Cops (1922)

 Cops is a 1922 two-reel comedy directed (and starring) Buster Keaton.  This 18 minute picture exemplifies the exorbitant production values visible in many short silent comedies and features an enigmatic, surreal and balletic performance by Buster Keaton.

A young man, (Keaton) down at the heels, finds that s rich man has dropped a wallet.  When he tries to return the wallet to the giant brutish plutocrat, the man slugs him.  Keaton manages to end up with the money from the wallet, eluding the Goliath-like rich man who pursues him in a luxurious jalopy.  With his ill-gotten money in his pocket, Keaton encounters a con man sitting next to a pile of household furnishings at curb-side -- a family is moving across town and a horse with wagon has been hired to transport their belongings to their new home.  (Inserts show the family waiting for their furniture to arrive at their new home.) The con-man talks Keaton's character into buying the household furnishings, walking off with almost all of his cash.  Keaton finds out that he's been conned and agrees to drive the horse and wagon to the address where the family is waiting.  He rigs up the wagon with inventive contraptions, including a boxing glove mounted on a telescoping frame that he can use to signal turns (and accidentally knock out traffic cops.)  The old nag drawing the wagon plods through the streets of the city, passing a series of interesting 1922 vintage storefronts -- sometimes, there are cars weaving around the horse-cart; other times, the streets are strangely empty.  Keaton pulls up at the curb next to a "goat-gland" doctor and the horse goes into the clinic, returning a few seconds later completely vivified and sporting a white ostrich plume on its head.  The horse now can't be controlled and it frisks about dragging Keaton and cart's towering heap of mattresses, chests and furniture into the center of a huge parade.  Every cop in the State, it seems, is marching down the avenue, ranks and ranks of uniformed constables. An anarchist pitches a bomb onto the horse-cart and Keaton uses it to light his cigarette before realizing that he's clutching a round, cannon-ball shaped explosive.  He desperately pitches the bomb aside and it blows up about thirty of the marching cops.  (This scene is startling -- there's a blast and when the smoke clears, we see large numbers of police with blackened features, burned hands and faces, and shredded clothing wandering around like zombies.)  All the police in the parade, then, pursue Keaton who flees them.  We see him sprinting in front of literally hundreds of enraged cops, many of them wildly wielding their truncheons (and, sometimes, knocking one another out).  At one point, Keaton uses a ladder as a kind of see-saw tipping it over a wall where, unfortunately, another hundred police are lurking.  More and more cops clamber onto the ladder which swings back and forth wildly over the fulcrum of the wall.  After a number of other stunts, Keaton manages to lure all the hundreds of cops into a single precinct building.  There he shuts and locks the door on them, presumably confining eight or nine-hundred police to the building.  A nattily dressed girl walks up to Keaton and ignores him when he doffs his hat.  Distraught, he opens the door of the precinct station and the swarm of cops, like an immense amoeba, simply absorbs him into their mob.

The movie is astonishingly choreographed with armies of uniformed extras running in formation through the empty streets of the city.  Keaton is very little and delicate but he runs like a world-class sprinter.  Like all of Keaton's movies, the gags are elaborate and not at all funny.  The humor doesn't make you laugh -- rather, there is something nightmarish about the intricate, balletic stunts and the huge cast of identically clad cops menacing the hero.  The two-reeler, I think, teeters on the edge of a horror movie.  A couple close-ups of the cops with vacant eyes and staggering gait would turn the short picture in a zombie movie - in fact in the aftermath of the bomb-throwing the movie almost assumes that form. From time to time, we see the family waiting for their furniture -- of course, they wait in vain because it will never arrive.  In fact, all of their household goods are strewn about the middle of the road with armies of belligerent cops trampling everything.  After all his efforts at evading the hordes of cops, Keaton's final surrender to them -- he just vanishes into the swarm -- is particularly disturbing.  I don't know how this movie was received when it was first released but it is huge, somber, and enigmatic.  Keaton had contempt for "art" and thought he was producing disposable bits of celluloid for half-wit movie audiences, but Cops is more surreal than Dali and Bunuel.  The empty streets have the peculiar menace of some of Edward Hopper's urban landscapes or de Chirico.  At the end of one vista, we see an ad for a Mexican restaurant.  The weird detail of the horse's rejuvenation by surgical installation, I presume, of goat glands (gonads) is a particularly baffling aspect of this two-reeler.  Keaton, also, enters the goat-gland doctor's parlor, but only for a second -- then, he emerges to try to control the now frenzied horse as it rears and plunges down the empty avenue.   There are obvious themes implicit in this material contrasting anarchism with the regimented mobs of police; the individual opposes the orderly, exuberant violence of the police state -- but this stuff is merely incidental, something secreted, as it were, from Keaton's desire to amuse and astonish.