Seven Chances

 Seven Chances is a Buster Keaton comedy only an hour long but anything but modest in its ambitious deployment of an army of extras and elaborate practical special effects.  The film illustrates how Hollywood budgets transformed even bits of movie persiflage into spectacles of gratuitous grandeur.  The picture is shot like a war movie -- it's not really funny except in concept and the concept is mostly founded on the disproportion between the trifling plot and the grandiose execution.

Keaton is a stockbroker who, with his sidekick, has either stolen money or lost a great amount of his client's funds.  As they despair, a simian lawyer appears, a little figure with a chimpanzee's features who looks a bit like Henry Gibson.  The lawyer announces that Keaton has inherited a huge sum of money contingent upon him marrying before seven pm on his 27th birthday -- as it happens, this is the very day that the lawyer delivers his message.  Keaton has a girlfriend but has been too shy to propose to her.  With the legacy at issue, he rushes to that young woman and proposes marriage, botching the transaction so that she angrily rejects him.  (Later, she regrets her anger and sends a comic "darky" to find Keaton; the servant is played in blackface and posited to be both shiftless and incompetent.)  Keaton and his buddy go to their country club and he offers to marry a variety of women, all of whom mock him and reject his proposal.  Wandering the streets, Keaton approaches women who are ever more inappropriate mismatches.  When he sits on a bench and eyes a homely girl, she lifts to her face a newspaper printed in Hebrew.  With this gag, we know that the inevitable racist joke will rapidly follow -- and, indeed, the movie doesn't disappoint in this respect.  (The film is casually noxious.)  Ultimately, Keaton ends up approaching a cross-dresser, a scene that is implied but not shown and this demonstrates that his effort at finding a bride will inevitably failure.  The "darky" messenger continues his ambling pursuit of Keaton on an old nag, but can't catch up to him.  Keaton's sidekick posts flyers all over town indicating that Keaton intends to wed at 5:30 pm at a certain church downtown.  At this point, the film shifts into its surrealist epic mode.  Thousands of women, all of them wearing bridal garments, converge at the church.  The women pursue Keaton who flees through the city and its desolate suburbs.  Enormous armies of women, all in white gowns with white bonnets, swarm over the landscape.  Keaton runs like an Olympic sprinter and, ultimately, the chase ends in a wilderness of gorges and high stony hills.  Dashing down a rock-strewn declivity, the hero starts a landslide of hundreds of boulders.  He dodges the boulders as he rushes down an endless hill into a valley where the waiting army of brides is decimated by the rocks bouncing down the slope.  At last, Keaton reaches a church where his girlfriend is patiently waiting and, after a scare as to the time -- the wedding has be before 7:00 pm -- all ends happily.  

The final fifteen minutes of the movie is conceived on a colossal scale and the sequence involving hundreds of boulders raining down the hillside is astonishing -- it was done, I understand, with paper-mache rocks, some of them as big as small cottages.  There are some endearing running gags -- Keaton's girlfriend has a tiny puppy on her leash when he first considers proposing to her but is to shy to utter the words -- by the end of the movie, in keeping with the film's exaggerated mise-en-scene, the dog has grown to Great Dane as large as a horse.  The physical gags are not as impressive as some of the stunts in Keaton's other movies, but the actor runs at impressive speed, plunges down hillsides with alacrity, and dodges the careening boulders like a ballet dancer.  (The opening montage involving Keaton's courtship of his patient girlfriend is shot in two-tone technicolor.  The film's title refers to a David Belasco-produced play from which the 1925 film is adapted.  There is not much in the movie justifying the title except for a list of seven marital candidates at the Country Club to whom Keaton presses his suit.)