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Buster Keaton Dan Callahan is a writer based in New York City. He contributes film reviews to Time Out New York, Stage Press and other publications. |
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| As one of the waxworks playing bridge in Sunset Boulevard (1950),
a ravaged Buster Keaton contemplates a dubious hand. With his customary
stoicism, he croaks, “Pass.” Then, facing up to lousy luck, his
face only slightly dejected, he again says “Pass” more quietly. This brief appearance in Billy Wilder's mordant classic expresses the essential attitude of his life and work. It is this attitude that makes Buster an important artist, patronized by intellectuals who appreciate his profundity and by mainstream audiences who gasp and giggle at his daring. Dismissing claims to greatness, Keaton insisted again and again that what he was most interested in was getting the laugh. Like so many film artists, he needed the freedom to create spontaneously if he was to function at his highest level. During the 1920s, he put out a phenomenal array of rarified, perfectly judged features and shorts, a cinematic jewel-box featuring authentic period detail, is-he-really-doing-that? stunts and an enduring persona that qualifies as one of the most poetic reactions to life imaginable. Restrained, unpretentious, pure films, they belie his seemingly disorganized working methods, a series of disparate and largely unnecessary co-directors and the apparent self-destructiveness of his own personality.
The effect of such a childhood cannot be overlooked. Because he refused to complain and would not hear a word against his family, even his abusive father, it is difficult to gauge just how much and what kind of damage was done. For Buster, it seems as if life from an early age was all about physical pain and cultivating the endurance to absorb it. Take your lumps and get the laugh, year in, year out. Out of this experience came the creation of his artistic persona: you fall hard, you get right back up; the girl doesn't love you, do what you can and wait until she does. He did not cry and he would not smile. Above all, even if things worked out, Buster knew that everything would soon fall apart again, which led to some of the most ruthlessly unsentimental endings in film history. At bottom, he was a cagey, down-to-earth pessimist who could occasionally liberate himself through graceful movement up into pure physical abstraction.
He made 14 films with Arbuckle and got his first taste of directing the action. “I directed when Roscoe was in the scene,” he reported. (2) In these shorts, his persona has not fully formed yet, but many of the familiar characteristics are already present. Though he's not entirely deadpan, facial gymnastics are few. The Arbuckle/Keaton shorts are sloppy and Mack Sennett-hostile; when Buster was given the opportunity to make his own films, he did not settle for knockabout stuff. What interested him was a kind of conceptual humor that is rather difficult to describe in words, since it depends on visual associations that only make sense in the moment. Such humor is, needless to say, an acquired taste. There are some that find Keaton's films dull, preferring Chaplin's flash, his easy laughs and unearned tears. There is no pressing reason to choose between them, any more than there is a reason to choose between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Both have their virtues and failings, depending on your point of view, but Keaton is definitely the more realistic of the two; when he kicks a villain in the ass, as Chaplin did constantly, his foot gets hurt.
In Hard Luck (1921), he anticipates Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971) by 50 years—the entire short consists of various unsuccessful suicide attempts, a gambit that reveals his ticking time bomb despair. “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show,” he remarks in The Playhouse (1921), a short in which he plays every one of the people in a theater: a full orchestra, a conductor, a kid, an old lady, a dowager and her bored husband. Unbounded surrealism, it is also a dig at the pretensions of Chaplin and others who wanted to be the be-all and end-all of a film, particularly producer Thomas Ince. In The Frozen North (1922), he does a wicked take-off on Von Stroheim in Foolish Wives (1922). Social issues are often broached, uncertainly but boldly. In The Paleface (1921), he wanders onto an Indian reservation with a butterfly net. When tied to a stake and set on fire, he tries to put out the blaze with a few phlegmatic birthday candle blows. Impressed by his tact, the Chief makes him a member and he soon joins them in a violent fight for their land. In perhaps his most enjoyable short, Neighbors (1920), he gets stuck in a hole in the ground and emerges in full blackface, prompting an outraged cop to chase him out of the neighborhood. Quickly, Buster rubs half of the dirt off of his face, then bewilders the cop by turning in one direction and then another. When he is white, the cop moves away. When he is black, he moves to eject him. It all ends in a fury of confusion, providing a pointed racial commentary only slightly spoiled when he later “spooks” a black lady by putting a sheet on his head. The Buster of these shorts is often a sarcastic hothead, but can be wonderfully solemn-silly when lovestruck. The deterioration of his marriage to first wife Natalie Talmadge is brutally exposed in the shorts, as attitudes towards hostile women become stoic yet biting. In 1923 Keaton was promoted to features by his brother-in-law, the aptly named Joseph Schenck, husband to screen star Norma Talmadge. Schenck made sure to secure the rights to all of the Keaton films. Thus, in the future, Keaton would not see a penny from any of his masterworks. Like Joe Keaton, Schenck was an exploiter of the Great Stone Face, but he did give him the freedom he needed. In the next blessed years the best of the Keaton features began to unroll.
With Sherlock Jr, he came up with a haunting little meditation on movies and dreams. Projectionist Buster falls asleep at the controls and dreams that he can enter the film he is unreeling. With a series of ingenious visual effects, Keaton gives us a perfect demonstration of what it would be like to climb up onto a screen and become a part of the movie we are watching. It's an unforgettable scene. Without self-consciousness, Keaton brings home the wondrousness of the medium itself, submerging himself in the ocean of its superb and liquid unreality. When he steps onto the screen, he fulfills something in all of us. The Navigator (1924), which followed, is more of a ballet than a film, a dry account of two rich twits, effete Buster and out-of-it Kathleen MacGuire, stranded aboard a deserted boat. The gags are cerebral and as mild as you can imagine. There's an aesthetic at work in The Navigator that is unlike that of any other director, a style that is distinctly Buster. For once, the girl is just as funny as he is—he and MacGuire make a fine team. Seven Chances (1925), which Keaton considered one of his worst films, is actually one of his best, and certainly his most under-rated. Perhaps Keaton didn't like being tied to such a definite plot; it's the old Belasco chestnut about the man who must marry before the day is up if he is to receive seven million smackers. Buster has something of Cary Grant about him in this, an off-kilter sexual charge, a snarky urbanity. Trying to find a bride fast, he tangles with a young, dark-haired Jean Arthur for a blissful moment or two. There are a lot of far-out jokes in Seven Chances, the kind of situations that you can't unravel with words—described point by point, they wouldn't sound as funny and strange as they are. In the lunatic climax, an amazingly sustained live action cartoon, hundreds of potential brides chase him across the countryside, an avalanche of unleashed feminine rage. As he runs, a real avalanche starts, with boulders that get bigger and bigger. In Go West (1925), Keaton toys around with Chaplin-like pathos, but tempers it by going as far out into Zen-like stoicism as you can possibly go while still retaining a pulse. In a defining moment here, during a game of cards, a gunslinger commands, “When you say that, smile!” Buster cannot, of course, comply, though he does force the ends of his mouth up with his fingers, a sweet nod to Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms (Griffith, 1919). At the end of Go West, Buster goes off with a charismatic cow named Brown Eyes, the most appealing of his leading ladies.
After this pinnacle, he slipped somewhat with College (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), but both of these works have enchanting moments. The first, his most audience-friendly film, finds him trying to impress his girl by taking up athletics. As could be expected, the stunts dominate, and the movie has a likable calm. In an ending of breathtaking morbidity, the usual happy fade-out is extended with dissolves, to domesticity, to crotchety old age and, finally, to a shot of matching tombstones. The studio system would not take kindly to such dangerous instincts. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was his last really fine feature. His face is older and sadder, but he still exhibits humid romanticism, sniffing a girl's hair as if in a trance. The gags play with expectations and build suspense; in one perfect moment, though knocked out and stuffed upside down in a car, Buster still manages to cross his legs jauntily. These last few films are the most refined expression of his art, unafraid to draw out situations to the point of, and even past, tedium. They are something like Beethoven's last string quartets: heaven for the specialist, alienating for the casual viewer. After this achievement came the downward spiral, all-too-familiar for those who deal with the more fragile and intransigent of the great American film directors, like Griffith, Von Stroheim, Welles and Nicholas Ray. These artists, along with performers such as John Barrymore, Bette Davis and Marlon Brando, were forced, through business pressures, to either compromise themselves, satirize what made them unique, or give up work altogether. In Keaton's case, the trajectory of events that led him from his own unit under Schenck to a prison-term contract at MGM is especially sickening. Buster's voice did not really suit his silent persona—it was low, hoarse and sometimes cracked, a drinking man's voice. But he probably could have made the transition if MGM had allowed him freedom to create the way he needed to. In many ways, Buster was the Godard of the twenties, the Rossellini of slapstick—he needed to improvise. He was unable to come up with a cut-and-dried script—that just wasn't the way he worked. The studio system crushed him, indifferently. After some financially successful but embarrassingly poor talkies, he was fired by MGM in 1933, ostensibly because of his now-severe alcoholism. Washed-up in films, divorced by vindictive Natalie Talmadge, he lost his huge mansion, his children, his career, his life. Buster thought of himself as a failure for a long time and he took what he could get—grim shorts at Columbia and Educational Pictures and gag man jobs at MGM. He turned up in bit roles in the forties, a woeful, deteriorated face in the crowd, the ruined remains of one of life's most beautiful faces. Later, television sustained him financially.
Like Chaplin, he had a native gift for movement, but, unlike the Little Tramp, he had very modern instincts that propelled him far ahead of any of his contemporaries. For so long, he was thought of as just a forgotten pie-thrower with stone face and porkpie hat. Today he is revered for that stream of pure movies from the twenties, a sequence of work that has improved with age and speaks to us all from the viewpoint of an artist who is both burned and purified, numb and serene, hopeful but cynical. Buster was just getting the laughs. We got the rest. © Dan Callahan, September 2002 Endnotes:
Filmography Buster
Keaton's two-reel shorts with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle:
The
Butcher Boy
(1917)
The
Gold Ghost
(1934) Co-directed with Charles Lamont Select Bibliography Benayoun, Robert,
The Look of Buster Keaton, St. Martin's Press, 1984
Articles in Senses of Cinema Keaton
shorts by
Adrian Danks
Web Resources Compiled by Albert Fung
Buster
Keaton: The Damfinos Official Website
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