The Scarecrow

The Scarecrow belongs among Buster Keaton's best two-reelers with others like The Boat and One Week. Buster gets chased through half the picture by a very clever dog. The rest is with Sybil Seely, Keaton's cutest girl co-star. The dog runs Buster through the ruins of an old adobe house, up a ladder and into a mountain of hay. Seely dances amid the bales then coyly misinterprets Buster's bended knee as a proposal. In the scarecrow scene he quickly kisses her, she runs into the middle of the river astonished, and delivers a double-take in close-up that's priceless! They somehow end up on a speeding motorcycle with a minister who marries them just before they plunge into a river. The dog is wonderful, Buster's rival is suitably oafish and there's even a great part for 'Big Joe'. The Scarecrow has less of the impossible stunts Keaton was known for but it flies along at break-neck speed from beginning to end and has enough material in two reels for six or seven

You discover all what you expect from a Buster Keaton film. From inventiveness to the love story and gags. All - so fresh, seductive and charming. A story about the perfect manner to survive to challenges and great example of fine humor. A film more fascinating than amusing. Because it remains proof of high art. A great short film.

Buster Keaton was one of the greatest motion picture performers in the history of motion pictures.

One reason was his athleticism, allowing him to do hilarious stunts, and his timing, as exemplified in "The General," and his dead-pan face that still portrayed an emotion.

In this short film, he uses all of those skills and abilities and still gets upstaged by Luke the Dog for much of the movie.

His female co-star is as cute as anyone could be, and we could only wish she had been around even longer.

Al St. John, later known as "Fuzzy," is here, uncredited, very briefly, and a "pastor" is not given his real name even here at IMDb, which is quite unusual.

Buster Keaton was always great, and sometimes, in fact often in his talkies, was greater than his script.

Here, he was star, co-director and co-writer, and everything came together very well.

I saw this in a TCM Sunday Night Silent, and am grateful to that network, which has, I'm sad to say, deteriorated in quality in recent months, showing an awful lot of very non-classic movies. TCM begins to redeem itself, though, with such films as "The Scarecrow." I recommend "The Scarecrow," and hope you get to see it next time it plays.

This very funny short comedy is an excellent example of Keaton's amazing inventiveness, and it deserves to be one of his best-remembered short features. The first part is especially good, and has to be seen to be appreciated - it's just Buster and a roommate going about their daily routine in a house filled with wacky gadgets and all kinds of unexpected features. There's a lot of great material, much more than you can catch all at once. It would be hard for the rest of it to live up to the first part, but it is pretty good, too - lots of slapstick and chases, plus the actual "Scarecrow" scene. This one is a bit more piecemeal than most of his comedies, but all of the material is very good. Most fans of silent comedies will really enjoy this movie.

One of Buster Keaton's early short films, The Scarecrow (1920) is brimming with youthful energy and silly fun. Keaton shares the screen with Big Joe Roberts and Sybil Seely.

Seely was nothing less than Keaton's finest leading lady, charming and spunky. She was a comic partner, not a "breathing prop" as Keaton's female co-stars are often stereotyped as being. It's a shame she and Keaton never starred in a feature film together, but at least we've got four shorts of them, so I won't complain. (Not too much anyway, ha!) But yeah, lots of cute stuff, like the rigged hut Buster and Joe share, or the wedding held on the motorcycle. For those who encounter pseudo-intellectuals who think Buster Keaton was all solemn and bleak and Kafka-esque, the sunshine of The Scarecrow should shut them up quickly. The man was plain funny.