The Play House (Keaton, 1921) #DTC #81

Keaton has a theatre dream where he is everybody - the actors and the audience... and everybody else, too.

He is also the editor, the director, the writer and the producer on this movie. Never mind the megalomaniac tongue-in-cheek credits: this is a great film. Many of the sequences on the stage are unsurpassed. For reasons unexplainable I loved the parts with the orchestra, maybe orchestra slapstick is something like its own sub-genre.

Definitely go and have another look at that for great slapstick! And although I do prefer the beautiful narratives of the later Keatons, even this one is already on an extremely high level.

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