The framing devices in Day Dreams are the letters which Buster writes to his girl, whom he has left to prove himself worthy of her. He writes that he is “cleaning up in Wall Street”. She dreams of an elegant wizard of the tickertape; the reality is a street cleaner. He writes that he is an actor. She imagines a Hamlet Buster; the fact is that he is an extra having terrible trouble with his spear and finally getting thrown out of the theatre. The idea is, generally speaking, more attractive than the execution; and the return to the girl and the relationship between them is not managed with Keaton’s usual clear grasp of character. The finale, however, is memorable. Running – for some reason – from the police, Buster leaps from the jetty on to a ferryboat – only to find that it is not as he had thought going out, but coming in. He therefore escapes from a window and on to the great paddlewheel, which begins to move round and round. To keep from going under the water, he must keep going round it like a mouse in a treadmill, endlessly.

David Robinson, Keaton, Martin Secker & Warburg, London 1969

Day Dreams was restored from a 35mm safety dupe negative made from Czech material provided by the Cinémathèque française and two nitrate prints from EYE Film Institute and the Lobster Film collection. Some short fragments were added from a safety sound aperture fine grain in the Blackhawk Films Collection preserved at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Intertitles were reconstructed according to the original font, based on the translation of original French and Czech cards. Restored by Lobster Films laboratories in 2015.