Cops (Buster Keaton, 1922)
In Cops, Buster Keaton plays a man who is told by his love interest that she will not be with him unless he becomes a big businessman. After stealing some money from another big businessman, he buys a big carriage full of furniture. The man then accidentally rides the carriage through a parade, where he ends up in a situation where the police think he was trying to bomb them. After this, an iconic chase begins that involves the entire police force. Eventually Buster manages to get away from them, and the film concludes.
Some interesting context for this film is the ‘gland larsony’ epidemic that swept through the states in the early 1920’s. During this period, it was believed that old men could rejuvenate themselves by having a younger man’s testicles surgically implanted into them, a process that people would pay a lot for. Because of the possible financial gain, criminals would often drug young men and steal their testicles to sell for a profit. In Cops, Buster Keaton goes into a ‘goat gland specialist’ after his horse comes out looking rather happy, in reference to the gland grabbers of the 1920’s.
During this period, coming right off the back of the western expansionism of the 1800s, many people still viewed police as a force that was intruding on people’s freedom. During the rapid westward expansion, boom towns had hardly any police, and so this is what many people were useful. The depiction of the police as a large, ignorant, and oppressive force throughout Cops would appeal to this nostalgic view of how law enforcement ought to have been during the 1920s.
The big scenes involving hundreds of policemen chasing Keaton’s character, which have been replicated in many films since (like The Matrix Reloaded), are emblematic of a filmmaker who is willing to go bigger and bolder, and one who is much more well funded than before. Throughout the 4 films on this course, there is a clear progression in the grandiosity of the ideas on display, and cops acts as a culmination of this. Big sets, hundreds of extras, special effects, and big stunts (such as Buster grabbing onto a car and being whisked away by it) are all representative of this.
I did enjoy Cops quite a bit, and even though it was largely made up of a chase (which i previously didn’t enjoy), I felt that it had enough going on to hold my attention and be funny. The clear step up in production value also meant that Keaton had to rely less on constant visual gags, as sometimes the action itself was enough to keep the film from growing dull.
4/5