Column: An ode to failure: Some classic movies were flops when they first came out

Know that phrase “the numbers don’t lie”? It’s a lie. The numbers lie constantly. With the movies, as with every creative medium in which visionaries must cross the six-way intersection of greed, exploitation, risk, reward, art and commerce, it’s a mug’s game to lie about numbers not telling the whole story about anything.

This spring, a century ago, Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” opened in theaters. Keaton, a huge success in vaudeville and one of a handful of silent film pioneers touched by the gods of inspiration, already had built an eager audience for his fearless, outlandish stunt work, bone-dry wit, pinpoint comic timing and peculiarly American melancholy. He directed “Sherlock, Jr.” as well as starred in it, as well as breaking his neck, literally, for it.

Keaton took his time filming — four months on this project — and was injured filming a scene with a railway water spout. Some chilly preview screenings garnered few laughs, so Keaton cut his comedy down to 45 minutes, ruthlessly. Still, business was mild; 1924 audiences preferred Harold Lloyd’s comedies “Girl Shy” and “Hot Water.” While “Sherlock, Jr.” didn’t cost enough to be an omen of creative independence doom, the way Keaton’s “The General” was two years later, Keaton biographer Marion Meade called it the star’s first conspicuous disappointment in 25 years of show business. He was 28.

This is the thing about money: Enough time goes by, and very few money matters matter anymore. A century later “Sherlock Jr.” has ascended to the pantheon. It’s a dreamy masterpiece, connecting the world of dreams to the expressive realms of cinema. There are moments in it that defy gravity, bamboozle the eye, invent and perfect new ways of seeing and getting a laugh, all in the same second. The trade publication Variety called it “as funny as a hospital operating room.” More recently, two different children in my life attended Facets summer camp, and watching “Sherlock, Jr.” for the first time, they came to the same conclusion on different days in different summers: It’s great. Magic.

Sometimes the audience simply is not in the mood. Post-World War II America in 1946 was not in the mood for “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That movie lost money and felt like Frank Capra’s fade-out. He made more pictures, but not many, decades after his astonishing string of shrewd, heart-massaging hits in the late silent era and 1930s Hollywood. But endless reruns in the 1950s, thanks to the newer-fangled medium of television, bred familiarity with “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Now it sells out the Music Box Theatre every Christmas.

The roster of economic failures considered by many to be classics of their genre, or genre-defying singularities, has only gotten longer with pandemic-accelerated viewing habits and a desperate industry hellbent on making theatrical exhibition as short-lived as possible. The older titles are easiest to call out: “Duck Soup.” Too mordant for the Depression, reborn on college campuses in the ’60s and rep houses in the ’70s. “Bringing Up Baby.” “The Rules of the Game.” Audiences didn’t like the meticulous artifice of the former, and Jean Renoir’s latter seemed merely cryptic in its tone. Now it is a key film, period.

Newer stuff: So many tough, sour, mud-in-your-eye examinations of dark American forces, especially in the media, couldn’t get arrested in the 1950s. “Ace in the Hole.” “A Face in the Crowd.” “Sweet Smell of Success.” Now they look like bulletins from the very near future, not the past.

Time will tell on the newer new stack of great or near-great economic disappointments. “Tár.” “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Half of the movies made by Paul Thomas Anderson, at least half of which are plainly the stuff of eccentric, rewardingly slippery classics.

So much conspires against any kind of greatness in movies, especially the ones that seem extraordinarily populist today. At the time few in Hollywood thought there wasn’t any money to be made with 1946’s “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Was this what postwar audiences craved? No, they said, whoever the “theys” were. Too depressing. Too topical. Too skeptical about the challenges facing millions of servicemen coming home, mirrored by the characters in director William Wyler’s powerful drama.

It was the biggest hit, as it turned out, since “Gone with the Wind.” And as many have pointed out, including Glenn Frankel in his fine book “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,” a movie even mildly questioning Main Street America’s treatment of returning veterans would likely never have been made a few short years later, in the early 1950s Red Menace heyday.

Sometimes it’s timing; sometimes a classic is just too something, the way Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” and “The Magnificent Ambersons” and so tragically many more from Welles, fought to simply get made, and weren’t Hollywood movies anyway, most of them. And now we revisit them and find them endlessly what they always were: marvels of instability and loss and, yes, genius.

Consider this an ode to failures in name only. And a reminder of the triumph of time, in perpetuity.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.