Seven Chances (1925)

Director: Buster Keaton
Writers: Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell, from the play by by Roi Cooper Megrue
Star: Buster Keaton

Index: That's a Wrap!

This is a far more enjoyable feature than its one joke premise ought to warrant. Of course, it’s a Buster Keaton movie, which helps, but he wisely wraps it up early at under an hour and breaks that up into forty minutes of story and a sixteen minute chase scene.

As a story, it’s weak, but, as a warm up to an impeccable chase scene, it’s enjoyable enough. It probably doesn’t hurt that the opening is in early Process 2 Technicolor, which was almost a trend in 1925, with The Phantom of the Opera and Ben-Hur both following suit.

It was no pioneer: the lost 1917 film The Gulf Between was Process 1 Technicolor and The Toll of the Sea in 1922 and Wanderer of the Wasteland in 1924 were Process 2, and others, like The Ten Commandments, had Process 2 sequences. That said, the third Process 2 feature wouldn’t show up until 1926, The Black Pirate.

The colour scenes here constitute a pretty simple gag. Keaton is Jimmie Shannon and he loves his girlfriend, Mary Jones, but can’t quite muster up the courage to tell her. They stand by her gate season after season, watching her dog grow up, and he still can’t tell her. That’s three minutes gone.

And then we switch back to black and white to get the setup. Jimmie is a junior partner in a brokerage firm, Meekin & Shannon, and times are hard. They were tricked into a presumably crooked deal that will leave them in prison if they can’t raise money quickly to cover it.

Enter a lawyer with papers for Jimmie to say his grandfather’s passed away and left him his estate. Of course, they think he’s serving them with a summons so they studiously avoid him, while he heroically gives chase. If a lawyer has money for me, I can only hope that he’s just as conscientious as this one! Anyway, this eats up another four minutes, while we wonder if the bounty will be something like fifteen cents.

It turns out to be seven million dollars, but there’s a catch. He’ll only get the money if he’s married by seven in the evening on the day he turns twenty-seven. Which, of course, through the magic of cinema, is today, so that deadline is merely hours away.

By the time he gets to Mary’s house, finally tells her he loves her and receives a yes to his proposal, we’re eleven minutes in and all that he has to do is explain why the wedding has to be today. Unfortunately, he mangles that and the whole thing’s off. There’s no intertitle but it’s not hard to read her lips when she explains that she never wants to see him again.

A little padding later and Meekin talks him into proposing to someone else, if only for his sake, you understand, which takes up the next twenty-five minutes. I wasn’t kidding about a one joke premise. Keaton, who directed as well as starred, riffs on that joke for almost half an hour and, while his famous stone face is great for this, it does feel a little stretched.

There’s embarrassment at a café as he opens conversation with “Will you marry me?” That prompts laughter and everyone is keen to see what happens next. Of course, he moves on to a fresh target and the litany of proposals feels seemingly endless, but the process does speed up as it goes. At one point he proposes to a girl on the way up a staircase, then another on the way down and a third on the way up again.

I think my favourite is the way that the hat check girl clearly feels left out that he doesn’t ask her, only for him to eventually do that too and for her to turn him down anyway. She was never going to say yes but wanted to be asked!

Eventually someone asks him and he walks out, hand in hand with her, to the laughter of what seems like all the other women there. It’s not what it seems though. Her mother collects her; she’s underage and dressed up. Oops!

And so it goes, from someone who doesn’t speak English to a female impersonator to the lady driving next to him; he hits a tree in what has to be the most underrated moment of this movie. I went back and watched that frame by frame so that I could see a ramp and padding, but it’s still incredibly impressive.

Meanwhile, his business partner thinks up a safer method: run an ad in the paper with the seven million bucks listed in the headline. Just be at the Broad Street Church by five in bridal attire and land a multi-millionaire. How could that possibly go wrong?

Incidentally, in keeping with the traditions of the silent era, most of the characters in this film go unnamed. The opening credits give us James Shannon’s name and the intertitles add that he’s Jimmie, but everyone else is listed as an archetype: His Partner, His Lawyer, His Girl, Her Mother, The Clergyman, The Hired Man.

Most of those never find a name, even in the intertitles, but the one shot of the newspaper ad gives us plenty of information. So Granddad was Jabez Shannon and the estate’s executor is Caleb Pettibone. It’s an impeccable shot that’s only on screen for fifteen seconds but could easily have been taken from a real paper.

Of course, every wannabe bride in town gets to the church by five and, after the priest tells them all to leave, thinking they were pranked, the chase is on. Literally. For the last glorious sixteen minutes of the film. I don’t know how far Keaton runs but he made me exhausted just by watching him.

Never mind that he jumps off a cliff onto a tree that’s being cut down at the time. Never mind that he literally bounces down a steep hillside, having triggered an entire avalanche of boulders. Never mind that he has to swim a river to escape some more dedicated would be brides. Never mind that he has to hang from the hook on a crane that they commandeer as it spins around viciously. He had my sympathy a second in just from the running!

What’s most telling is that, while the rocks weren’t real, with a hundred and fifty of them built from papier-mâché and chicken wire, the rest of that absolutely was. If Keaton is good in this film as an actor and OK as a director, he’s outstanding as a stuntman. This is Jackie Chan level stuff in 1925.

At least he didn’t write the film, though I’m sure he conjured up some of these gags. It was originally a play by Roi Cooper Megrue, albeit likely a routine one, given that the real joy is in the chase and there’s only so much of that a stage production can host. Keaton didn’t like the play and the original ending was a fadeout of him running from the bridal mob.

Thank the stars that he added the chase, as this review would be less complimentary if he hadn’t. Five stars for the chase, two otherwise.