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Of all the slapstick comedies from the 1920's, Buster Keaton's have perhaps
remained the freshest, be it for their narrative stringency, their incredible
pace (even though Keaton was one of the few directors who didn't speed up the chase sequences in his
films
for additional comical effect), be it for
their incredible (and highly dangerous) stunt setpieces or for his
visionary directorial skills that pushed the medium to its limits,
creating shots and sequences in a pre-digital age that are unsurpassed
even today. Interestingly enough, in his high time in the 1920's, Keaton
didn't even play in the same league concerning box office success as other
slapstick greats Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon and especially Charlie
Chaplin, yet his best films have stood the test of time much better than
those of his competition, as their clockwork-like fatalistic narratives
with their almost mechanic (yet highly hilarious) gags and hair-raising
yet effortlessly executed stunts seem much more timeless and universal
than those of his rivals that often went out of their way to have a
heart - which meant nothing else but kitsch of course. (By the way,
Keaton's intentionally expressionless face wasn't too suited for cheesy
stories anyways - but it was perfect for the role of the little man fighting
overpowering ods he tended to play.)
Born into
Vaudeville
Regarding Buster Keaton's childhood, it was already hard to imagine
that he would become anything but a slapstick comic: Buster was born
Joseph Frank Keaton in 1895 in Pickway, Kansas. It wasn't that his parents
Joseph Hallie (Joe) Keaton and Myra Cutler Keaton were living in Pickway,
or even in Kansas, they were just touring the country as a comic act with
a medicine show that interestingly enough also featured a pre-star Harry Houdini. Buster was only about three when his parents
tested him
on stage for the first time, and at the request of the manager of the
vaudeville theatre they were then working for, Buster became a part of his
parents act when he was merely four years old. The early acts of young
Buster were already a precursor of things to come: His father would throw
Buster around on stage and have him perform little stunts, and the main
function Buster had was to endure everything that was happening to him
without showing any emotion - with the same stoneface that would remain
his trademark all through his career. The acts of the Three Keatons, as
they called themselves then, were pretty rough - especially since Buster
showed a natural talent for stunting from an early age -, but they were a
hit with the audience ... not so with child welfare organisations though,
which especially in bigger cities often forced the Keatons' shows to shut down.
However, for travelling theatre folks like the Keatons having to shut down
in one spot only meant to open in another, and the law never could really
catch up with them to book them for child neglect or something. Buster's
own memories of his childhood, which he mainly spent being mistreated on
stage (from an objective point of view) were primarily positive though,
and it stands without a doubt that his early experiences directly
influenced his later career. During Keaton's childhood and
youth, Buster also developed an interest in mechanics and all sorts of
machines, which might have influenced his films' almost clockwork-like
plots. Especially locomotives and trains fascinated him, which later
became evident in two of his masterpieces, Our
Hospitality (1923) and The
General (1926). Buster also became a bit of an inventor during his
formative years, though his inventions were barely notable for their
practibcability but rather for their fascination with mechanics. The short
The Electric House
(1922) or an extended scene in The
Navigator (1924), in which he has created all sorts of crazy
kitchen appliances to make himself breakfast on a drifting boat, perfectly
mirror this talent. It's interesting to note at this point that while
Buster might have inherited his comic talent from his father Joe, dad
Keaton had no talent in mechanics whatsoever and is said to have been
afraid of machines (which allegedly is why the Three Keatons never
made it to the screen during their career as a trio). Even
after Buster Keaton had outgrown his childstar status, the Three
Keatons continued to perform, and to great success as well - after
all, the act wasn't successful for Buster being a child but Buster being a
great performer of physical comedy. However, over the years, the family
troupe ran into more and more problems, and the main one was father Joe
Keaton himself. The older he got, the more he took to drinking, his
fitness deteriorated and with that, his precision - on which Buster had to
rely in order to not get injured in his stunts - got worse. Add to that
jealousy directed towards his son who already showed more talent than he had
ever had and more and more grew the center of the act, Joe Keaton's
increasingly bad temper (caused at least in part by his alcoholism), and
the like. This all led to the seperation of the Three Keatons
comedy troupe in 1917, and Buster went to New York, 21 years of age.
Thanks to his talent and (relative) fame, it took Buster a mere few days
to find a well-paid job as a solo comic in a revue, The Passing Show of
1917, but that engagement didn't last long ...
Fatty Arbuckle
Having only yet spent a few months in New York, Buster Keaton
made the acquaintance of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle via a friend from his
vaudeville days. Besides Charlie Chaplin, Arbuckle was the leading
slapstick comedian of the latter part of the 1910's, and just like
Chaplin, he directed his films himself. Arbuckle had just quit his
contract with Mack Sennett and decided to hook up with independent producer Joseph
M.Schenck to form the Comique Film Company. At first, Buster was nothing but an observer on
Arbuckle's filmsets, but he was fascinated by the whole filmmaking process
and its many possibilities pretty much right away - little wonder, would
making movies, with all its possibilities of editing and camera setup,
correspond with Buster's mechanical mind far better than live theatre. Even
though it meant much worse wages, Keaton quit his theatre job pretty much
immediately and became a part of Arbuckle's troupe - and Arbuckle was
quick to notice the young man's potential, as within a short time, Buster
did not only become Arbuckle's most important co-star alongside former Keystone
Cop Al
St.John, but also his assistant director. Arbuckle's first film
with Keaton was The Butcher
Boy (1917, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle), basically your typical
Arbuckle short that takes a certain scenery - in this case a department
store - and squeezes as many funny situations as possible out of it.
Buster's performance in this film is remarkable though since it already
perfectly anticipates things to expect from this future landmark slapstick
comedian and sees his screen persona - down to the characteristic flat
straw hat - already fully developed - and all Buster does here is test
brooms and buy molasses. (Buster wasn't in character in all of his
Arbuckle films though, for example in The
Rough House [1917, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle], he can even be seen
laughing.)
Buster's on-screen persona caught on
quickly, and he had soon become a fixture in the Arbuckle-shorts. And when
Arbuckle moved production from New York to Hollywood (back then not yet
the movie mekka it is today) in later 1917 after only a handful of movies,
it was no question for Buster to move to the West Coast as well. Once in
Los Angeles, Buster at first moved in with his father Joe, whom he even
persuaded to accept a part in Arbuckle's first Hollywood-film, A Country
Hero (1917, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle), and though dad Keaton was
sceptic towards the (relatively) new medium at first, he soon caught on
and would appear in supporting roles in many of Buster's shorts and
features. With the move to Hollywood, Buster's importance gradually grew
in Arbuckle's team, and he soon became Arbuckle's lead sidekick, a position
previously occupied by Al St.John. Now that's not to say that St.John -
who remained with Arbuckle all through Keaton's years with him, helped him
through hard times and eventually wound up to become one of B-Western's
most popular sidekick Fuzzy
- was a bad comic, he was actually quite ok, but he simply lacked the
genius and analytical mind of Buster Keaton. Still, there is no report
that the two men were actually fighting over Arbuckle's attentions or had
a private rivalry going on between them, quite the contrary - actually,
over the years St.John even appeared in a couple of Keaton's post-Arbuckle
shorts, including The High
Sign (1921, Buster Keaton, Edward F.Cline), the first solo shord
Buster made (though not released) after he and Arbuckle parted ways. As a pairing, Arbuckle and Keaton seemed
almost ideal, as
Arbuckle's good-natured, playful, even childlike character was perfectly
contrasted by Buster's emotionless face and permanent seriousness. That
both were masters of slapstick comedy and knew how to perfectly react to
one another of course made their act even better. In 1918.
Buster had to leave Arbuckle's production unit for a year because he got
drafted to fight in World War I, but when he got to the front, the war was
already over, and his service was limited to entertaining the troops.
Returning to Hollywood and Arbuckle in 1919, he quickly reassumed his old
position, but after a mere three films (Backstage, The Hayseed,
The Garage [all 1919, Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle]), Arbuckle decided
to move on to make feature films (which turned out to be a blessing for
Keaton) before his career got cut short by a nasty early-Hollywood scandal
that involved the death of a starlet in 1921 ... The time with
Arbuckle may vvery well be considered as Buster's formative years as a
filmmaker, and most of what Buster learned about comedy filmmaking,
he learned from Arbuckle - however, Buster's analytical mind, his vision
and his predeliction for all things mechanic (even on a narrative level) saw him surpass Arbuckle's rather simplistic and episodic
understanding of comedy before long, and when he and Arbuckle parted ways
(professionally, they remained close friends until Arbuckle's premature
death in 1933), he was already halfways to finding his very own cinematic
language.
The Buster Keaton-Shorts
In 1919, Fatty Arbuckle has reached such a level of popularity
that it was almost compulsory to let him move to feature films - yet at
that time, that was a bite too big to take for his producer Joseph
M.Schenck (yet), so he loaned Arbuckle out to the Famous Players-Lasky
Corporation (later Paramount).
This though left the Comique Film Company
short of a leading man to build a series upon, but considering the status
that Buster Keaton already had in Arbuckle's shorts, it was pretty much a
given that he would take over from his mentor - and that Keaton was
engaged to Schenck's movie star wife Norma Talmadge, Natalie, probably
didn't hurt either. The Comique Film Company
was rechristened Buster
Keaton Productions to put former emphasis on its new star.
It's interesting to mention in this context that
Buster, before making his starring debut in a short film, made his debut
in a feature film, The Saphead (1920, Herbert
Blaché, Winchell Smith), when he was
on loan to Metro
Pictures while Schenck was busy assembling Buster's production
staff. The film though, an adaptation of a popular stageplay, can hardly
be described as a typical Buster Keaton, as it is way too complex in plot and Keaton's physical comedy sits rather
ill with the narrative about a crash at the stock market and Buster's
clumsiness that ultiamtely kickstarts business again.
Also before his debut as a short film star, Keaton made an
appearance in Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle's feature film debut, The
Round-up (1920, George Melford), but playing an Indian falling from a
horse, his role is only just above extra-status, and it was probably little
more than a favour to a friend.
The first short film Buster
Keaton shot - even before The Saphead
and The Round-up
- was The High
Sign, which he co-directed with Edward F.Cline (his
most frequent co-director while making shorts) in 1920, but he found the
film, a gangster comedy in which Buster plays a shooting gallery employee
becoming mixed up with the world of crime by accident, a failure and
initially shelved it. The High
Sign was dusted off in 1921 though
when an injury inflicted during the filming of The
Electric House (1922, Buster Keaton, Edward F.Cline) caused him to
take a pause and the production company needed a filler. By the way, The
High Sign featured Al St.John, Keaton's co-star from his days with
Arbuckle, in a guest role. Keaton thought (with some
justification) that The High
Sign was too much reminiscent of the roughhouse style of his films with
Arbuckle, which often had a brutal side to them, and not in tune with the
more refined comedies he intended to direct. His next film though can
already be considered as pure Keaton, One Week (1920, Buster
Keaton, Edward F.Cline), in which Buster and his fiancée, played by Sybil
Seely, try to build a prefabricated house on their own - to hilarious
results. The film shows Buster at war with a bigger fate than he can ever
hope to master in the form of the house-to-be, while Keaton's analytical
mind as a director succeeds in making the most of this highly technical
situation. It's also remarkable that in this film the mechanics of the
story are mirrored by the actual mechanic action (building a house) going
on on the screen - a theme that would be picked up in many of his best
feature films. Also apparent is another recurring theme in Keaton's
films: Construction and subsequent destruction, both brought to the screen
in the funniest ways possible. In fact, with noone construction as such
looked as funny as with Buster Keaton, and the destruction scenes he
featured were always done on a grand scale - plus he never used any
miniatures or cameratricks to show destruction scenes either, as apparent
in One Week, in which
his house is run over by a train (!) in the finale, with both house and
train being the real thing. With One Week,
Buster had already reached such heights as filmmaker that only few - if
any - of his subsequent shorts managed to equal it in quality. Still,
there are points of interest in almost all of them:
- In The
Play House (1921, Buster Keaton, Edward F.Cline) for example he
pushed the technical possibilites of contemporary filmmaking to the limits
when in an extended sequence, he played all of the roles himself, which
meant appearing on the screen up to nine (!) times in one image, something
that in pre-CGI days could be achieved only via a very sophisticated
device - which was abandoned again after Keaton's film, as he showed how
to master such scenes (also concerning simultaneity and interaction with
himself) that nobody else could hope to come even close to this.
- In The Boat (1921, Buster Keaton, Edward F.Cline),
the destruction of the house that ended One Week
is put at the beginning - and this time it's the titular boat that
does the job -, and in the subsequent story, Buster manages to destroy
the pier he starts his boat's maiden voyage from and one after the
other sink his car, his boat and the lifeboat.
- In The
Electric House (1922, Buster Keaton, Edward F.Cline), Keaton
pushed the idea of One Week
a tad further by having himself (as a character) building a fully
automated house, but once he has amazed everybody with the house's
functionality, Buster the filmmaker enjoys to have the house turn against
its creator. Again, the narrative mechanics are mirrored in the mechanic
goings-on onscreen.
The Buster Keaton-Features
When watching Buster Keaton's shorts (apart from his very
best), one can't help but feel that in all their greatness, they would
have needed (and deserved) more screentime to fully develop, a feeling
totally shared by Keaton himself, who actually wanted to go into feature
filmmaking right after his split from Fatty Arbuckle. However, Buster's
producer Joseph M.Schenck did not believe slapstick comedies could work as
feature films - after all, in 1920 comedy features were still only
experimented with and even Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle were only
making their first attempts in the new medium. In 1923, the situation was
already a tad different though, as it was proven at the box office that
slapstick comedies could indeed carry feature film running time, and even
Joseph M.Schenck was beginning to accept that. So he let Buster make his
first feature, The Three Ages
(1923, Buster Keaton, Edward F.Cline), yet he wasn't quite convinced about
going feature length yet, so The
Three Ages is a sort of anthology movie that tells three stories -
all slapstick-lovestories - set in three different ages, the stone age
(conmplete with a sop-motion dinosaur), Ancient Rome and modern times, so
if the film failed as a feature, it could be cut down to three shorts. To
not make this strategy too obvious though, the three stories - that all
told almost the same plot - were each cut up into segments, where similar
segments from different periods were put one after the other to emphasize
on their parallels. This was of course not the kind of feature film Buster
had wanted to make, and it was indeed not as good as his better shorts,
yet at the box office it was successful enough to win over Schenck to the
side of feature film producers. Buster Keaton's second feature,
Our Hospitality
(1923, Buster Keaton, John G.Blystone) was already his first masterpiece
in that medium, the story of a young man (Buster himself) who in 1830's Kentucky
gets caught up in a family feud he knows nothing about and doesn't want to
be part of, and the whole thing isn't made any easier by the fact that he
has fallen in love with the daughter (his now-wife Natalie Talmadge) of
the man he's supposed to be having a feud with. As with all of Keaton's
best films, the story moves along like a clockwork and sees Buster's
character trying to handle a fate too big for him to master (like in most
of his features, Buster succeeds though), and the stunt setpieces are
simply breathtaking. Plus, it's the first film that gives evidence of
Keaton's fascination with trains (which eventually should lead to his
absolute masterpiece The
General) in an extended ride on a genuine 1830's steamtrain - to
quite hilarious results. Compared to Our
Hospitality, Keaton's next film Sherlock
jr (1924, Buster Keaton) was actually a step back, as it lacked
the stringency and unavoidability of onscreen events because of being a
dream story, yet taken on its own, the film, which has Buster playing a
film projectionist and wannabe detective who after being accused of a
crime he didn't commit dreams about being a super sleuth in your typical
pulpy detective story, is still pretty funny. And for once, Keaton, who
normally avoided cameratricks or even effective editing as he felt it
would mean cheating the audience, showed his mastery in that field in an
extended hilarious scene in which he enters the screen only to be made a
fool of by one jumpcut after the next. The scene is not only brilliantly
brought to the screen on a technical level, it also shows a deep
understanding for filmmaking that goes beyond the obvious. In fact this
scene is so well done that it was later replicated only in cartoons - and
quite often, too. While Sherlock
jr might not have been the most keatonesque of his films
(though stil a great movie), his next, The
Navigator (1924, Buster Keaton, Donald Crisp) was pure Keaton
again, the story of a young man (Keaton) who accidently gets caught on a
massive battleship drifting on the Ocean with noone else but the girl he
loves - and since neither of them has the slightest idea of how to steer a
ship of this (or any other) size, and (being spoilt brats) they both have only rudimentary
ideas about feeding themselves, this leads to one
hilarious situation after the next without ever becoming just episodical
or losing its basic narrative - which Keaton always tried to keep as
simple as possible - in its gags. Keaton's next three films
were of a lesser nature:
- Seven Chances (1925, Buster Keaton) was based on a Broadway
play by David Belasco that didn't correspond particularly well
with Keaton's brand of humour and methods of storytelling.
- Go West (1925, Buster Keaton) is an attempt to make a film
with heart along the lines of Charlie Chaplin's recent success The
Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin), but Keaton's stone-faced screen
persona was much less suited for doing something altruistic (in this
case saving a cow from being slaughtered) than Chaplin's loveable
tramp.
- Battling Butler (1926, Buster Keaton) was once again an
adaptation, and the Broadway musical by Stanley Brightman and Austin
Melford about a man (Buster) who becomes a boxer to impress the girl
he loves, is just too idiotic to work as a Buster Keaton-comedy.
While these three films were not exactly masterpieces though, they did
well enough at the box office to encourage Buster to work on what he
intended to be his magnum opus (which it turned out to be, too), a Civil
War-set film about a train - which was also a slapstick comedy. After the
successes of his previous (lesser) films, everybody thought Buster was
able to pull of such a feat, and thus The
General (1926, Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman), Keaton's most
costly film, was put into production ... and the outcome was nothing short
of amazing, as Keaton pushed his brand of storytelling and of comedy to
the limits, featured many great stunt sequences and destruction scenes
(including one in which a bridge is blown up while a steam train is
passing over), beautifully incorporates the film's underlying theme -
trains and locomotives - into the movie's main plot and many of its gags,
and no other of Keaton's films has worked more like a clockwork than this
one.
And yet, upon its initial release The
General became Keaton's first box office failure, and even the
critics, who were much more appreciative of Keaton's sophisticated humour
than the general public, were (inexplicably) less than impressed with
Keaton's latest effort.
Keaton was devastated by The
General's failure, since he saw the film as his masterpiece and
personal favourite - an opinion that nowadays pretty much everyone shares, as the film
is in almot every film critic's top 100 (mine included), usually quite far
up, but that was of course no consolation back in the day, and while we
might wonder what critics didn't like about the film back in the day,
these were the opinions he had to deal with. Keaton fell into a depression
subsequently, a depression he attempted to drown in alcohol. He had never
been a stranger to drinking, but now he hit the bottle harder than before,
but still had himself under control. It would get much worse only later
on.
The General's
failure with contemporary audiences is much easier explained than its
failure with critics: Fact is that all of Keaton's earlier features were distributed by Metro
Pictures/MGM
where he was what you could call the house comic and was thus given
star treatment, but with The
General, he moved over to United
Artists, of which Charlie Chaplin, back in the day the much bigger
star, was one of the co-founders - and thus Keaton was forced to play
second fiddle, which also meant he didn't have the same channels of
distribution that Chaplin had ...
The first consequence of The
General's failure was to relieve Keaton of directorial
responsibilities of his films (at least officially), responsibilities he
sadly enough never regained - which is weird in a way, since whatever the
problems of The General
might have been, they couldn't have been found on a directorial level.
Also, Joseph M.Schenck took closer watch over budgetary matters, as the
high budget (naturally) was part of the reason The
General hardly broke even.
However, none of these measures could save Buster's next film, College
(1927, James W.Horne) from becoming an even bigger failure than The
General - and rightfully so, as it is one of Keaton's weakest
features so far. While in previous films, Keaton tried and (most of the
times) succeeded to have their plots told by its gags and stunt setpieces, the plot of College
is little more than a collection of scenes of a young man (Buster)
failing at sports, with their sequence being pretty much interchangeable
... and in that way was much closer to Buster's early films with Fatty
Arbuckle than his own features or even shorts.
Quite a different matter was Steamboat
Bill jr (1928, Charles Reisner), a film about steamboats (hence
the title) and a momma's boy who becomes an unlikely hero during a
hurricane. This film is once again based on the typical Keaton-premise of
a man forced to handle a fate much too big for him to master, again the
plot moves along stringently and with admirable unavoidability, and the
mechanic possibilities of steamboats don't go unnoticed with Buster
Keaton. Plus, Steamboat
Bill jr features large scale destruction seldom seen on screen anywhere
(especially without the use of miniatures or anything) - though
interestingly, originally the film was to be not about a hurricane but a
flood, but a real Mississippi flood occurring back then led the producers
to rethink the film's basic plot - not to the film's disadvantage for a
change. It's thanks to the change from flood to hurricane, actually, that Steamboat
Bill jr contains probably the most iconic Buster Keaton sequence
ever in which he's about to be hit by a falling wall and is saved from
being squashed only by going right through an open window - a stunt that
actually was even more dangerous than it looks on screen, as Buster,
always the perfectionist, insisted on using a full-weight wall that could
have killed him if he was slightly off mark. Sure, there already was a
similar scene in Buster's first short, One Week,
but with a stunt like this, it's the scale that counts, and only on repeat
viewing one can truly appreciate what daring went into the routine when
depicted in Steamboat
Bill jr.
Steamboat
Bill jr unfortunately became an even bigger failure than The
General and College,
again partly thanks to United
Artists' studio policies of invariably favouring Charlie Chaplin
over Buster Keaton (which they had every reason to, back in the days,
unfortunately) - and with three failures in a row, Keaton's producer so
far, Joseph M.Schenck - who has since been made president of United
Artists -, decided to let his former star go. Back then though,
Buster was still big enough a star despite his recent failures, that he
didn't have to look for a new job for long, and he found it at MGM,
a studio that still didn't have a comic of its own and that took Buster on
with open arms ...
Artistic Decline at MGM
The contract with MGM
was actually what led to Buster Keaton's downfall. Now one might argue
that Keaton had worked for MGM
and its predecessor Metro
Pictures earlier on, but back then he was not their contract
player, both studios were merely distributing his films which were
produced independently. Now though whoever wanted to and was high enough
up in the ranks at MGM
(including famed studio-head Irving Thalberg himself, who wasn't exactly
well-versed in comedy) could take influence on Keaton's films and tell him
how to make comedies - quite a bitter irony given Keaton's comedic genius. Keaton's
first film at MGM,
The Cameraman (1928, Edward Sedgwick) was pretty good
in that
respect though and became the last of the typical Buster Keaton-films,
given its rather simple story build-up, the character Keaton played and the
stunt-heavy
comedy including breathtaking setpieces. Sure, The Cameraman was no
match to Our
Hospitality, The
General or Steamboat
Bill jr, but taken on its own, this story about a news cameraman
(Keaton) who grows from a big klutz to the saviour of the heroine during
the proceedings is still fun. The movie is successful on an artistic level
though because back then, Buster still cared, he fought for creative input
on the film, rewrote the over-complicated script to be more in line with
his character's requirements, and imprinted his style of comedy onto the
film rather than just lending it his famous name. After three
failures at United
Artists, The Cameraman
became one of Keaton's most
successful films, and one would think the powers that be at MGM
should have taken this as a hint to let Buster continue to do things his
way - but far from it, Buster's next, Spite Marriage (1929, Edward
Sedgwick), already showed a new Buster Keaton, transformed from his
classic stonefaced android-like persona into a loveable idiot by a bunch
of moderately talented comedy writers at the studio. For The Cameraman, Buster was still able to stand his own, but when it came to
Spite Marriage, Keaton was going through massive personal problems
and his alcoholism was taking its toll, thus he simply didn't have the
power anymore to fight for the film. And thus, Spite Marriage, a
meaningless romantic farce, became possibly his worst (and certainly last)
silent movie ... yet the film became another success, even though in 1929,
silent movies were already beginning to become a thing from the past. Sound
film was the career-wrecker of many a silent slapstick comedian, and with
the new dimension of sound, slapstick comedy did get a whole new dimension
that transformed genre rather than destroying it - there were a few
slapstick comedians who were actually able to take advantage of it, first
and foremost of course Laurel
& Hardy, who only really came into their own with the
advent of sound. Keaton's comedies on the other hand were never relying
much on sound and he personally saw to it that even the dialogues on
titlecards were kept to a minimum to not destroy his films' rhythm - yet
on a commercial level, he made the transition from sound surprisingly
well.
The first movie that saw Buster talking (and singing) was
The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929, Charles Reisner), a variety film
that brought together as many of MGM's
contract players and stars as possible in a film that amounts to nothing
in particular. Keaton's little gag that is reminiscent of his vaudeville
days however is pretty much the highlight of the film. Keaton was not an
actor who had problems with sound as such, he had spent years on stage,
knew how to articulate, had an ok voice and had no annoying accent.
However, his style of comedy that was heavily relying on movement suffered
badly, since early soundfilm cameras were heavy and sluggish and could
hardly keep track with him when on top of his form. This though played
right into the hands of his bosses at MGM,
who didn't want their star to do any dangerous stunts (like the ones he's
become famous for) or the like to protect their investment ... and that's
the main difference between Buster's independent films for Joseph
M.Schenck and his studio films at MGM:
For Schenck, who was certainly not a philanthropist and patron of art but
a businessman, it was Buster and his comedy that counted, including
hair-raising stunts (which most of the times paid off on screen), for MGM,
Buster was an investment that was by no means to endanger, not even by the
threat of making good movies.
And indeed, with the arrival of
sound it seemed that there was no more Buster Keaton standing in the way
of MGM's Buster
Keaton comedies, he was just some funnyman thrown into a handful of badly
written comedies that gave him no opportunity to really kick into gear and
show his talent.
This was already apparent in the first talkie Keaton headlined, Free
and Easy (1930, Edward Sedgwick): The plot is not at all tailored
towards Keaton's needs and talents, his role could have been played by
pretty much anyone, the slapstick is disappointingly cookiecutter routine,
and the musical finale ... well, that's actually the most interesting part
of the movie, and Keaton does not embarrass himself as singer, dancer and
funnyman at the same time, but at the same time the shoe just doesn't fit. In
a few later films, probably for surplus appeal, Keaton was coupled with fellow comedian Jimmy Durante,
themn being The
Passionate Plumber and Speak
Easily in 1932, and What! No Beer?
(all three Edward Sedgwick) in 1933. Now Jimmy Durante is by no means an
unfunny comedian in his own terms, but his collaborations with Keaton were
rather terrible because there was simply no chemistry between the two men,
and Durante's talky brand of comedy didn't go well with Buster's silent
but physical jokes. But whatever my points of criticism from a distance
of more than 75 years, the audience back in the days seemed to like the
new Buster Keaton, and all of his talkies for MGM
made substantially more profits than even his most successful silent
features ... and this was yet another reason why it was less and less
possible for Buster to push through his comic style, when the box office
proved the heads at MGM
right. Buster Keaton's time at MGM
might have been Buster's commercially most successful, but it was also his
least fulfilling on both a professional and personal level:
Professionally, he could never get over the loss of control he once had
with Joseph M.Schenck. Sure, his films sold much better than back in the
day, but they had very little to do with his actual vision, and he felt
pretty much reduced to a cntract player in his own movies. On top of his
professional frustration, his marriage to Natalie Talmadge broke up in
1932 - and Buster tried to drown all of this in alcohol, so much so that
his alcoholism was beginning to affect his work and he occasionally stayed
away from a shoot for several days. MGM
hired a nurse, Mae Scribbens, to keep Keaton in line, but after another of
his drinking binges, the two of them eloped and got married in Mexico -
and this was pretty much the last straw for MGM,
as the studio simply could not afford a star who constantly evaded their
control and sabotaged his own films, so only days after the completion
of What! No Beer?, Buster was sacked by the studio heads (and
one can't really blame them), and his next project Buddies, that had him
starring next to Jackie Coogan from Charlie Chaplin's The Kid
(1921), was scrapped ...
Surviving the 1930's
and 40's His alcohol-induced shenanigans at MGM
had not only ruined his career at the studio and taken a toll on his
health, they also seriously hurt his reputation with all studios
Hollywood-wide, and thus, when he was set free by MGM,
it was impossible for Buster Keaton to find filmwork at first (even though
What! No Beer? at the same time ran successfully throughout the
country), and for a time, Keaton had to return to the vaudeville stages he
has long grown out of to at least ensure an income for himself. It
was only in late 1933 that Buster finally got another film contract, with
little company Educational
Films, to make a series of shorts with him in the lead, for which
he earned $5,000 apiece. These films were far from great, just low budget
comedies that couldn't even dream of the large scale destruction Buster
loved to feature in his own silent shorts, and time was too scarce to cook
up any elaborate slapstick setpieces, but even in these films one is able
to occasionally catch a hint of Keaton's comic genius. Of some interest
among Buster's films for Educational
might be Palooka
from Paducah (1935, Charles Lamont) because it features both his
parents and his sister Louise, and Love Nest on Wheels (1937,
Charles Lamont), which reunited Keaton with Al St.John from his Fatty
Arbuckle-days. But even if these films are "of interest", they
are not exactly memorable, especially when compared to Keaton's earlier
(silent) work. If at all, these films are more reminiscent of his shorts
with Arbuckle than his own films in their lack of a proper story and often
episodic structure - but here one has to keep in mind that Arbuckle's
films were made 15 to 20 years earlier, and film comedy had become much
more refined and sophisticated in the meantime. While working
on the Educational-shorts,
Buster Keaton took trips to Europe, where he was as big a star as back in
the States, with the difference that his alcohol binges were less
well-known in the old world - which is probably why he was hired for two
features, Le Roi des Champs-Élysées/The King of the
Champs-Elysees (1934, Max Nosseck) in France, and The Invader
(1935, Adrian Brunel) in Great Britain - but while the former was an
acceptable slapstick gangster comedy that ends on a smiling Buster (!) and
was a notch or two above his MGM-efforts,
the latter was simply horrible, a badly concieved film about a jealous
husband that hardly features plot enough for a short let alone a 60+
minute movie. Neither of the features became a success though, and thus
Buster returned to the USA and Educational
Films.
Educational
went bust in 1937 and left Buster without any kind of income rather
abroptly - but by then, Buster was already reformed, his marriage to Mae
Scribbens had long been divorced, he had his drinking under control again,
and his bad reputation had at least been partially faded away. Because of
all of this, Keaton was welcomed back at MGM,
though not as actor but as gagman (and director of three forgotten shorts
which did not star him himself).
His writing for MGM
included gags for Too Hot to Handle (1938, Jack Conway) starring
Clark Gable and Myrna Loy, At the Circus (1939, Edward Buzzell),
one of the weaker comedies starring the Marx
Brothers and a film Keaton was not too satisfied with, the
Esther Williams-vehicles Bathing Beauty (1944, George Sidney) -
co-starring Red Skelton - and Neptune's Daughter (1949, Edward
Buzzell) - co-starring Red Skelton and Ricardo Montalban -, the
Laurel & Hardy-comedy
Nothing But Trouble (1944, Sam
Taylor), It Happened in Brooklyn (1947, Richard Whorf) starring
Frank Sinatra, and In the Good Old Summertime (1949, Robert
Z.Leonard) with Judy Garland, among others. In the mid-to-late 1940's, MGM
also released a trio of semi-remakes of Buster Keaton classics with Red
Skelton in the lead: I Dood It (1943, Vincente Minelli), a version
of Spite Marriage, A Southern Yankee (1948, Edward
Sedgwick), which was based on The
General, and Watch the Birdie (1950, Jack Donohue), based
on The Cameraman. These three films presented Skelton as a likeable
guy and a talented mime, but hardly a match for Buster Keaton concerning
physical comedy, and in terms of direction, the Skelton-films hardly lived
up to the originals, over which Keaton had at least some directorial
control.
Aside from his writing for MGM
- and for Twentieth
Century Fox's Jones Family-films The Jones Family
in Hollywood and Quick Millions (both 1939, Mal St.Clair) -
Buster also found work as an actor again from the late 1930's onwards, be
it for a new series of (rather unremarkable) shorts for Columbia
or supporting roles of any size starting with Hollywood Cavalcade
(1939, Irving Cummings) starring Alice Faye and Don Ameche, his first
ever supporting role in a feature. Other supporting performances of
interest include Li'l Abner (1940, Albert S.Rogell) based on the
popular comicstrip by Al Capp, The
Villain Still Pursued Her (1940) by the frequent collaborator
from his silent days Edward F.Cline, San Diego, I Love You (1944,
Reginald Le Borg) with Louise Allbritton and John Hall [Jon
Hall bio - click here], That's the Spirit (1945, Charles
Lamont), in which Buster plays the heavenly gatekeeper who sends Jack
Oakie back to the world of the living, and God's Country (1946,
Robert Emmett Tansey), a Western only barely held together by two
interludes by Keaton. Buster Keaton played his last lead in a
feature film in the Mexican production El
Moderno Barba Azul/Boom
in the Moon (Jaime Salvador) in 1946, a atrociously written,
cheaply produced and sloppily shot film that hardly even deserves the
label comedy, as it is that unfunny, much less a comedy genius like
Buster Keaton in the lead. Deservedly, this film did not become a success
... In 1947, Buster went to Europe again, where he did not make
another film this time but appeared at the Cirque Médrano in
Paris. These performances were a spectacular success, again deservedly so
... By the end of the 1940's, a new medium was about to catch
on with general audiences, and while many moviestars, be they at the top
of their game or already fading back into obscurity, avoided the medium
like the plague, Buster was one of the first name stars to realize its
potential, and from 1949 onwards, he made many appearances on the small
screen - and he was successful enough that he was able to quit his gagman
job at MGM
as early as 1950, because he no longer needed the income.
Comeback
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Mainly recreating his old slapstick routines on any number of shows and
even commercials, Buster had soon become a household name on TV, and it wasn't long before
he got his first half-hour show, The
Buster Keaton Show, basically a comedy series that featured
reworking of many of Buster's old slapstick sequences and a few new ones,
and while these TV-recreations lacked the scale and the narrative
stringency of Buster's work in the silent era, they also show that Buster
as a comedian was still spot on and able to do amazing physical comedy
despite being in his mid-50's. The show, which was broadcast live (like
pretty much all television back then) and in front of a studio audience, only ran on the West Coast, but it
was a big enough success for the producers to consider a filmed version of
the series, Life with Buster Keaton (1951), which could then
be aired nationwide. Life with Buster Keaton did not become
a breakthrough success though, and was cancelled after only one season,
yet several episodes were edited together into a movie, The
Misadventures of Buster Keaton (1950, Arthur Hilton), which might
not have been a great movie - first and foremost it was too episodic for
that - but is still totally watchable for Keaton's comedy alone.
Recogniton
for Buster's place in film history came when he got a small part in Billy
Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), in itself an hommage to old-dime
cinema, and in 1952, when Buster's friend from the silent
days, Charlie Chaplin, asked him to play a supporting role as his stage
partner in his film Limelight (1952, Charlie Chaplin). But while Limelight
is nowadays considered as one of Chaplin's best films from his later
years, and the sequence with Keaton - a hommage to the vaudeville - one of
the film's best scenes, Keaton's inclusion in the film did virtually
nothing for his comeback because the film only played in a handful of
theatres upon its release and was then released into oblivion when commie
hunters accused Chaplin of being a party member and had him evicted from
the USA later
that year. The film wasn't even screened in Los Angeles until 1972 (after
Keaton's death), but when it was, it actually got an Academy Award for
best movie score (Academy rules favour the LA release date of a film over
the actual release date for the inclusion in the race for the Oscars,
which is why a 20 year old film might still be eligible for an Academy
Award). Interestingly, while Chaplin and Keaton fought for the same
audience in the silent days, they were friends off-screen - but never
appeared in a film together until Limelight. While Limelight
was a hommage to the vaudeville days, The
Silent Partner (1955, George Marshall), an episode of Screen
Directors Playhouse, was an actual hommage to silent slapstick
comedy and Buster Keaton himself, a rather sentimental story about a
silent comedy director (fellow comedian Joe E.Brown) who receives an
honorary Oscar and honours the long-forgotten comic (Keaton) who made his
career possible. The episode is bittersweet and simplistic rather than
good, but there's quite a bit of newly staged Keaton comedy material in
here to keep the whole thing going. Keaton himself received an honorary
Oscar in 1960 by the way.
In 1957, Buster's life was made into
a movie by Paramount,
the a tad unimaginatively titled The Buster Keaton Story (Sidney
Sheldon), with Donald O'Connor in the lead, but even though Buster himself
served as technical adviser, the film had precious little to do
with his actual life. With his his TV series, hommages like Limelight and
The
Silent Partner, of course The Buster Keaton Story and his
appearances on numerous TV-shows and even commercials during the 1950's,
Buster Keaton was pretty much rediscovered by an audience too young to
have seen him in his prime, and before long he was considered the greatest
silent, slapstick comedian next to Chaplin, something he never actually
was in the silent era (talking only about the commercial aspect of his
films). But it might be that the timelessness of his films earned him the
recognition in the 1950's that he didn't get in the 1920's, when he was by
far outranked by Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon. Even Keaton's biggest
failure from back in the day, The
General, got a second chance at film festivals and the like, and
it was now hailed as a major rediscovery.
His rediscovery kept
Buster Keaton in constant employ in the 1960's, pretty much up until his
death: On TV, he even got roles in a handful of unusual roles for a man of
his talents, including the lead as a time traveler in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
(Once Upon a Time, 1961, Norman Z.McLeod)
and a guest spot on Burke's Law (Who Killed 1/2 of Glory
Lee?, 1964, Don Weis). His motion pictures from that time include
several beach party movies produced by AIP
- Pajama Party (1964, Don Weis), Beach
Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (both 1965,
William Asher) -, a rather weak Frankie Avalon-comedy - Sergeant
Dead Head (1965, Norman Taurog) -, several all-star pictures - Around
the World in Eighty Days (1956, Michael Anderson), It's a Mad Mad
Mad Mad World (1963, Stanley Kramer) -, and an Italian comedy starring
Sicilian comic superstars Ciccio Ingrassia and Franco Franchi - Due
Marines e un Generale/War Italian Style
(1966, Luigi Scattini)
Of
course, within Buster Keaton's filmography, none of these films are too
remakrable, rather footnotes. Of more interest might be two shorts he shot
in the 1960's, The Railrodder (1965, Gerald Potterton) and Film
(1965, Alan Schneider). The Railrodder, a travelogue through
Canada which Buster crosses on a railcar, is pretty much a hommage to
Keaton's silent shorts, but one done with style and understanding of
slapstick humour - plus it once again features one of Buster Keaton's
favourite subjects, trains. Film
is a different matter altogether, it's famed stagewriter Samuel Beckett's
first experiment with moving pictures, and in Buster Keaton he thought he
had found the perfect embodiment of his favoured lead character, the man
thrown into an absurd fate he fails to understand. In this film, Buster
plays a man who thinks he's constantly followed by some all-seeing eye he
desperately tries to evade - until he has to realize the eye is himself.
Buster did not like the film too much because despite being the perfect
choice for the role, he lacked the intellectual access to the story. Yet
his performance is just great, especially considering he plays with his
back to the camera most of the time (which is part of the story, actually)
- which was another thing Buster hated.
Buster Keaton had his
last screen appearance in A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to
the Forum (1966, Richard Lester), a comedy set in ancient Rome in
which Keaton provides the (literal) running gag, playing a man who
stoically circles Rome by foot while plenty of mad things happen within
his long walk's radius.
Closing Words
In
early 1966, Buster Keaton died from lung cancer. He was 70 years of age
and had worked almost until his death. It's ironic with Keaton that
during the height of his crativity in the 1920's, when he pretty much
delivered one masterpiece after the next, he never gained quite the
recognition that Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd or Harry Langdon did, but
now, decades after his death, while the films of these three men have more or
less faded or look old-fashioned (yes, even Chaplin's), Keaton's films with their fatalistic
storylines, fascination for all things mechanic (both metaphorically and
literally), with their great and refined slapstick setpieces and
hair-raising stunts still seem as fresh now as they were then, and it
shouldn't surprise anyone one bit when a latter-day stunt-comedians like
Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung cite Buster Keaton as their major inspiration.
Thing is, that while Keaton might not exactly have created slapstick
cinema as such, he still hasn't been surpassed until today, both as a
performer and as a director, and as most of his best films are readily
available nowadays on DVD, he is not likely to soon be forgotten either.
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