The Seven Chances [56', 1925] The reputation of Buster Keaton's Seven Chances rests almost solely on its outrageous finale, a brilliant cascade of comic invention that begins with a church full of blushing brides and builds to a surreal chase of epic proportions. The hapless groom is pursued by an angry mob of women clad in white lace and veils and ends up dodging rolling stones and massive boulders while fleeing an avalanche, never once losing his trademark deadpan. Buster plays a struggling lawyer who will inherit a fortune if he marries by 7p.m. of his 27th birthday--the very day he receives notice of the potential windfall. When his longtime sweetheart turns him down, he frantically searches for someone--anyone--to wed. While Seven Chances doesn't have the sustained inspiration of his best films, Keaton fills the picture with inventive moments and clever ideas, notably a sustained series of desperate proposals (the "seven chances" of the title) that lead to the climactic swarm of aggressive brides. The biggest weakness is an embarrassing blackface performance that has only become more offensive with the years. Jean Arthur briefly appears as a switchboard operator. The film was remade in 1999 as The Bachelor with Chris O'Donnell ... [Sean Axmaker] Seven Chances is a film often imitated but never rivaled for hilarity and visual virtuosity. It stars Buster Keaton with Lori Bara , T. Roy Barnes , Bartine Burkett & Rosalind Byrne. Amazon viewers' reviews: All we are saying is give Keaton a chance, February 6, 2004, by Andrew McCaffrey (USA): I'm at a bit of a loss to explain what I thought about SEVEN CHANCES (1925) as a whole, because I had such a mixed reaction to it. The beginning and middle go from being sort of fun to being downright offensive. It's the last twenty or so minutes that save this fifty-six minute feature. They're absolutely terrific and encapsulate all of the things that Buster Keaton did so well. The premise for this movie is overly simplistic and rather contrived, but then again, we aren't looking for Machiavellian plots out of most romantic comedies. Buster Keaton finds himself as the recipient of a large inheritance. As one could guess, this windfall comes with a catch: if he is married before seven o'clock on his twenty-seventh birthday, he gets the cash. If he isn't married by that time, then he gets nothing. (Wouldn't we all love to put weird catches like that into our last will and testament? I'm planning to withhold everything from my next-of-kin until they put on a clown suit and run down Interstate-270 during rush-hour shouting the lyrics to Eminem's Lose Yourself.) Since it turns out that today is the unmarried Keaton's twenty-seventh birthday, he races around desperately trying to tie the knot with someone -- anyone. Naturally, there is one special woman who we all know that he's supposed to end up with, but we have to wait until the very end for the movie to reward us with the anticipated conclusion. If that plot summary sounds familiar to any reader out there, it's probably because the film was remade recently with Chris O'Donnell in the Buster Keaton role. I haven't seen that version of the movie, and I can only assume that the decision was made because a movie mogul had some sick desire to see the words "Chris O'Donnell" and "Buster Keaton" in the same sentence. This movie is less successful when sticking close to its initial foundation. Indeed, the Keaton character's unwillingness to marry outside his WASP background is responsible for two of the more uncomfortable moments. (What is it with this disc and bizarre attitudes towards race? I know it was a less enlightened time, but I've been making my way through the "Art of Buster Keaton" DVD box set and the stuff here really stands out as unusual. And one of the included short films has its own groan-worthy sequences: would any cop really be so dimwitted as to be confused about Buster Keaton's ethnic background just because of some mud on his face?) What this film is mostly remembered for is its incredible chase sequence that more or less takes up the entire last third. Suddenly realizing that there is only One True Woman that he can possible wed, Keaton must escape the clutches of the thousands of would-be brides who want to get their hands on Keaton and his cash. This leads to sequences of several hundred extras in wedding gowns racing through the city streets, which is almost as funny a visual as the hundreds of angry police-officers chasing Keaton in one of his short films (the aptly named COPS). But it's Keaton's physical dexterity that makes this memorable. For example, after escaping the city, he races across countryside. He comes to a cliff and quickly throws himself off it, reaching out and grabbing a tree to save his fall ... a tree that is being chopped down and which slowly topples as soon as Keaton lands on it. Undeterred, he immediately gets right back up and starts running again. A few minutes later, he's racing down a rocky hill, inadvertently causing a rockslide. Watching Keaton sprinting down a sandy incline while dodging large boulders is amazing. At one point, he comes to a standstill and concentrates solely on avoiding the rocks. He leaps over some. Others he ducks under. He jumps to the left to dodge them. He jumps to the right. My first thought on watching this was that Keaton got himself into a live-action version of Donkey Kong, with fake boulders instead of barrels. I love this sort of Keaton stunt work where I can both admire and laugh at a sequence at the same time ... Best Chance for Buster, July 30, 2004, by blockhed (UK) Frankly, I'd been a bit disappointed in the Buster films I'd seen before this one. Perhaps it was the scrappy condition they'd reached me in. This film, however, turned out to be a treasure and a masterpiece. Finally I became fully aware of how funny and downright amazing Keaton could be. It's strange that other viewers report that he didn't like it himself. Personally, I enjoyed the obviously well-structured plot, the elegant clothes, Buster's incredible athleticism, and as the story came to its ever zanier climax I was laughing out loud, very loud. Aside from the obvious fact that the whole world, not just Hitler's Germany, was unbelievably racist in the 1920s, there seems to be something of a feminist message underlying this story. One of the best scenes is where the vast army of women on the rampage totally flatten two football teams. Yikes, here comes women's lib! I'll grab my hat and run. Keaton's marriage life slapstick farce, September 27, 2006, by Salvador Fortuny Miro "Parva" (Tarragona, Spain) This splendid slapstick farce was Keaton's revenge to the tensions and bitterness of the marriage life with his first wife, Nathalie Talmadge. The film is a torrent of very calculated sight-gags with a unstoppable rhythm that arrives to its "climactic" explosion in the spectacular scene in which the character incarnated by Keaton, a wrecked lawyer who have to be married by 7pm of his 27th birthday to inherit a big fortune (this is, in 24 hours), must choose between five hundred spiteness brides or a rocks avalanche. The film knew a very poor remake in 1998 called The bachelor. Another masterwork of one of the greatest technician and comic artists of cinema.