The more time I spend with old films, the more of a giant I see Keaton to be. I'm beginning to think that we all need to see a lot of him, which is why I wandered into this. It seems to have been made only because they had access to a Roman set.
The setup is that a courtship story is presented in three eras: a cave-man setup, a Roman context and a modern one. All are based on film notions of those eras of course. Unlike most movie humor of the time, the joke here isn't in embellishing the story with humorous decoration. Its in the difference among the stories.
Its a clever piece of what I call folding, and you will see at least one scene here that I swear is quoted in "Rashomon."
So there's the idea of the thing, which is worthwhile, but now I've explained it, you hardly have to see it. The jokes are trite. But there is one scene that I recall over and over. I think Keaton did it elsewhere and several others too, but here it is the best.
He's driving a car, a rickety one to his girl's house. (This is in the modern setting, obviously.) He hits a bump and the car falls to pieces. And I just don't mean the wheels fall off, the car quite literally disassembles into the parts that went into the factory and there he sits among hundreds of items. I have no idea how he did this. The car really is moving as a car, and then in an instant it is in pieces.
Wonderful.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
