Seven chances

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Movie
German title Seven chances
Original title Seven Chances
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1925
length 57 minutes
Rod
Director Buster Keaton
script Clyde Bruckman ,
Jean C. Havez ,
Joseph A. Mitchell
production Joseph Schenck
camera Byron Houck ,
Elgin Lessley
occupation

Seven Chances (alternative title Buster Keaton, the man with 1000 brides ; original title Seven Chances ) is a silent film comedy by and with Buster Keaton from 1925 . The film is based on David Belasco's stage production of the play of the same name by Roi Cooper Megrue . The unsuccessful businessman Jimmie inherits seven million dollars if he manages to marry within a few hours.

In contrast to Keaton, who was dissatisfied with the comedy, critics generally speak of a successful work, with particular emphasis on the final chase. In addition, Seven Chances is the only film by Keaton that served as the basis for two remakes (1947 and 1999).

action

Jimmie Shannon and his business partner Billy face bankruptcy when Jimmie learns that he will inherit $ 7 million from his late grandfather - assuming he's married by 7 p.m. that day. Jimmie has to overcome his notorious shyness and proposes marriage to his adored Mary. Because she believes he only wants the marriage for the money, she rejects him.

The financial hardship forces Jimmie to hastily submit a marriage proposal to other female acquaintances, which, however, is usually rejected even more hastily. His partner then placed a marriage advertisement in the newspaper. In fact, hundreds of women are soon crowding into church in anticipation of marrying a millionaire.

When the sexton, irritated, referred the ladies away from the church, the anger of those willing to marry was released to Jimmie. With hundreds of aggressive women in wedding dresses behind him, Jimmie runs through the streets of Los Angeles and flees into the surrounding area. By an avalanche of rubble, which he unintentionally set off, the women are finally driven to flight.

In the meantime, Mary was able to convince herself of Jimmie's honest love. At the last minute they both say yes, saving Jimmie's legacy. However, when Jimmie kisses the bride, all the well-wishers come first.

Production history

Buster Keaton, probably around 1920.

Joseph Schenck , producer of Keaton's films, had acquired the rights to Seven Chances without consulting Keaton and had also assured the former rights holder John McDermott that he would be co-director. The play by Roi Cooper Megrue premiered in 1916 and was for Keaton "the kind of unbelievable comedy I don't like". Because Keaton Schenck owed money and a few favors, he accepted the material and, together with his team of authors Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez and Joseph A. Mitchell, contrary to their usual way of working, developed the film from a literary model. The team shortened the plot of the play to the essentials and adapted it to the medium of silent film and the style of Keaton: Instead of puns, visual humor and visual values ​​had to dominate. The authors, who, as always, worked without a fixed script, devised a varied chase as a new final act. They also redesigned the main character in the sense of Keaton's sincere screen personality: With Keaton's Jimmie, greed for money is not the driving force behind the desperate courtship, but rather lack of money and loyalty to his business partner. He has been secretly in love with his future bride for a long time.

During the shooting, too, Keaton insisted on his usual artistic freedom. McDermott, who was bypassed in all decisions, eventually left production. The film was shot on 35 mm and in black and white . The romantic prologue, in which Jimmie does not dare to confess his love to Mary in all four seasons, was in Technicolor Process No. 2 filmed. For the rest of the film, the elaborate color process was dispensed with. Instead, Keaton resorted to a film trick in the course of the plot that he had already used in a well-known trick sequence for Sherlock Jr .: In Seven Chances , Jimmie gets into his roadster in front of his country club to drive to Mary's house. But the car stays in its place: only the background changes through a fade to Mary's house, whereupon Jimmie gets out of the vehicle and walks through the garden door. When he drives back to the clubhouse a short time later, the process is exactly reversed. Precise dimensions were necessary for this technical film gag. The automobile and Buster Keaton had to be filmed in exactly the same position and distance from the camera. The effect was achieved by fading the two shots filmed in different locations.

He worked in front of the camera for the first time with the character actor and comedian Snitz Edwards , who can also be seen in subsequent productions at the side of Keaton. He realized the eye-catching chase at the climax of the film with around 500 extras dressed up as brides in the streets of Los Angeles. The later film star Jean Arthur also made a small appearance as a receptionist in the country club .

When Keaton showed the edited comedy as usual in the context of previews , the reactions were limited according to his statements. Only when he accidentally loosened a few boulders during the chase and got them rolling did the viewers react with excited anticipation "for the first time during the film". "We then recreated 1,500 boulders, from the size of a grapefruit up to eight feet in diameter [...] We were working with paper mache ... but still, for example, the large boulder weighed 400 pounds." In the added sequence, Jimmie steps loose stones, the next one Bump stones. A huge debris avalanche develops from boulders of various sizes. When the group of brides willing to marry in the valley want to cut off the path to Jimmie, they are thrown to flight by the rolling boulders, while Jimmie confronts the rockfall and cleverly dodges the individual boulders. About the new finale, Keaton said: "That was the only way to save the film."

Film analysis

As the cut-off frequency graph shows, the use of subtitles (black) is significantly lower in the second half. The dynamic chase takes up around a quarter of the total game time.

Making applications and being turned down is a typical theme in Keaton's films, which is taken to extremes in Seven Chances : Circumstances force him to ask seven women in a row if they want to marry him. As film scholars note, Keaton increases the pace with each sequence in a “flawless way”: “[...] the last one says 'no' before he can even ask her anything.” This not only increases the main character's desperation: according to Robert Knopf the film distorts the social conventions of courtship into the absurd. For Norbert Grob, the most touching moment has come when Buster (Jimmie) “finally disregards his worries for a moment” and crouches in the front bench in the church and falls asleep, just before hundreds of brides gradually fill the church.

The surrealist comedy of this “melancholy comedian”, observed again and again by critics, is shown when Buster flirts with a lady in a hairdressing salon who he only sees from behind, “until the hairdresser comes up - and takes her head off, it's his demonstration doll. “Another form of confusion is no longer communicated so directly to today's viewers: Buster sees a poster of a female star at a stage entrance and gains access to her cloakroom. At that moment, a suitcase that covered the name on the poster is removed: " Julian Eltinge " - a very well-known woman impersonator at the time. Shortly afterwards, Buster comes out of the dressing room with a black eye. Walter Kerr says that there is hardly any other film that makes the uncomplicated view of women imitators clearer at the time. "[The audience] saw it as a talent, not as an indication that the performer might be a transvestite ."

The reception was particularly impressed by the twelve-minute chase and the subsequent rockfall, which Keaton “not only gave Keaton an outstanding film finale, but also one of his most representative top dances with animated objects.” The rubble that could kill Buster brings He saved him from the angry women: "[...] he feels more comfortable under rocks." Robert Knopf's dominant main motif of the comedy is the steady increase in the masses: the insane number of brides is joined by a tight squad of police officers , a swarm of bees and finally the countless boulders of various sizes. The approaching seven o'clock appointment itself was established at the beginning of the chase in a gag sequence with several clocks. The narrative framework that was approaching the appointment gave Keaton the freedom to concentrate fully on the various gags during Jimmie's escape. His ability to create strong images is particularly emphasized in this context. In order to show as much as possible of the quantities of brides and rubble used, Keaton had the chase filmed with total shots . With Keaton, according to Grob, it is not suggestion that triumphs, "but rather the visual value, which is presented full of lust, often downright onirical ." He avoided close positions, also because, in his opinion, they can disturb the rhythm of a comedy: "[...] a cut [ on a close-up] can keep the audience from laughing. "

reception

Seven Chances was released in American cinemas in mid-March 1925. As with Sherlock, Jr. The projectionist was advised to project the film at a speed of 1,000 feet in eleven minutes, which is faster than today's sound films.

With revenues of around $ 600,000 in the United States alone, the comedy turned out to be profitable: film historians put the average production cost of a Keaton film at $ 220,000. While this did not surpass the extraordinary commercial success of Keaton's previous production The Navigator , the general acclaim confirmed Keaton's outstanding popularity as a comedian - even though the New York Times disappointedly stated that Keaton's new comedy was “not in the same class as The Navigator . "

Keaton's rediscovered and restored silent film comedies were gradually shown again in cinemas after the successful revival of The General from 1962. In September 1965, Seven Chances saw its revival at the New York Film Festival.

Even decades after its completion, Buster Keaton stuck to his view that Seven Chances was his weakest film. It is often contradicted by today's critics and film scholars. Jim Kline says the comedy is "wonderfully funny and imaginative work that [Keaton's] disparaging opinion does not deserve." David Robinson speaks of the film as the "ideal vehicle" for Keaton's comedy.

Remakes

Seven Chances was the only film Keaton's template for two remakes: Keaton's writer Clyde Bruckman worked as a screenwriter on the short film Brideless Groom , which was created for The Three Stooges in the lead roles. 1999 came The Bachelor (The Bachelor) with Chris O'Donnell and Renée Zellweger in the cinemas. The critics mostly preferred the original: "Buster Keaton's genius deserves a better homage ."

literature

  • David Robinson: Buster Keaton , pp. 119-125. Thames and Hudson Limited, revised 2nd edition, London 1970, ISBN 0-436-09881-4
  • Walter Kerr: The Silent Clowns . Da Capo Press, reprint, original edition by Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1980, ISBN 0-306-80387-9
  • Kevin Kline: The Complete Films of Buster Keaton , pp. 104-107. Citadel Press, New York 1993, ISBN 0-8065-1303-9
  • Heinz-B. Heller , Matthias Steinle (ed.): Film genres Comedy , pp. 63–67. Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-018407-X
  • Kevin W. Sweeney (Ed.): Buster Keaton: Interviews . University Press, Mississippi 2007, ISBN 978-1-57806-962-0
  • Marion Meade: Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, a Biography , pp. 153-155. Harper Collins, New York 1995, ISBN 0-06-017337-8 .
  • Robert Knopf: The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton , pp. 92-96. Princeton University Press, 1999, ISBN 0691004420 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d See Robinson, Keaton , p. 119.
  2. ↑ a b c See Marion Meade: Cut to the Chase , pp. 153–155.
  3. ↑ See Kline, The Complete Films of Buster Keaton , p. 105.
  4. ↑ Cf. Knopf, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton , p. 92.
  5. ↑ See www.silentera.com .
  6. ↑ See Robinson, Keaton , p. 124.
  7. ↑ a b Kline, The Complete Films of Buster Keaton , p. 106.
  8. ↑ a b See Brownlow and Gill's television documentary Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow , Part 2.
  9. ↑ “[…] they expected somethin '- for the first time in the picture […]”, cf. Keaton in conversation with George C. Pratt, in Buster Keaton: Interviews , p. 43.
  10. ↑ “We went back, and I think for a finish we built fifteen hundred rocks, starting from grapefruit-size up to one was eight-foot in diameter, and we went out on the ridge route and then I went up there and got started . At least I was working with paper maché, although some of them… for instance, that big one weighted four hundred pounds. ”, Keaton in conversation with Arthur B. Friedman, in Buster Keaton: Interviews , p. 23.
  11. ^ "It's the only thing that saved the picture.", Keaton in conversation with George C. Pratt, in Buster Keaton: Interviews , p. 43.
  12. ↑ See Kerr, The Silent Clowns , p. 236.
  13. ↑ “The way in which he builds up the tempo of individual sequences is impeccable.”, Robinson, Keaton , p. 124.
  14. ↑ Norbert Grob in Film Genres Comedy , p. 64.
  15. ↑ Knopf, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton , pp. 94-96.
  16. ↑ a b c Norbert Grob in Film Genres Comedy , p. 66.
  17. ↑ “Audiences of the period looked at female impersonation in an uncomplicated way: it was a talent, not a hint that the performer was probable transvestite. The attitude is made most explicit in Keaton's Seven Chances […] ”, Kerr, The Silent Clowns , p. 293.
  18. ↑ “Keaton took the film back to the studio and invented the boulders, giving himself not only a hilarious finish for the film but one of his most representative toe-dances with the animated inanimate.”, Kerr, The Silent Clowns , p. 225 .
  19. ↑ “[The brides] can only be routed, finally, by a downrush of giant boulders that may themselves kill Buster while saving him. But he is more at home with boulders. ”Kerr, The Silent Clowns , p. 240.
  20. ↑ See Knopf, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton , pp. 94-95.
  21. ↑ “Close-ups are too jarring on the screen, and this type of cut can stop an audience from laughing.”, Keaton in conversation with John Gillet, in Buster Keaton: Interviews , p. 225.
  22. ↑ The exact start date is given in Kline, The Complete Films of Buster Keaton , p. 105, and on the IMDb as March 11th. The website www.silentera.com , however, lists March 16 as the premiere date .
  23. ^ Kerr, The Silent Clowns , p. 37.
  24. ^ "[...] one could never consider Seven Chances in the same class as The Navigator .", New York Times , March 17, 1925.
  25. ↑ See the film's premiere dates at www.IMDb.com , accessed November 6, 2007.
  26. ↑ "Buster's least-favorite feature film, Seven Chances , is actually a delightfully funny and inventive work, totally undeserving of his disparaging opinion.", Kline, The Complete Films of Buster Keaton , p. 105.
  27. ↑ See title relating to the film on www.IMDb.com , accessed November 6, 2007.
  28. ↑ See reviews of The Bachelor and Seven Chances on www.rottentomatoes.com .
  29. ↑ “The brilliance of Buster Keaton deserves a better homage.” Rob Blackwelder in his review on splicedwire.com , accessed November 2007.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on December 3, 2008 in this version .