Welcome to Public Domain Theater, your home for the wonderful world of films that have (in the United States, at least) fallen into the public domain, and are free for everyone to see!

This month, we’re serving up a double dose of Buster Keaton! That master of silent movie slapstick returns to Public Domain Theater with the 1928 feature film The Camerman. Keaton plays a cameraman (natch) who’s trying to capture some great news footage to earn money/impress a girl (also natch), but finds those efforts going hilariously awry (so very much natch).

The film is packed with terrific gags and wild stunts, as Keaton’s hapless protagonist swims into shipwrecks, trespasses at Yankee Stadium, runs afoul of police officers, and winds up in the middle of an all-out gang war. All that, plus a mischievous monkey sidekick? For all-out mirth and merriment, it stands as one of Buster’s best.

To accompany such a feature, we felt it only right to select one of Keaton’s finest short films as well. “The High Sign” stars Keaton as yet another aimless drifter, whose efforts to get employed at a shooting gallery instead find ’em employed as the bodyguard to a rich tycoon and as an assassin for a secret society of criminals … who want ’em to assassinate the aforementioned tycoon. You could make a decent thriller out of that premise, but in Keaton’s hands, it becomes a wild comedy of errors with a hilarious and action-packed climax.

So if you like to laugh, come on down to Public Domain Theater and see how one of the old masters did it best!
(And if you don’t like to laugh … tough!)

Opening Short:

Feature Presentation: