Two Busters + Mac

Two new Busters tonight at CSUN. The first was "Seven Chances", in which an oft-used theme from the old days is trotted out : a millionaire's will is read; in order for the heir to receive his money, he must be married by such-and-such a date, in this case his 27th birthday. For Buster, that just so happens to be Today. He is single, but if he can get married before 7 o'clock in the evening, he will inherit 7 million dollars. There are a lot of 7s happening, and as he formulates his plan to get married by the end of the day - with the aid of his law partner - he finds himself with a list of 7 names of eligible bachlorettes and sets out to work on them, one by one. They are his "Seven Chances" of the title. His ploy basically boils down to walking right up to each of them and asking "will you marry me", without any preamble or explanation, and naturally he is rebuffed in varying ways. Having blown all seven of his chances, and as the hour gets closer to 7pm, he visits a girlfriend and asks her the same question. She enthusiastically accepts.......until he blows it by explaining to her the premise - that he had to marry somebody by 7 o'clock to collect his inheritance. "Oh.....just anybody"?, she says.

And that ends that..........(at least for the time being)

Meanwhile, his law partner - taking no chances - has placed a large ad in the local newspaper, complete with monetary details. Any willing bride-to-be is invited to show up at a nearby church at 5pm, in order that Buster be married on time.

This brings us to the last 15-20 minutes of the 56 minute movie, and to some of the craziest stuff I've ever seen on film. Suffice it to say that the newspaper ad does the trick. Several hundred women respond and begin arriving at the church in droves. Buster has been inside, asleep, and when he awakes he is horrified. The women are not his type, to put it mildly. Now begins a chase scene that has to go down as one of the greatest in the history of movies, and I shall not provide a description except to say, imagine 300 women chasing Buster Keaton through ever changing scenarios, for fifteen minutes, the creativity and "human cartoon" factor increasing as it goes. At one point, I recognised a location. Hey, SB, do you remember a few years ago when I was first doing my hikes, and I was driving out to Newhall to look for an old mountain pass that was known as Beale's Cut? You probably don't remember, but I came close to it when I discovered an old Oil Refinery just off Sierra Highway that I wound up taking pictures of. They are in my 2014 photo album on FB. Beale's Cut is on a mountain right behind that abandoned refinery. Way back in 1925, or maybe before that, it was the only way for cars to cross from the Valley to Santa Clarita/Newhall. Well anyway, Buster used it for a location shot. The chase scene shows him jumping across Beale's Cut. I don't know if he actually made the jump or if it is an editing trick, but it was cool to see another local landmark in a Buster movie.

"Seven Chances" is a must see for the last 15 minutes, of which you've never seen the likes of in any movie.

The second film was "Go West", which was more of a melodrama, if a Buster movie can be called such. His character's name is Friendless (how sad!), and at the beginning of the film he is shown pushing all of his belongings (furniture, etc) into a pawn shop, for which he is given $1.65. With that, he buys some food, hops a train and heads west, where he lands a job as a cowhand at a desolate ranch. I'll not give as descriptive a review as I did with "Seven Chances" because (take a guess...) I'm really tired, but a Cliffs Notes version is that Buster, i.e. "Friendless", finally makes a friend, a beautiful girl named Brown Eyes.

And she really is beautiful, the most beautiful cow you've ever seen. And she loves Buster too.

The rest of the movie deals with Buster's efforts to keep Brown Eyes from the slaughterhouse, and while the finale is not quite as "slam-bang" spectacular as the one in "Seven Chances", it is still very impressive, and must have been a hell of a thing to stage. It is one thing to have 300 women chasing after Buster in the first movie, but in "Go West", the finale ends with a cattle stampede....through Downtown Los Angeles, down near the area around what would eventually become Union Station. It's an incredible thing to see what the area looked like in 1925, but what is immediately recognizable are the train tracks as you pull in to where the station would be located in the 1930s. And there were stockyards down there in those days....

So instead of 300 women chasing Buster, you have about 300 cattle, running not just street to street, but shop to shop.

It is cinematic insanity, and as I've been saying, with Buster Keaton you never know what is gonna happen next. It must have been an exhilarating time to be a filmmaker with his level of talent, in the very early days of cinema which had passed the Nickelodeon phase and the early Silents with their very basic camerawork and editing. Buster knew he could blow all of that stuff off the map, and he did so. he was like the Edward Van Halen of Silent Comedy, at that time, and his movies hold up today, with staging of scenes that would not even be attempted now.

Elizabeth, I must say I liked the Yoga Doggie. I think one of the "airport" posts from yesterday was actually a post about an upcoming rock festival. I hope you are going.  :):)

I saw a Macintosh stat here at the Blogger page yesterday, for the first time in a while. As you know, I can't decipher computer stats or anything of the kind, but I always knew the regular appearance of the Macintosh prior to about early Summer (last June), so maybe The Mac Is Back?

I guess well see. :):)

See you in the morning.