Short Subjects: Buster Keaton in The High Sign (1920)

In 1920, comedian Buster Keaton filmed his first short subject, The High Sign. After working as a second banana to mentor and friend Fatty Arbuckle, Keaton was eager to prove to audiences that he could be just as funny in his own films. However, after editing The High Sign, Keaton decided not to release it, and instead filmed and released the classic One Week.

In The High Sign, Keaton filmed a scene with a banana peel on the sidewalk. As Keaton walks toward it, the audience anticipates him slipping and falling. However, he steps right over it and gives the audience the “high sign” of the film – which involves putting his thumb on his nose and wiggling his fingers. When Keaton first saw the film, he found this scene insulted his audience by making his own character smarter than them. He must have had some other problems with the film, since this scene could have easily been excised, or a follow-up scene – in which Keaton does slip on another banana peel –could have been added.

Today, however, it is difficult to understand why Keaton shelved the film, except that he probably wanted his first solo short to amaze his fans – and One Week certainly still does that. However, The High Sign is a bright comedy with many unforgettable Keaton touches. Even if some of the gags have been done before, Keaton makes them fresh because of his character – The Great Stone Face, as he was later called. For instance, early in the film, Keaton is running a shooting gallery. A man comes in and asks for a gun, and Keaton hands it to him. The man then proceeds to pull a stick up. A lesser comedian – Arbuckle, Larry Semon - would have punctuated the moment with a popeyed look of surprise directly into the camera. Keaton registers a millisecond of recognition – not surprise, not fear, just instant acceptance of the situation – and puts his hands up in the air.

Other gags have the personal Keaton touch. When he first gets the job at the shooting gallery, he places his hat flat against the wall, where it slides down until it finds a nail to hang on. (As Walter Kerr pointed out in THE SILENT CLOWNS, this gag is physically impossible and yet there it is, captured on film.) Later, Keaton simplifies things by simply painting a hook on the wall (a simple J figure) that magically supports the hat. A third gag involving Keaton’s hat comes when he enters the home of his girlfriend and her father. As he exchanges pleasantries with them, he casually flips his hat behind him, where it lands perfectly on a hat rack. Of all the great silent comedians, Keaton understood film the best. He knew two things – audiences didn’t like fakery, and the only thing that counts is what winds up on screen. So, as in another gag for his first feature THE THREE AGES, Keaton may have shot this scene dozens of times until he managed to get his hat to land on the rack – or perhaps, as could well be the case, he was just extraordinarily accurate with his hat toss.

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