It is well-known that Hard Luck has been missing for over half a century. Buster Keaton always had a weakness for it, as he revealed in the famous interview with Robert Franklin, in 1958. He never knew that the Cineteca Italiana in Milan owned an (incomplete) copy with the misleading title Nel paese degli armadilli (literally In Armadillo Country), nor that a decade after the first restoration carried out in 1987 by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, new materials would emerge to finally reveal the impossible gag Keaton kept describing. After so long, the echo of laughter was still loud and clear in his memory: “the audience would be laughing getting into their cars, out in the parking lots… and if they stayed in there and watched the feature picture coming on, they’d still be laughing at the middle of the next reel of the feature.” His final dive – reminiscent and yet antithetical to his attempted suicide in The Electric House – is shown in a very Keatonian shot with no cuts. It is an impossible dive, a round trip to the other side of the world.

Cecilia Cenciarelli