Cops (1922) on Netflix
A young woman tells Buster she wants a businessman, not him. Cash from a dropped wallet buys him a load of furniture and a horse to haul it.
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- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.5/107,589 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
Buster calls on a young woman who turns him down because he has no money and says he needs to become a businessman. On the street he sees a large man drop a wallet, returns it, and comes away with the cash inside, then drives off in the man's car. At a house where a family waits for movers, a con man claims the furniture is his to sell, and Buster buys it, along with a horse to carry it away. The family, taking him for the moving man, loads its belongings onto his cart and gives him an address. Buster, sure the goods are his, drives off. After a run-in with a nasty dog, he mounts a boxing glove on a pole as a turn signal, and it knocks a traffic cop down twice.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cops (1922)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Cops was filmed during the rape-and-murder trial of Buster Keaton's former collaborator Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, a circumstance that may have shaped the short's tone of hopeless ensnarement.
- Pennsylvania's state censor board removed the goat gland sequence from Cops, and for decades that footage was missing until a surviving uncut print was located around 1980 and the sequence re-inserted.
- The film's goat gland sequence, in which Keaton's character takes his horse to a specialist and it emerges faster, referenced quack doctor John R. Brinkley, who claimed goat testicular transplants could cure male impotence and boost virility.
- Cops was one of many silent films shot in a one-block alley near Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevard; the alley was later renamed Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd Alley in recognition of that and other films.
