The High Sign (Buster Keaton, 1921)
In The High Sign, Buster Keaton plays a man who cons himself into getting a job at an amusement park shooting gallery. After proving himself to be an amazing shot using a dog with a bell attached to him, the man who runs the gallery invites him into his secret gang, The Blinking Buzzards. Because he’s so good at shooting, the gang hires him to kill a man. Unfortunately, Keaton had already been hired by that same man to protect him from any possible attackers. When the two eventually realise what has happened, a wild chase begins through the man’s house involving various trap doors and flipping walls.
One interesting type of gag Keaton uses in this film is the ‘impossible gag’. This is a gag Keaton employs throughout many of his early films, and involved Keaton doing something that would be impossible outside of the world of the film. In The High Sign, the ‘impossible’ gag is when Keaton paints a little hook on the wall and then hangs his hat on it. These gags work quite well since you aren’t expecting them to happen, but Keaton would later remove them from his films when he decided that he wanted them to be as realistic as possible.
In this film we see one of the early depictions of gangs and mobs that would become an extremely common trope in later years. They are depicted exactly the way you would expect, as big, bald brutes with a hunger for violence.
Personally, I thought that the high sign was decent. I thought that the comedy worked quite well and I especially enjoyed the gag involving the dog and the string. I also thought that the final fight and chase through the house was quite inventive and that the 2D perspective was very fun, allowing us to watch all of the action as it happens and know where each character is at all times.