The Scarecrow

1920

Comedy / Family

2
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 90% · 2 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 90% · 500 ratings
IMDb Rating 7.8/10 10 5151 5.2K

silent film farmer's daughter short film

Plot summary

Two farmhands compete for the love of the farmer's daughter.

Director

Buster Keaton Photo
Buster Keaton

Top cast

Buster Keaton Photo
Buster Keaton as Farmhand
Joe Keaton Photo
Joe Keaton as Farmer
Al St. John Photo
Al St. John as Man with Motorbike
Luke the Dog Photo
Luke the Dog as The Dog
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
172.38 MB
1280*960
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
12 hr 18 min
Seeds 3
320.08 MB
1440*1080
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
12 hr 18 min
Seeds 9

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by imogensara_smith 9 / 10

Fresh as the dawn

Reviewed by AlsExGal 8 / 10

This largely has nothing to do with a scarecrow...

... as the scarecrow gag is just one gag in a two reel short that is full of them.Buster and Big Joe Roberts are roommates and fellow farm hands. Probably the best part of this short are all of the gadget related gags at the beginning as the two farmhands eat breakfast and prepare to meet the workday. As the pair get ready to leave the house, one bed becomes a piano, the other a couch, and a phonograph doubles as a stove. Keaton always said he would have been an engineer if he hadn't become a comic and his mechanical bent shows in this short.Keaton seldom used captions as he tended to show you not tell you what's going on. But there's one line here that is odd for a Keaton comedy - "I don't care how she votes - I'm going to marry her." This short was made the first year that women had the Constitutional right to vote. Also Prohibition went into effect this year. Thus the line ""My stomach's as empty as a saloon." It's rare that you need to know something about history to appreciate Keaton, after all, he was not Alice Guy-Blache.
Reviewed by Mike-764 9 / 10

This Scarecrow had the smarts.

Story of two farmhand roommates, living in a flat that only Rube Goldberg could have come up with, who are vying for the attention of the farmer's daughter, while Buster's character has to fend off his roommate (Joe Roberts looking very much like Fatty Arbuckle), the girl's father, and father's dog (which actually belonged to Arbuckle). That's pretty much the plot, but the sightgags are what make the short really work. The breakfast scene, with the aforementioned Goldberg setting, is pure genius. A very good production all around and ranks as one of Keaton's best. Rating, based on shorts, 10.
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