Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin Double-Bill at RNCM

Send in the clowns! Organist David Battiwalla and a group of RNCM students provide the live improvised soundtracks to films from silent cinema’s greatest comedians this October.

The evening starts with Charlie Chaplin short The Immigrant which sees the writer-actor-director in his famed Little Tramp role. The 1917 film sees the Tramp aboard a steamship on his way to America, with Chaplin mining the sway of the vessel for laughs as tries his luck at cards and dodges seasick passengers before finding an unexpected romance. It’s an early work from the British filmmaker, but more than worthwhile as an example of Chaplin’s physical prowess and the sense of humanity that runs through his oeuvre.

For the second act, RNCM have gone with Buster Keaton at the height of his powers in his 1924 masterpiece Sherlock Jr. Keaton directs and stars as an inept, lovesick projectionist who falls asleep only to dream his way through the cinema screen and into a role as the film’s titular detective. The premise is astonishingly simple — who hasn’t imagined themselves the star of the movie — and yet it seems modern and sophisticated a hundred years on.

It helps of course that Keaton has the talent to back up the concept. There are gags aplenty as the film throws the great stone-faced comedian through a series of physical trials and tribulations, up buildings and down, as his character’s dreamed movie detective works to foil a villain — played by the same actor who acts as Keaton’s dishonest love-rival in the film’s non-dream bookends. Sweet, smart and relentlessly entertaining, Sherlock Jr. is simultaneously a perfect introduction to silent film comedy, and an eternal treat to those well versed.