–shades of The Titanic­–is KO’d by what is assumed to have been an enraged whale and sinks. At this juncture Albom perhaps has the Old Testament tale of Jonah and the whale in mind, but he then tosses us the first of several curveballs and unless you are very astute or very lucky you will probably whiff.

 

Just nine people make it to the lifeboat, some from the guest list and others from the below-decks crew meant to serve them: Lambert, an Olympic swimmer, a hairdresser, an UN ambassador, two chefs, a British media executive, a traumatized and mute small girl, and a deckhand named Benji who chronicles the fates of an ever-diminishing passenger list. As they are adrift, they pull aboard a 10^th person, an unkempt man who partakes of their water and food. As panic sets in, one distraught passenger calls upon God to save them. The 10^th person, the namesake stranger from the title whom no one recalls having been aboard in the first place, staggers the rest by asserting, “I am the lord.”

 

Would you buy it? Why would a divinity need food and water? And what’s with the odd insistence that none can be saved until all believe in him? Too much sun and not enough water? You probably wouldn’t expect a pompous jerk like Lambert to yield, but then again, he might be one of the first you’d want to offload if you were playing the lifeboat game. Or would it be the stranger? He sure sounds like his elevator doesn’t rise higher than the lobby. Would you ignore him and turn to figuring out how to jerry rig sails, fresh water collection, and fishing gear?

 

Is the stranger the lord? I’m saying nothing beyond a vague statement that you have a ton of surprises in store based on what I’ve not said. There were at least three things I did not anticipate, so count me among the whiffed.

 

Albom isn’t a great stylist, but he’s a fine storyteller. If he is preaching in this novel, it is in ways subtle enough to be called nonecumenical, even transtheistic. I think, though, that he wants us to think upon the tendency of believers of all stripes to stuff God into a box. In a sense, he is telling us that some atheists have a point when they reverse Genesis 1:27 and render it, “man created God in his own image.” Albom’s story might appear simplistic to some, but whatever faith or non-faith one embraces it’s worth asking the question: If the divine walked among us, would we know it?

 

Rob Weir     

The Quiet Power of The Boy in the Field

 

THE BOY IN THE FIELD (2020)

By Margot Livesay

Harper, 256 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

 

I dislike novels that try so hard to impress that only other authors and critics with affected highbrow airs are reeled in. One of the joys of Margot Livesay’s The Boy in the Field is that it’s gripping though nothing particularly earthshattering happens after the first few pages.

 

At its center are the three siblings of Hal and Betsy Lang: 18-year-old Matthew, 15-year-old Zoe, and 13-year-old Duncan. They live in the Cotswolds and one day the kids notice something as they are walking home. Duncan sees what appears to be a pair of red socks lying in a field by an oak tree, but they are blood-stained and attached to a young man, not a boy. They fear he might be dead, but each hears him mutter something. Was it cowrie? Cowslip? Coward?

 

The Langs duly report this, the victim is taken to a hospital, and Detective High Price informs them that Karel Lustig, a hospital worker, almost died but will be okay thanks to them. That’s heady stuff to digest, especially for Duncan who fantasizes possible crime scenarios only someone his age could conjure. The mystery thickens when Duncan learns that Karel had been beaten and stabbed by a driver who dumped him in the field.

 

Livesay deftly begins to unpeel layers of other things, including how traumas can reveal other things. After all, don’t we all have uncracked mysteries lurking within and about us? Hal is an ironsmith and Betsy a solicitor (lawyer to we Yanks) and theirs is a perfect marriage. Of course, we know that no marriage is “perfect,” so expect some revelations on that score.  

 

Spotting the boy in the field is also an unsettling trigger that subtly pushes each of the Lang children to forge their own identities. Matthew is about to enter university and needs to sort through his relationships with his best Benjamin, his social circle, and his various girlfriends. It’s all so overwhelming that at times he reverts to patterns more akin to the those of someone Duncan’s age than one on the verge of manhood. By contrast, Zoe grows increasingly distant from her family and wants to break out. She looks older than she is, is very smart, and holds her own in discussions with Rufus, an American Ph.D. philosophy student at Oxford. He’s a gentleman, though he finds Zoe more alluring than his girlfriend in Paris.

 

Duncan is affected most of all. He has trouble concentrating in school, though he’s a budding artist, and is too empathetic for his own good. It’s as if every detail he observed that day is indelibly etched in his mind. When he visits Karel in the hospital, Duncan grows even more obsessed and wants to “solve” the crime and enlists Karel’s jaded older brother Tomas in his amateur sleuthing. Duncan’s also adopted and becomes assertive in seeking his Turkish birth mother and, yes, he becomes color-conscious Yet for all the irons in various fires, Duncan is the one who makes friends the easiest.

 

The Boy in the Field is set in the year 2000 with a last chapter is a coda of how the Langs and the Lustigs are faring in 2008-09. Lest you think that Livesay has imposed on her characters the disruptive social transformations that were supposed to happen at midnight of January 1, 2020, let me assure that Livesay does not resort to anything that cheap. All that transpires is in keeping with their personalities and evolves organically.

 

How often does a writer impress you with a quiet and relatively action-free novel? For the kids, it’s a coming-of-age journey; for the adults one of dealing with good choices and bad ones. Far from penning a classic whodunit crime tale, Livesay offers penetrating overlapping character studies in which the actual resolution of the crime warrants more of a shrug than a gasp. It’s as if everyone was already on preordained paths illumined by the boy in the field. It reminded me of John Knowles’ classic A Separate Peace in that a single episode brings clarity to inner selves. This is a lovely and literary work but, lest it sound too weighty, know that a lovable dog also plays an important role.

 

Rob Weir

Buster Keaton Cheats Death in Two Classic Films

 

OUR HOSPITALITY/SHERLOCK HOLMES JR. (1923/1924)

Directed by Buster Keaton & John Blystone; Keaton

Metro Pictures/MGM

74 minutes; 45 minutes; Not Rated

 

A recent NPR Fresh Air interview with author Dana Stevens prompted me to buy Camera Man, Stevens’ new book on silent film icon Buster Keaton. In his day, only Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd matched Keaton’s fame. Each pioneered forms of physical comedy that transformed movies from curiosities to mass entertainment. Keaton also directed many of his films. Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr. are packaged on the same disc for those who have DVD players, though you can stream them separately. Each spotlights Keaton in front of and behind the camera.

 

 

 

Our Hospitality could have inserted the word “Southern” in the middle of its title. It riffs off the infamous Hatfield/McCoy feuds of the late 19^th century. For Keaton it was a family affair. His son, Buster Keaton Jr. plays one-year-old Willie McKay, Keaton is the adult Willie, his love interest, Natalie Talmadge, was his first wife, and his father Joe appears as locomotive engineer. It opens in a scene in which the infant McKay’s father and a Canfield assassin kill each other. His mother knows that the Canfields will seek to kill all the McKays, so she trundles Willie off to New York, where he grows up in ignorance of the feud.

 

Years later, Willie learns he has inherited the old McKay “mansion” and ventures southward to claim it, with a stern warning not to tell anyone his last name. There are two very funny transportation scenes, one of Keaton riding an early bicycle, but of the push and glide variety rather than one that is pedaled. Funnier still is the journey on an early train–basically rolling stage coaches–in which the rails are placed on the terrain as it is rather than levelled. On the trip he meets a woman named Virginia (Talmadge), who invites him have dinner with her family. He has no idea who they are, but word soon gets out that he is a McKay and the roly-poly Canfield paterfamilias tells his two strapping sons that “honor” demands McKay be killed. Everything that can go wrong does and Willie shows up at the door, still ignorant that he is about to sup with Canfields bent on homicide.

 

Lucky for him that “honor” also demands that a Canfield cannot kill a guest as long as he’s inside the house. Imagine all the ways in which Willie manages to be inside when he learns he is a target and Keaton pulls off several you probably hadn’t conjured. He’s good at avoiding being shot outside as well. A classic scene sees him battle a raging river, avoid going over a waterfall, and rescuing Virginia. Love triumphs. The river scenes are all the more remarkable in that Keaton did his own stunts decades before special effects.

 

 

 

For me, Sherlock Jr. was the funnier of the two films, though it’s more crudely made. Keaton is a distracted movie projectionist and theater cleaner who needs money to impress a young woman (Kathryn McGuire) who is also being pursued by a dandy (Ward Crane). Every windfall ends badly and all he has is $1, which he uses to buy a box of chocolates. On a whim, he changes the 1 to a 4, which trumps the $3 candy purchased by the dandy/villain. But the villain steals the watch of the girl’s father (Joe Keaton), pawns it, and sneaks the pawn ticket into Keaton’s pocket who retires in unjust disgrace.  

 

The title comes from the forlorn Keaton’s dream as he falls asleep in the projection booth. He imagines himself as a suave detective who cracks a theft case involving Crane. That’s not how it goes down when he awakens, but Crane is exposed as a thief and a cad, the girl is again smitten, and Keaton backs her away from the movie being projected so he can take wooing cues from the dashing man on the screen. The scenes that most impress, of course, are the fantasy dream sequences. They are half pre-James Bond–the restored print even uses Bond music on the soundtrack–and they again make you wonder how Keaton didn’t kill himself. One involves a driverless motorcycle with Keaton riding on the handlebars. It must be seen to be appreciated.

 

These are silent films and, by today’s standards, seemingly unsophisticated. Don’t despair if you think I’ve given away the story. In early features–these two are seven and five reels respectively–you really couldn’t easily tell an overly complex story as the only dialogue appeared on intertitle cards. The films are really about sight gags and the acrobatic ways Keaton carries himself. The man was a veritable one-man Cirque du Soliel.

 

Rob Weir