Cops (Buster Keaton, 1922)

Cops was written and directed by Buster Keaton in 1922, and follows the usual clueless and naive Keaton character getting into insane scenarios. Here, Buster stokes the anger of an entire city’s police force, after a series of laughable events, and ends up outrunning them through some unique and crafty escape routes.

The film is similar to Keaton’s other films of the 1920’s, except Cops involves more outrageous and unbelievable scenes, such as Keaton outrunning hundreds of cops or catching a bomb and using it to light his cigarette while riding a cart full of stolen furniture, in the middle of a police parade! The film suspends realism to a large extent, featuring impossible stunts and scenarios that escalate into outright chaos, as his films often did, involving physical stunts to achieve comedy and reflecting the belief that cops were unnecessary at the time, including one aspect of realism. The film is not expressionist either though, only using impossible stunts and structures to achieve comedy, as Keatons other films of the 20’s did. They reflect the industrial advancement of America at the time, and follows an innocent but chaos-creating man who the audience can sympathise with in his struggles.

I personally enjoyed Cops a lot! It did escalate extremely quickly and ended up being quite jarring with the pace and lack of buildup to the absolute calamity that was the climax. But other than that it involved some of the funniest stunts and wacky moments of any other Keaton film, although the ending was very sudden and the plot was almost too unbelievable at times. I rate Cops 3 and a half stars!