Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

sashank_kini-1 In The High Sign, our intelligent half-wit Buster trying his luck at shooting when he reads a newspaper ad wanting shooters at an amusement park shooting gallery. Our gypsy-like wandering hero lands up in a town, with an inter-title introducing him as a man going nowhere who's found anywhere and will land up somewhere. He steals a newspaper from the pocket of a guy and finds this ad; the guy later approaches Keaton and buys the same newspaper from him, not knowing that it was his own paper which Buster had stolen. Before entering the park, he tries his hand at shooting and evidently stinks at it. Yet, Keaton is happy that he took out the practice targets, always the one he wasn't aiming at, and he accepts the job once he enters the gallery. Before leaving to his office in the next room, the tall owner instructs him that he wants to hear the bell go off every time Buster shoots. This puts our hero in trouble as we know he has little skill at shooting.But Keaton is an intelligent half-wit, and so he devises an ingenious plan: he ties up a street dog to the bell and ties a meat bone close to the dog. Inside, when he steps on a lever kept hidden close to where he stands, the tied up meat will lower down. The tied up dog would try getting it and in its attempt cause the bell to ring each time the meat is lowered. This works very well until the dog sees a cat, a probability Buster never considered. While this is going on in the gallery, we are also taken to the owner's office in the next room where we realize that the owner is actually the leader of a murderous group of extortionists called Blinking Buzzards. The group is impressed with Buster's 'shooting skills' after hearing the bell go off every time and assign him the task of killing an old man who refuses to pay him money. Our intelligent half-wit acquiesces. Meanwhile, the target of this gang visits the shooting gallery along with his daughter and is impressed with Keaton's shooting ability. He requests Buster to protect him from the gang and our intelligent half-wit Buster, unaware that it's the same guy who's to be shot, acquiesces. The rest of the action continues at the old man's home. I found out Donald O'Conner, the funny-man from Singin' in the Rain considered Keaton as a major influence. The 'Make Em Laugh' number from the legendary musical reminds me of the Keaton sequence in The High Sign when Buster tries to evade the gang of Blinking Buzzards at the old man's house by jumping from one room to the other, tearing up walls and sliding through connecting windows. I doubt any of Buster's contemporaries could top him when it comes to nailing the excitement of physical comedy. Anything is possible in Buster's world, like the scene when he slams the door into one of the gang members and we see his head popping out through the door.Everyone including Buster himself considers him to be something he's not. He's not a shooter yet he's hired as a shooting gallery shooter as well as assassin as well as a guardian angel. And Buster plays along the situations creating comedy and craziness on the way. He likes exploring the possibilities of cinema and creativity in an age where cinema was still developing as a medium, and so he creates his world as he pleases. Take for example where he simply paints a hook on the wall and hangs his hat on it and it really does hang like there's an actual hook. That's how malleable and modifiable Keaton's world is. And High Sign is a high sign of what Keaton brings to the world of cinema.

ccthemovieman-1 This begins with Buster being a crook. First, he steals a newspaper from a man riding a merry-go-round. It turns out to be the biggest newspaper you have ever seen! He sees a "help wanted" ad for a worker in a shooting gallery. You must be "crack shot." Buster isn't, of course, but he cheats again and gets the job, thanks to a little (and very clever) scheme with a little dog. (Buster is not an honest man in this movie, but he sure is resourceful!).The arcade is run by a giant of a man (Charles Dorety?) who is a member of the Blinking Buzzards, a brutal secret group of extortionists and hit men. One of the men on their hit list is the town tightwad: "August Nickelnurser." The latter, knowing his days are numbered, walks by the arcade, sees Buster, and hires him as his bodyguard. The big villain-arcade owner (no name was ever given him) comes back, takes Buster to the Buzzards hideout, makes him a member and gives him his first assignment: kill Nickelnurser.Holy cow - Buster is both the bodyguard and the hired assassin for the same man!!! What to do?This fantastic premise - to be played out in the second half of the film, doesn't really get going until the final few minutes, unfortunately. We have to sit through a few meaningless scenes back at the arcade. However, when Buster, the target and his cute daughter, and all the Buzzards all wind up in the same house - a great house filled with trap doors....the finish is fantastic!

Igenlode Wordsmith Some people -- to paraphrase Mel Brooks -- call Buster Keaton a genius. But that's both too little and too much to give him credit; Einstein was a genius, Keaton... is incredible.In the Fatty Arbuckle films he's amusing in what we tend to put down as a 'silent-comedy' way, a {by and large} straight-faced clown in a world of food fights, cross-dressing, clumsy cops and general anarchy. After exposure to a few hours of these I was, frankly, ready to write Keaton off as simply another sub-Laurel-and-Hardy slapstick act -- in the Arbuckle shorts he's reasonably funny but nothing to rave over. And then, suddenly, in the middle of the programme, came "The High Sign"... and it knocked me for six here, there, and into the middle of next week.As a solo debut it's nothing short of astounding. It's the spectacle of a great talent emerging fully-formed and all at once into unique existence, like Athena from the head of Zeus. From the opening scene, the style, the humour, the devices, the sheer *intelligence* are instantly, blazingly original: this isn't just 'silent comedy' to be laughed at and over by the modern public with an air of faint condescension, it's surreal and hilarious and utterly gifted to side-splitting effect by anyone's standard. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. And the audience reaction -- from the former good-natured 'look-he's-dipped-the-bouquet-in-the-dirty-oil' laughter to the sudden roar of genuine surprise and delight -- was instant and electric. Suddenly, it was we who were eighty years behind the times, belated recipients of a moment of magic. Director, acrobat, actor, gag-writer, cinematographer, stuntman... for the first time Buster Keaton was set free into the universe of his own imagination, with confidence, grace and meticulous inventive brilliance, and before our eyes -- how could we not know it? -- a star was born.Even more incredible to learn, and yet true, is the fact that Keaton himself rejected and suppressed this first film as insufficiently original, holding up release for a year: no-one ever saw it at the time. He knew he could do better and, unbelievably, he was right. But that's another story...

captnemo This little gem of a movie is chock full of inventive gags that will keep you laughing. There are the usual physical ones, such as the house and its many entrances/exits. What had me intrigued were some of the sight gags as well. The dog and the bell was amazing to watch. Each and every corner in Keaton's world has something wondrous around it. The man was an amazing athlete, and it shows here. Watch for the weird guns throughout the film. They don't make sense but then again they don't have to.