Synopsis
The Romeo and Juliet story played out in a tenement neighborhood with Buster and Virginia's families hating each other over the fence separating their buildings.
Neighbors
1920 Directed by Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline
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Alternative Titles
Vecinos, Frigo a soused, Kærlighedens Plankeværk, Uskolliset naapurit, La voisine de Malec, Szomszédok, I vicini, Sasiedzi, Соседи, Buster Keaton verliert die Hosen, Voisin voisine, 이웃 사람들
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Cinematic Time Capsule
1920 Marathon - Film #46”He's my son and I'll break his neck any way I please!”
The best thing about this line is that it’s “spoken” by Buster Keaton’s real-life father who used to literally throw him around the vaudeville stage as a toddler for laughs.
High-wire hijinks, mutlistory acrobatics and a busted-pants wedding make for yet another hilarious Keaton short. This modern-day version of Romeo & Juliet, uses two neighboring buildings to create some unbelievable and potentially neck breaking stunt work and I nearly broke the remote with all of my pausing and rewinding to try and comprehend each incredible piece of action.
A special shout-out for Buster’s amazing paddle-fence. I simply love how he can…
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Oh Buster, another flawless one.
(The only politically correct way of doing blackface i have ever seen)Missunderstandings are slowly but surely becoming my favorite comedy trait. I feel like, the only modern masters of that are the Coen Brothers.
But it'll be difficult ever surpassing the Great Stoneface.
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"He's my son and I'll break his neck any way I please!"
The Great Stoneface delivers another classic. Miscommunication to the nth has always made for some of the best comedy and throw in some romantic hijinks here, The Flying Escalantes providing a three story human transport system, a single plank of wood from a paddle-style fence providing half the gags and mix them altogether and you'll most likely have the fits of crying laughter that I did, something very very necessary for my existence right now. -
Features perhaps the most audacious and complex blackface gag in cinema. (Several theses could be written on this ingenious, damning shot.) Here, Buster mostly revels in the cartoon-gag trickery of his doll's-house world (sexed-up men's pants falling down at a wedding, woman-as-hypersexualized-commodity, bodies hopping about in perfect gymnists' triplets). But, for about 3 minutes, Buster zooms out the cartoon world into the real world. We get some searing, penetrating, light-social-satire on race relations in America: how white policemen traffick people based on their skin-color and no other defining feature, how biracial identity is still such a touchy and un-talkable issue in America, how the stitches in the black-white racial dynamic will perhaps never be fully sutured. This blogger summarizes the use of blackface in Neighbors very well.
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“Neighbors” has everything you want and expect from a Buster Keaton short film: Incredible stunts, funny slapstick, memorable sight gags, hilarious misunderstandings, and Keaton´s stoic stone face performance. The three people on top of each other is the highlight for me. 18 minutes of pure entertainment.
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This is Buster Keaton at his most cartoonish, some of the most entertaining and intricate slap-stick humor I’ve seen from him
There’s a scene where Buster Keaton is full of mud, after being stuck head first in the ground, he then proceeds to smack his neighbor in the head with a broom, the neighbor gets the cops involved - but before they arrive Keaton washes away the mud and the police arrest a random black guy instead - that’s pretty fucked up, but the sequence is paced so well.
This film is wild! There’s a lot of humor I expect was a bit too edgy even for those days.
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buster king of bozo cinema. the bit where he gets hung by his feet on a laundry line and just gets rocked with a two-by-four and spins entirely around the line with his feet still attached... that's what the movies are all about.
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Buster in love again and looking very cute. Straightforward story with some lovely physical gags and great acrobatics. This has actually gone down a half star on this rewatch: good but not great.
(It's such a comfort to watch something I love, an anchor of familiarity in the ocean of the new and the strange I'm currently floating around in. I'm not able to regularly watch films at the moment (or at all, really) and I miss it terribly).
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Funny in parts, with several amazing stunts, but there’s a few jokes in here that I can only describe as “blackface adjacent.” Like, they’re not as overt as something like Birth of a Nation or even Holiday Inn, and they highlight the racism of policing, but...oof, it’d work way better without them. Also, it sounds ridiculous to say this about an 18 minute film, but a couple of scenes drag on for too long.
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☆"The Flower of Love could find no more romantic spot on which to blossom than this poet's Dream Garden."☆
Keaton does Shakespeare, apparently, in the 18-minute short Neighbors, as he and Eddie Cline co-direct a spin of Romeo and Juliet. The two-reel silent comedy has a little less slapstick than many of his early works, but still features incredible physical stunts amidst a sweet story of love and misunderstanding.
In the urban tenements on either side of a fence live two young star-crossed lovers -- played by Buster Keaton and Virginia Fox -- whose families are feuding about the two and their constant communication, especially their fathers (Joe Keaton and Joe Roberts, respectively). So the gentleman has to get creative…
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My 2 year old laughed her head off. Never seen her laugh that hard watching anything. Kept yelling “what!” at Buster’s stunts and asked “what’s next?” or “again again!” at each title card. Maybe my proudest moment?
