Battling Butler (1926)

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 71 mins.


Warning: Spoilers.

It was a simple and winning formula: Buster loves a girl but she doesn't quite feel the same, so he must embark on a journey that turns rather perilous, proving not only his love to her but his ability to withstand the elements as a man should, eluding forces of nature and other suitors, to win her affection. Ideal? Perhaps not, but in many cases it proved to be comic gold, and Keaton, who led his gag and prop team to reinvent the formula for film after film, did it better than many. He deviated from it rarely, and even when he did — in a film like Go West, for example, where the girl is replaced with a friendly cow and his journey is to protect her from the slaughterhouse shipyards — the overall effect was not too different. Battling Butler, however, is a significant exception. It is not among Keaton's great films, but it is notable for the way it inverts and redistributes his patented formula. This isn't a film about a low- or middle-income man who desperately tries to get the girl; it's a film about a rich man who wins her rather easily and then begins a lie that makes him work to keep her.

Much like The Navigator and a few shorts before it, Keaton plays his standard dandy character, this time a Mr. Alfred Butler. Butler's father, seeking to toughen his son, sends him out into the forest to rough it for a while — or what passes for roughing it when you're wealthy (a valet played by Snitz Edwards, hot baths, newspaper delivery, skinned animal rugs, etc.) He and the wild do not get along, and his inability to fire a rifle lands him in hot water with a country girl (Sally O'Neill), with whom he soon falls in love. The two are seen as an odd match by all, but they're sweet together; in a great scene he escorts her home at dusk only to find he doesn't know the way back to his tent and she then escorts him home. Her burly family is skeptical, and Butler's valet, attempting to talk up his boss to the mountain clan, says he is "Battling" Butler, a boxer who shares the same name. They then approve of the marriage, only to have the timing be perfect for them to rally around Keaton's character when "Battling" Butler is to participate in a high-profile bout.

Does the fact that the protagonist is trying to retain the girl's affection instead of win it make the stakes seem any less important? Perhaps a little, and maybe only negligibly because the story still fits nicely into the Keaton universe of wry takes and taxing chores. Keaton did play a stock character that changed sometimes dramatically from film to film. Whether he is down on his luck or well-to-do, his films possess a nihilistic quality as if the universe is actively working against his tenacity the way gravity works against his actual physicality. Keaton does give himself numerous tasks and challenges to overcome, including rigorous athletic training (and eventual bouts, including some sloppy footwork in the ring) that keep him on his toes until the facade.

There's a tendency to compare, or much rather contrast, silent comedy's most famous boxing sequence — the featherweight Tramp using a referee for cover in Chaplin's City Lights — to the boxing scenes in Battling Butler. Most of us cannot help the fact that we're all but certain to have seen a Chaplin masterpiece before we see a minor Keaton, so there's a tendency to temporally view Battling Butler as something in the shadow of City Lights, a ridiculous proposition since this film precedes Chaplin's by five years. Nevertheless, it's all too rare that the comedians overlapped in critical scenes. Keaton, the more physical of the two, predictably embraces the more painful elements of boxing, unlike Chaplin, who spends time deftly avoiding his opponent. Keaton becomes trapped in the ropes of the ring and finds himself on the receiving end of a few punches. And unlike Chaplin, according to scholar Marion Meade, Keaton's boxing work sidelined him a few times: once when he fell out of the ring and hit his head, and once when he strained a ligament in his leg jumping into the ring.

But the differences, as they exist, reach maximum distance at the end of the film. If Keaton began Battling Butler seeking to invert his traditional formula, then he also seemed intent on having its ending invert a traditional formula as well. In most of his comedies, his character would either evade the bad guy or comically come to defeat him. But when the real "Battling" Butler shows up at the end of the film and begins to move in the girl, Keaton emerges rather heroically — almost like a Fairbanksian swashbuckler — to put in a serious, dramatic boxing fight in the locker room. It should be no surprise to anyone to observe how fit and athletic Keaton really was (after all, there's no other way he could have performed all those stunts), but there is still something shocking and thrilling about watching Keaton throw himself into a serious fight that more than makes up for the rather muted stakes.

Still, it's quite bewildering that Battling Butler proved to be the most popular, thus most financially bankable, of Keaton's silent films. It was a vindication for Keaton, who considered it among his favorite films, but an astonishment to most critics today. Through the ways that it immediately shifts in an unexpected direction and lets the surprises move and build upon each other, Battling Butler is surely never a disappointment, just a curious chapter of Keaton's work. To invert his classic narrative structure, to insert an honest shot at genuine drama through a decisively unfunny boxing sequence at the film's end, is (oddly enough) almost a move toward the mainstream for Keaton. Battling Butler does invoke the aura of other adventure comedies from the era, and there are moments when it distinctly feels like something Harold Lloyd might have explored if given the opportunity. But when considered against his masterpieces, it doesn't pack the same punch. Then again, there's probably nothing more Keatonian than going against the grain — in all respects — and achieving success.

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Go West (1925)

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 69 mins.


Around the midpoint of Buster Keaton's western comedy Go West, our hero — a man from the east who is out of his element in the frontier, descriptively named Friendless — is asked to brand the cow for whom he has developed a sympathetic and convivial camaraderie. His approach is distinctly Keatonian: apply a little shaving cream to her hind quarter, trim away some of her hair, and let that stand instead of a painful branding. But the scene also reflects what's wrong with this middle-brow but not altogether problematic film. Keaton's own approach to the material mirrors his character's careful shave. It's a little here, a little there, and a gentle pat at the end. Compared to the fast and frenzied world of Keaton's more searing pictures, Go West is a little limp.

The film's strengths are in its themes in rather familiar territory: Friendless (Keaton) is a bit of a loner struggling to find fulfillment in an Indiana town who heeds the long-heralded advice of Horace Greeley: go west, young man! However, once he arrives, he realizes he's not much more of a success there than he is back east — maybe more so as the rancher cowboy lifestyle doesn't quite seem to fit his skill set. His one joy forms in the unlikeliest of places, a relationship with a Jersey cow named Brown Eyes, who he spends the rest of the film trying to save from a journey to the slaughterhouse.

Although the territory is familiar, the execution is not — or at least not as tight, focused, and inventive as Keaton's previous works. It is not so much that the film occasionally stumbles as it is that the film never seems to lift off. This is heavy with plot and story, frequently without any of the physical prowess that makes a Keaton film what it is. Some have theorized the film is a sly take on the romantic films coming out of Hollywood, but Go West is no more critical of conventional love and romance than the self-deprecating and outsider takes on romance in Keaton's other films. (Incidentally, Go West is the only Keaton film where he doesn't whisk off into the sunset with the female lead.) The behind-the-scene dynamics could explain why it lacks the impresario's touch. Keaton drafted the story and directed the film almost entirely on location in Mohave County, Arizona, but lost much of his regular creative and technical crew. Writer Jean Havez died unexpectedly, and writer Joseph A. Mitchell left Keaton to work for Universal; Keaton's loyal gagman Clyde Bruckman took meantime work on Harold Lloyd's For Heaven's Sake. All three had been instrumental from his short films through his early masterworks like Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator.

Most of the slapstick is handed off to others, with Keaton standing as the calm center, particularly when he lets a train full of cows out onto the streets of Los Angeles and attempts to nonchalantly avoid them. Keaton's on-screen relationship with Brown Eyes might be the most impressive stunt in a relatively stunt-free film (at least by Keaton standards). Marion Meade, in her essential book Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, notes that Keaton trained the cow with a rope halter and by feeding her tidbits. In a little more than a week, he and cow had bonded so well he could lead her around with sewing thread tied to his finger. Life began imitating art, and the cow wanted to follow Keaton as far as his dressing room. That anecdote alone is ample demonstration of how delightful the synergy between Keaton and Brown Eyes is. Go West is obviously not without its charms, but the fact that it is rather heavy and sentimental is unexpected and unfulfilling.

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Seven Chances (1925)

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 56 mins.


On the whole, Buster Keaton's films tended to be developed as original screenplays, with gags, scenes, or broad themes worked out well before he knew exactly what was going to happen in a narrative. Sherlock Jr. was to be about dreams, he knew, but how and why he didn't; The Navigator was to incorporate a $20,000 abandoned ship, but to what ends was not immediately clear.

Seven Chances, however, began as a previously written stage play, purchased for Keaton by someone on his staff. Keaton didn't care much for the play — its many plot complications did not suit the sort of bare-bones storytelling needed in silent comedy — but he took on the project obligingly and began morphing into something that was closer to his style. Unsurprisingly then, as it labors to set up the premise of a soon-to-be-27-year-old man (Keaton) who must be married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday to inherit his grandfather's $7 million, Seven Chances leads off as a fairly conventional comedy by 1925 standards. Yet as it progresses, the film becomes something distinctly Keatonian, the focus on the narrative becoming looser and looser until he embarks on one of the greatest chase scenes in the totality of silent cinema.

The crux of the film's first half essentially hinges on repeated rejection. Keaton's Jimmie Shannon does love a girl, Mary Jones (Ruth Dwyer), and she loves him as well, but the courtship process has taken the two an inordinate amount of time (illustrated in an early and surprising two-strip Technicolor sequence that opens the film, where Keaton and Dwyer stand in front of a house as the seasons dissolve in the background and a cute Great Dane puppy grows and grows). Upon hearing the news of his potential fortune, he earnestly proposes to her, but errs in checking his watch as he does so and she kicks him out. Jimmie and his partner, Billy (T. Roy Barnes), desperately need the money to keep their business afloat, so Billy attempts to solicit any woman to marry Jimmie so the money can be his. But woman after woman rejects him (or, in the film's lousy ethnic humor, he recoils in a mistake of planning a proposal to women neither white nor Gentile). Finally, in an act of desperation, Billy places an ad in the newspaper detailing Jimmie's dilemma and saying he'll marry any woman who shows up at the church — and hundreds of eager and ruthless potential brides do.

The film has heart and moxie, even if it can seem disabusingly cynical on the subject of love. The one girl he does love rejects him on the basis of miscommunication; the girls he pursues simply to make it to the altar reject him on superficial grounds; and he rejects an entire mob of wedding-crazy and angry women to spare his own life. It is redeemed by its fairly predictable ending, which is necessary to illustrate that Seven Chances is not an entirely misanthropic affair and is ruled by its unmaterialized sentimentality. The beauty of Keaton producing this play instead of some other comedian (Charlie Chaplin might have just wanted the money, Harold Lloyd might have just wanted the girl, Groucho Marx would have wanted both but in a more lascivious way) is that he walks a tightrope of emotions. We as viewers sympathize with his plight of needing a bride to earn an inheritance, and we want to see him succeed, but Keaton portrays Jimmie as a character who is never satisfied with the journey and who keeps Dwyer's Mary close to his heart. By the time the final chase arrives, it earns its excitement and suspense because we have forged a connection with Jimmie.

Keaton has control over the first half, even if the premise isn't his, but the second half almost breaks apart neatly from the first to become unmistakably his. After the mob of women arrive at the church, he must escape them, and the chase scene that ends the film is among Keaton's best. He equals the sheer magnitude of the urban chase in his 1922 short Cops, but spreads the energy across a horizontal rural plane. He traverses a marshland and avoids the buckshot of hunters trying to bag a duck; he leaps objects and slides under cars; and most impressively, he evades an avalanche of rolling stones.

After a test screening of Seven Chances, during which the audience began laughing riotously after Keaton accidentally dislodged a few small stones while running downhill and caused them to tumble after him, he went back to the scene of the crime and filmed an entirely new sequence with what seems like hundreds of rocks, ranging in sizes from those about as large as a basketball to gigantic boulders. That scene alone is probably the most famous of the film, and a great example of Keaton's inherent comic instincts and his ability to improvise and deviate from the slated vision for the opportunity to earn more laughs. And it's here, in the miraculous finale, where the film's reputation is cemented.

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The Navigator (1924)

d. Donald Crisp & Buster Keaton / USA / 60 mins.


Buster Keaton, much like silent comedy's mega-star Charles Chaplin, liked to improvise, and perhaps his most expensive improvisation was The Navigator, a film that had all of its pieces before it knew what to do with them. Keaton's art director, had informed him that a soon-to-be dismantled ocean liner had become available, and Keaton convinced producer Joseph M. Schenck to invest $20,000 into the ship to secure it for a film. Schenck did (although a bit begrudgingly, it's been reported). So after an enormous expenditure and with an entire ocean steam-liner at his disposal, Keaton sat down with his chief gagman, Clyde Bruckman, and finally asked the big question: What are we going to do with it?

The result turned out to be The Navigator, an artistic and cinematic success that went on to be the comedian's most profitable film at the time. The story he and his crew created does not stray too far from typical Keatonian narratives; he plays a well-to-do and pampered rich man named Rollo Treadway who is struck with the urge to be married one day, but the girl (Kathryn McGuire) for whom he pines, named Betsy O'Brien, rejects his proposal. Through a series of mishaps he and she both end up on the empty ship, which is sent out to sea and leaves both the pampered characters to fend for themselves — make their own food (a decision to use six coffee beans to make a gallon proves disastrous) and try to find safety (they scare off a ship that could have helped them when they send up the quarantine flag for attention because it's the brightest flag).

Social status and technology then recur as key sources of Keaton comedy, and both leads carry their weight equally and seem tortured equally by the uncaring mechanics of the ship. Mechanics aside, they're both haunted by what they assume are ghosts on board the ship, including a brilliant sequence where a photograph of a frightening man is tossed out by McGuire and lands on a hook above a porthole, swinging back and forth while Keaton is trying to sleep, as if a face keeps looking in on him. (I'll also give a shout-out to a particularly funny, if Chaplinesque, struggle with a deck chair and a moment where Keaton tries to shuffle a soggy deck of chairs.) Although McGuire appeared in only two of Keaton's films — this and Sherlock Jr. — she brings to the screen a comic poise that you rarely see silent comediennes exhibit. Rollo may have proposed to Betsy in the beginning of the film, and slowly builds up a camaraderie with her as they spent time abroad the ocean liner, but it would almost be incorrect to label her a romantic interest. She lacks the chance to exhibit the physical humor Keaton could conjure out of seemingly nothing (she may or may not have had any), but she undoubtedly serves much more as a comic partner in The Navigator.

Donald Crisp, who made regular appearances in D.W. Griffith's films and served as an uncredited assistant director on The Birth of a Nation, was brought in by Keaton to direct the "straight" scenes of The Navigator. The decision turned out to be a mistake as far as Keaton was concerned when the rather humorless Crisp began meddling in the film. Consequentially, Keaton re-shot everything and is generally regarded as the sole director of the film although Crisp's name remains on the credits.

Even though the film is completely Keaton's, and is a success by any measure, I'm not sure the social satire and the man-versus-machine humor is quite as effective here than in other Keaton features. Certainly it cannot be forgotten for an absolutely bravura sequence that appears toward the end. When the ship stalls out near an island of cannibals that pose a clear and obvious threat to the two socialites, Keaton must don a diving suit and go underwater to fix the ship's broken propeller. It's among the earliest underwear scenes in cinema, filmed at Lake Tahoe because the studio tanks were too small for a life-size propeller. Keaton finds nothing lacking in terms of underwater humor: he washes his hands although he's at the bottom of the sea, and he uses the local fauna to his advantage (a lobster's claws help cut wires and one swordfish comes in handle to fence with another swordfish).

Nearly all of Keaton's films made and released between 1920 and 1929 possess the miraculous quality of blending entertainment, humor, and cinematic skill, but The Navigator has its fair share of ardent defenders; Walter Kerr, in his seminal book The Silent Clowns, calls it "one of Keaton's two perfect films" (the other being The General). Without a doubt I think the film is very good, although it falls short of of masterpiece status. It's always struck me as Buster Keaton's most mechanical film, and not just because one of the "stars" is an retired ocean liner. As I've written before, one of Keaton's surest strengths as a director is delivering a tactile atmosphere through the mise-en-scène; you can almost hear the groans of the hull and smell the cold, wet metal. But the joy of a Keaton film is the journey to a faraway and comic place while being able to feel close to Keaton on screen. He's distant in The Navigator, and though the film as an entire production is marked with distinguishing Keaton characteristics, his lead performance isn't. It's a small gripe for an otherwise splendid film.

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Sherlock Jr. (1924)

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 44 mins.


It is an exhausted but perpetually romantic cliche that the movies are perhaps the purest artistic incarnation of our sleeping hours. In both, we enter into the comfort of a dark room, relax, and find ourselves whisked away into an incomparable dreamlike state where our minds are alive and nothing is impossible. Every film, even the ones that attempt to evoke uncontaminated realism, possesses a fraction of this illusory quality, and some more than others. Spend just a few minutes with a Buster Keaton film and it's clear he is among the latter. He uses his body on-screen in ways that often shouldn't be possible, and uses the practically limitless capabilities of cinema's ability to deceive to create scenes that range from unlikely to just downright impossible.

The most ethereal of his films is Sherlock Jr., for the ways it disintegrates the boundaries between reality and cinema. It is essentially a film about (a) film, one of the earliest metacinematic experiences that was disguised as something much more ordinary. This was the earliest Keaton film I saw, and it continues to be my personal favorite — which, I suppose, shouldn't be all that surprising to those who know Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is my favorite film of all time. Like Hitchcock's, Keaton's is painstakingly crafted. Both are imminently accessible yet infinitely layered, and sing complex and unrestrained praises of the medium in which they appear while producing the most enjoyable work of art possible. Few experiments are more difficult than creating a work of art that adequately reflects, praises, and comments on its medium; few, if any, come as close as these films to creating such a work that also reaches perfection.

The triumph of Sherlock Jr. is the triumph of the quotidian and of the universal. Keaton plays a likable movie theater janitor and projectionist, hapless in life and love but aiming for something better. His dream is to become a detective and to win the affection of a girl (Kathryn McGuire), but his progress toward either dream is thwarted when a villain (Ward Crane) sets him up as a thief and attempts to win the girl. He returns to his job a distraught man, and as he falls asleep behind the theater's projector, he dreams his way onto the screen, where the characters have been replaced with the people of his own life and where, as his dream persona of Sherlock Jr., he is for once able to move deftly, skillfully, and acrobatically to solve the case.

Dream states were not new territory for Keaton by 1924. The early part of the decade was still a nascent age for film, and the narrative device of a dream had allowed him to get away with scenes and sequences that depart from reality while not profoundly disrupting audience interpretation. In shorts like The Love Nest and The Frozen North, Keaton used the dream as an excuse to explore an exotic location. But his short The Playhouse, in which Keaton uses multiple exposures to play more than twenty roles in the span of just a few minutes, has more in common with Sherlock Jr. in the opportunities it afforded Keaton to create in the netherlands of possibility.

The contrast works well. In the opening scenes, the primary comic emphasis is on slapstick and pure jokes. There's a wonderfully simple sequence where he finds $3 in the trash outside the theater but soon finds himself losing it in a series of unfortunate events. Shortly thereafter, his "How to Be A Detective" book suggests he follow his suspect closely, and Keaton and Crane perform a pantomime where Keaton mirrors his every step only inches behind him. But once Keaton enters the film, the other side of Keaton emerges: the stunt-work, the choreography, the diligent planning of nearly every moment. It is in these moments — in our dreams, when anything seems possible — that Keaton shoots a perfect game of billiards (all avoiding a single ball, which was planted as an explosive), jumps through a window and perfectly into the clothing disguise of an old woman, and makes a daring escape on the handle-bars of a motorcycle that zips through potential crash after potential crash, all while not knowing there's no one driving it.

The cinematic legacy of Sherlock Jr. may be less about its superb entertainment factor (at 44 minutes, it seems too scant to be a feature film, but it exists without an ounce of fat) than it is about its superb filmmaking factor. It is a complete synthesis of performance and form. Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, notes Keaton demurred all claims of intellectuality in his films and stubbornly settled with a classically stone-faced line of, "I was just trying to get laughs." But, Kerr notes, that doesn't negate the reality that Sherlock Jr. nevertheless shows Keaton to be a brilliant analyst of film, particularly in the early scene of Keaton being transported from one landscape to another (only to trip over, fall, or spin in the shock that he is somewhere new) with the speed of a splice. Writes Kerr:

... the sequence illustrates basic theories of continuity and cutting more vividly and with greater precision than theorists themselves have ever been able to do. But the analysis was in not Keaton's head. It was in the film. He went past celebration and worked only with the thing itself, creating what amounts to theory out of his body, his camera, his fingers, a pair of scissors. Art is often something done before it is something thought: Keaton's impulses were not only stronger but more accurate than any verbal formulation he might have chosen to offer for them.

It is tour de force filmmaking: special effects created purely with the aid of mathematics, celluloid, and scissors instead of computer rendering software. That scene so baffled audiences and colleagues that cameramen and directors were reportedly heard to boast around the corners of Hollywood that they'd seen it multiple times and still had yet to discover how Keaton had actually managed to create the illusion, to transport himself between locales without seeming to move a muscle. Two decades went by before he revealed the secret: first he meticulously measured the distance between the camera and himself, then he developed the last frame from the previous shot and placed it inside the camera's viewfinder, where his cameraman could coach him into lining up with himself. Thus the irony reveals itself: when you see the sequence play out on the screen, it appears to be the product of miraculous technology; but the technology was rather ordinary, and instead, it was Keaton's corporeal control and poise that proved to be more miraculous. (Sherlock Jr. tested the endurance of his body in other ways as well. While filming a scene where he falls from the trough of a water tower and lands on a set of train tracks with hundreds of gallons spilling out onto him, he broke several vertebrae. He suffered severe migraines in the years that followed but only realized he'd actually broken the bones when a doctor told him during a routine insurance examination that it had healed well.)

That tension between the film's outer narrative (Keaton the projectionist, trying to become the detective and win the girl) and the film's inner narrative (Keaton the detective, solving crimes with über-sleuth panache) does not drive Sherlock Jr. on its face. By the time of the climactic motorcycle sequence, it is possible that most people — myself included, practically every time I watch the film casually and do not force myself to track its machination — have become so consumed with the inner detective story that they have forgotten the film's narrative origin. But of course that's no accident. Robert Knopf calls the whole inner story "one of the longest narrative disruptions in Hollywood cinema," an altogether fitting description because films usually deliver two-hour disruptions in the human condition. They transport us somewhere new and allow us to become something we are not. Sherlock Jr. rejoices and relishes in that fact; by setting forth on an audacious journey to codify that sensation into the physical language of film, it delivers one of cinema's most flawless spectacles.

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Our Hospitality (1923)

d. John G. Blystone & Buster Keaton / USA / 73 mins.


If you enter Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality through the back door of time, you might not immediately appreciate it for what it is. Having now re-watched Keaton's works in chronological order, it is easier and more rewarding to see this film as a giant leap forward for Keaton, his first true feature film as a director even if it is technically his second (Three Ages, released earlier in the same year, was three shorts spliced together). The film has an entirely different rhythm and pulse than anything Keaton had done before; it is mature storytelling, with a straightforward and occasionally dramatic and satirical narrative positioned first and the comedy serving as a successful buttress.

Contextually, Keaton's films are often set on the cusp of something — the moment civilization is about to roll forward to something else, with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. That metaphoric straddling shouldn't be surprising considering how acrobatic Keaton was; his stunts occupy that same plane, always partially under control and always partially out of control. Our Hospitality is a riff on progress, refracted through the seeming absence of progress. It finds itself at a technological nexus, a time when bicycles didn't have pedals yet and trains (a Keaton favorite, this time a working model of Stephenson's 1831 "Rocket") bounced up and down on tracks.

The human story is also an on-the-cusp variety. Based on the famous feud between the Hatfield family and the McCoy family, Keaton plays Willie McKay, a surviving member of a family that has been feuding with the Canfields for generations. On the train-ride South, he strikes up a friendship with a lovely young woman named Virginia (Natalie Talmadge, at the time Keaton's wife), but neither knows the other is the member of an opposing family. Upon their arrival, Willie finds himself embroiled with Virginia's brothers and menacing father (Joe Roberts, a Keaton regular who suffered a stroke during production and died shortly thereafter). Willie manages to find a moment of eerie and foreboding serenity by becoming a guest in the Canfield home after the elder Canfield has decreed that as long as he is a guest, he will not be harmed. Once he steps outside, however, that's another matter.

Keaton intentionally set the film the antebellum South (to give himself the opportunity to play with the era's technology), but the decision also infuses the narrative with palpable geographic tension. Keaton's Willie may have been born in the South, but he was raised in the North and returns to his birthplace as a Northerner seeking to settle his family's estate. The story does not make clear what his subsequent intentions are: will he move to the South if he has inherited the mansion he dreams of, or will he merely handle all that is necessary and come back North where his family now lives? Either could be seen as an affront to the traditional respect of a culture. More pressing for the film is his connection to the Canfields as a McKay.

The title could be read as a mockery of Southern hospitality, yet the film does not venture to taunt a particular culture. Indeed, it is an undeniably grim title: what is hospitable about a family that wants to kill you but is being polite enough not to do it while you're in their home? But the human condition is undeniably grim as well, and as the final moments of the film demonstrate, it is not a cultural obstacle the characters must traverse but rather the human condition. An embroidered axiom that hangs on the walls of the Canfield estate converts the father — a standard message of loving thy neighbor — but that message is not directed at any one person or people, but rather people on the whole. It is not a victory of politics because the film was never interested in its characters as walking metaphors in the first place; instead, it's a personal victory, a victory for Willie who has not only saved the girl but managed to marry her as well. (The parting shot is rather hilarious, too: once the truce is called, Willie, who has until that point been the subject of a chase, begins unloading numerous firearms from his pockets. Although he might not have been willing to fight in the name of his tribe, he was ultimately willing to defend himself so he could be with the girl he loves.)

More importantly, there's not a flat note in the film. Our Hospitality possesses a forward momentum in its narrative that is generally lacking from Keaton's shorts, which possess more of a circular narrative that takes a situation and mines it for all its comic gold rather than pushing it to another place. But it doesn't venture too far away from what we could expect of Keaton — namely a good chase, some fantastic stunts, and a few simple gags, scaled back so as not to interfere with the plot. (In one of the best, Willie, trying to stall his departure from the Canfield home, repeatedly hides his hat under a seat but a feisty dog keeps retrieving it for him.) It is not one of Keaton's funnier films, but I don't see that as a strike against it. What it lacks in laugh-out-loud humor it more than makes up for with its charm and handsome character.

Writing about Keaton's stunts is in many ways as effective as writing about the choreography and performance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — at some point words begin to breakdown and oxidize into useless tools; the event simply must be seen to be believed. The breathless climax of Our Hospitality, set on a rushing river which ends in a waterfall, is one of the great scenes in Keaton's oeuvre. (And in one of his many brushes with death while making films, he actually almost drowned shooting his struggle of being sent down the river.) He finds himself dangling over the waterfall, a rope tied around his waist and attached to a log that has become jammed in some rocks. He is desperately trying to free himself and reach safety on nearby rocks when he is called into action to save the girl, who is caught in the current and headed toward the fall. Those who have seen it can't forget it, and those who haven't should as soon as possible.

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Three Ages (1923)

d. & Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton / USA / 63 mins.


Although considered to be Buster Keaton's first feature film, Three Ages is really no more than three short films about love during various eras of human civilization cut and woven together. Keaton admitted as much, too. Willing to perform outrageous stunts in front of the camera, behind it he was a rather shrewd and cautious businessman. If feature-length Keaton turned out to be a failure or unpopular with audiences, his thinking was that he could return to Three Ages, tear it down, and reassemble the pieces into three short films.

This fact does not diminish the overall enjoyment of Three Ages, which manages to build good will during its running time by coalescing into a tongue-in-cheek parody of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance — a film that billed itself as "love through the ages." For Keaton, the eras are the Stone Age, the age of the Roman Empire, and contemporary 1920s America; the relative constants are that Keaton plays his poker-faced paradigmatic character in each epoch, trying to win the affection of a young woman (Margaret Leahy, in all three) and butting heads with another suitor (Wallace Beery, in all three) and the girl's father (Joe Roberts, a crossover from Keaton's short films).

The Stone Age and Roman Empire segments both provide lighthearted entertainment, spoofing contemporary attitudes about love and society, particularly our technology, which always seems to fascinate Keaton. He sends up golf, parking spaces, automobiles, meteorology, gambling, and bicycles, which all tend to amount to nothing but throwaway gags. Although the Stone Age segment is imminently forgettable, the Roman scenes do contain a bit of wicked creativity on Keaton's part. In one gag he succeeds during a chariot race despite a freak snowfall when he attaches skis to the bottom of his chariot and forgoes the horses for sled dogs; in another, parodying the biblical tale of Daniel, he is thrown into a lion's den where he and the big cat become friendly after he volunteers a manicure. It is silly more than anything else (the lion is so patently fake and immobile you don't expect any harm or threat), but it's not without a certain charm.

Of the three, it is actually the modern era segment that proves superior. It is the closest in theme and style to the shorts Keaton and Cline had been making the preceding three years, and if it had been released on its own as a short, it would probably rank among Keaton's best from that period. The jokes in this section are far superior, including his participation in a football game that pre-dates Harold Lloyd's famous football game in The Freshman (it also provides more laughs than the sequence in that film as well). As one might expect, Keaton's size and fear factor heavily into the humor of the football sequence, but he also utilizes camera placement and spatial fields to create certain effects, such as distancing himself from the other players and allowing the unsteadiness following a particularly tough tackle to play out across the field. In another scene, he pulls the audience along as a phone booth that holds his character is picked up, moved out of a building, and onto the back of a pickup truck. In the best Keaton sequences, the mise-en-scène has been calibrated carefully and there is a tangible sense of objects, and although the camera doesn't move to reflect any wooziness or dread during the moving of the phone booth, the film nonetheless evokes such a response from the audience and by taking his time, Keaton winds up for a great punch-line.

After all, comedy, if it is anything, is part art and part science. While it was evident in his independently-produced short films that Keaton already had the dynamics of comedy under firm control, there's a particular scene near the end of Three Ages that I think demonstrates his mastery quite well. As with his shorts, the film is a balance of action and inaction, of measuring the situation for the right response — subdued, proportional, or overdone— and of targeting his performance to fit the particular space captured on film. Keaton does not merely attempt to circumnavigate our expectations, but to slice through them like a tornado-blown needle. In the scene I speak of, Keaton is being chased and is making his way across rooftops when he reaches a gap between buildings that is too wide to jump. From the moment he begins (in his performance) to process the distance between the rooftops and whether he could actually make such a jump to the actual moment he jumps, exactly seventeen seconds elapse. Such an amount of time feels rather insignificant, but the scene is performed in one unbroken take and is loaded with the suspense of what he will do coupled with the tension already felt in the pursuit. We are able to watch him as he (and we) are invited to solve the dilemma. Naturally, he being Buster Keaton and we being silent comedy spectators, there is an expectation that he will jump, and he does; there is also an expectation on our parts that the jump will not be perfect, but we are heretofore left guessing how exactly it will culminate.

What happens is ultimately beyond expectation. He jumps, but he misses the building, falls through a few awnings, grabs onto a gutter pipe which becomes unmoored and swings him down, sending him through a window, across the floor of firemen's quarters and to the firehouse pole, where he then falls through and lands abruptly onto the ground-level floor. This sequence is sharply edited with multiple cuts (but still not too many; Keaton always wanted the audience to know it was him on screen). Without missing a beat, he stands up, now as dazed as we, and sits down on the back of a fire engine bumper. The beat now is infinitesimally longer than the time between his landing and his move toward the fire engine, but it is nonetheless discernible, enough time for us comprehend what has happened. We are given just enough time before the fire engine, supposedly on this whole time, suddenly leaves the firehouse garage. That sequence — the film's most remarkable action sequence — is exactly twelve seconds, or five whole seconds shorter than the essential inaction that preceded. It is a crucial cinematic move for the comedian's part, and it is wondrous to see how deft Keaton at blending the art of his performance with the science of his editing to achieve the maximum comedic and disorienting effect.

Keaton always contended that such artistry was never at the front of his mind while he was making films. Fair enough. I'll take him at his humble word and say that perhaps what he was doing was not explicitly conscious. But there is little doubt in my mind that he was the sort of person who could naturally feel the pulse of an audience and had an internal timing mechanism that was virtually peerless. Because he wore all hats during production — actor, director, producer, writer, stunt coordinator, etc. — he was able to incorporate that timing into all facets of the film. The scene I described is one of countless moments in Keaton's work where a viewer can marvel at how well the viewing experience synchronizes with the film's creation, even more than eighty years later. And while Three Ages as a film in its totality is not among Keaton's best, what would have been the short film reflecting modern age romance certainly is. The other two, while not great, are at least fun and complement the overall intention.

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The Short Films of Buster Keaton (1920-1923)

d. Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton / USA / Nineteen shorts, 394 mins.


The short film is often a forsaken art, uncounted by many in catalogues of great movies and spuriously rejected on the premise that bigger equals better. When treated as a launching pad, the short film will feel like nothing but — a couple sets, small-scale slapstick, a limited cast. D.W. Griffith made almost 400 of them in the span of a few years; Charles Chaplin turned out one per week while working for the Essanay and Mutual studios. Once studios realized people would sit for an hour and a half to two hours, shorts began losing their luster; once the dawn of television occurred, mainstream shorts had become a near-relic.

But the short films that Buster Keaton made between 1920 and 1923 — nineteen of them, co-directed and co-written by himself and Edward F. Cline with occasional work by Mal St. Clair — are frequently an exception to the idea that shorts are inherently less satisfying and less accomplished than feature films. At their best they exhibit gusto and enterprise lacking in many feature comedies, from this or any other era. And at their best they dispel the theory that you can't do something grand on a small scale. Indeed, while Keaton's true masterpieces would come later in long form, his short films don't suggest he was holding back anything. In films like One Week (1920), The High Sign (1921), and The Electric House (1922) he constructed elaborate, expensive, and ingenious sets with no less attention to detail than his work in features. In The Playhouse (1921), he flashes his technological mastery of cinema by using multiple exposures to play more than twenty different roles, and in Cops (1922), dozens and dozens of extras fill out an entire police force that chases him through the streets. They're unique even in the world of short comedy and work in a way few other shorts either attempted or achieved.

This success is no doubt tied to two important elements. The first is incidental: Keaton's producer, Joseph M. Schenck, provided the largesse and independent approach that gave Keaton the opportunity to make the films he did, initially these two-reels and later five- to six-reels. The second is contextual, therefore perhaps more crucial: Keaton saw film as film. He would not have been able to do what he did in any other art-form, and this knowledge seemed to both liberate and invigorate him. Chaplin's shorts tended to be more performance pieces set around the Tramp persona, the benefit of film being that the Tramp could appear on the farm in one and backstage at a movie in another; although the sets changed, the straightforward and clean production pattern did not. As Chaplin began pushing the boundaries of the medium's presupposed limits — making four-reelers like A Dog's Life and Shoulder Arms in 1918 — his films grew not only in length and scope but prestige. Keaton, on the other hand, embraced the possibilities of cinema early. His first two films, One Week and The High Sign (the latter was released in 1921, but filmed before One Week) created wildly different scenarios. Whereas each Chaplin short felt like simply the next stop on the Tramp's long journey through the universe, each Keaton short was like a universe within itself.

Much like his feature films, the shorts provide a close-up inspection of Keaton's psychology and what fascinated him as a thinker. Certainly the most prevailing interest he had was with the tension between man and technology — specifically how such technology designed to provide comfort ended up causing so much pain. One Week, one of Keaton's best, follows him as a newlywed attempting to build a do-it-yourself house that he and his bride have been given on the occasion of their wedding. What seems like a sweet gesture is undercut by a grim sense of premature failure, a lopsided, oblique monstrosity that leads to sheer mayhem and must be moved to the correct lot after construction. But there's an intriguing disconnection between the technology gone awry on screen and the technology perfected behind the camera. The Scarecrow (1920) introduces us to Keaton's Goldbergian cleverness, where a house is filled with multi-tasking elements: a sink turns into a bench, a phonograph turns into a stove-top, and a bookshelf opens into a pantry, all designed to provide chuckles but none of which contributes to the ultimate goal of the film, to provide a chase sequence. The entire premise of The Electric House is that Keaton, mistaken as an electrical engineer, is put in charge of wiring a home in order to put it on the vanguard of technology. The staircase becomes an escalator, a mechanized billiards table funnels the balls into a display case and then re-racks them for the players, the food is served on a miniature train, and so on.

The electric house within The Electric House fails, at least as far as the characters on screen are concerned; it is a dangerous home that malfunctions, most notably in the way its escalator sends its inhabitants flying out of windows. The short itself rolls out resplendently, and it is executed with tactical brilliance by Keaton and his crew. Perhaps his most perfectly executed gag film is The High Sign, where an unemployed Keaton (he portrayed unnamed men in most of his shorts, so I'm going to use his name as something interchangeable with his characters) wanders into town looking for a job and accidentally becomes mixed up in a murder plot. The gags there are simple, ranging from an obscenely large newspaper that seems capable of unfolding infinitely to the antics caused by Keaton's clumsy handling of a rifle. His search for employment leads him to accept positions both as an assassin and as a guard of the same man. The centerpiece of the film is a rigged house, full of trap doors and secret walls, which come in handy for the spry and agile Keaton to evade the gang that has his hired him to do the hit-job when he decides to protect the target and the target's daughter.

What becomes evident watching a Keaton short is that, while all silent comedies seem oriented around the slapstick gag, the director differs from his contemporaries in one important way: he was as concerned about the role of technology on-screen as he was about utilizing technology in the process of making movies. He was an early master of cranking the camera at different speeds to create the illusion of frighteningly fast action, such as in Cops and The Blacksmith (1922), the latter of which continued his fascination with man's use of technology. In that short, he plays a blacksmith's assistant who takes over the busy with disastrous results when his boss is arrested. The Blacksmith is one of many films Keaton made where he rather seamlessly blurs the lines between time and technology, a conscious attempt to evoke the simplicity of a bygone era. There's a gentle and respectful humor in The Blacksmith when horses or manual labor are concerned, and a more sinister and destructive humor where luxury is present (the nice car he is called to work upon is destroyed through a Keatonian mix of oil, fire, and heavy devices crashing into it).

As an innovator, Keaton also explored double-exposure, and there's no better example of this than The Playhouse, his great short film from the second year of production. The film opens with a dream sequence in which Keaton attends a vaudeville show where all the performers and the entire audience are played by Keaton — no less than 25 characters by my count, of all ages and genders, appearing through clean editing and skillful use of multiple exposure. Of course The Playhouse also represents another Keaton motif: his self-denigration through a rather pointed take on socio-cultural masculinity. Keaton was fit and healthy (how else could he have done all his own stunts?), but he was a diminutive five-foot-five, drawn into exaggeration when standing next to his regular shorts co-star Joe Roberts, who was barrel-chested and stood six-foot-three. The Playhouse puts Keaton's stage-hand character in the position where he must act like an ape to cover up for the fact he loses a monkey meant to perform with the star of the show. Time and time again Keaton drew on his physical stature to create the set-ups for these jokes, much like Chaplin did regularly in his career. You can spot Chaplin's influence in Convict 13 (1920), an early Keaton short where he is wrongfully mistaken to be an escaped convict and is sent off to prison, where Keaton must survive against larger gentlemen. My Wife's Relations (1922), while not a particularly brilliant short, nonetheless sees the smallish Keaton accidentally wedded to a large and boisterous woman, whose large and boisterous family push Keaton around until they think he is the heir to $100,000.

But Keaton's films always possess a double-edged take on the notion of masculinity. Keaton aims for laughter because of his size, social status, class, or profession, and this is contrasted with other larger men, but he rarely loses based on size alone. In fact, size is often the contributing element in his (often momentary) victories. The chase, Keaton's third and final recurring device in his shorts, is dealt in his favor because of his size and fitness. In one way or another, all his films are a chase — Keaton chasing something (a girl, typically) or someone (an authority figure or upset father, typically) chasing him. His ultimate chase film, and perhaps his definitive short film, is Cops, where a rather innocent mistake on Keaton's part leads to a city's entire police force chasing him through the streets — although that might be simplifying it a bit too much. Cops is actually Keaton's most surreal film, a portent to later films that would capitalize on his dissociative brand of storytelling. It is almost two one-reel shorts glued together by the presence of a subtly metaphoric anarchist. It begins as most Keaton romances do, with an emphasis on culturally defined masculinity and a girl saying he must go out and make something of himself in order to earn her affection. In attempting to become a success he comes into possession of some belongings in a rather dubious way and then, while riding a wagon into the middle of a police parade, accidentally catches a bomb through by an anarchist. (Naturally, he uses the burning fuse to light his cigarette.) Then the short switches gears and he goes on the run from the entire force, evading them with the help of any and all found-objects — ladders, fences, cars, etc.

In addition to mastering the chase film, Cops reveals another intriguing aspect of Keaton's persona: his bleak humor. He outmaneuvers the police with his cunning and athleticism, but even after proving he is physically up to the task, the girl rejects him and he sadly allows himself to be embraced by the police. The short ends with the shot of a tombstone and his pork-pie hat setting askew atop it. Such bleak humor pervades many of his shorts. Convict 13 takes the notion of gallows humor literally. Hard Luck (1921) is a pitiful Keaton repeatedly failing in his attempts to commit to suicide, and The Frozen North (1922) features a scene where Keaton, riffing on the cold-blooded melodramas of William S. Hart, walks into a cabin and assumes his wife is with another man. He shoots them both, only to discover he's walked into the wrong cabin.

Lest I give the impression they're all jewels, I should note that of the nineteen, less than half are films I would strongly recommend (a full list is printed at the end of this essay). While such comparisons to Chaplin are ultimately fruitless and chiefly irrelevant, in their totality Keaton's shorts lack the general uniformity that Chaplin exhibited at Mutual Studios; but conversely and importantly, there are few if any genuine duds in the bunch, so even when they don't quite come together, there's a surprising amount of pleasure to be had along the way. Neighbors (1920) is often seen as one of the better films, but it only delivers half-way for me. In the film, Keaton is attempting to see a girl in an apartment across a courtyard but has a run-in with a police officer who thinks he's black after a mishap with soil and a mishap with black paint. The humor is strained, but the finale — a choreographed sequence in which three men are stacked on top of each other and bounce back and forth across the courtyard, going in and out of apartment windows — is one of the more inspired teamwork gags. In The Boat (1921), Keaton aims to take his family out onto the water in a craft he made himself except it's too hard to pull out of the garage, leading to the collapse of the entire house as he tries to squeeze it through the frame of the garage. The Boat takes Keaton's joy of large-scale property destruction to new levels; it's not every day that a short film shows an entire house, a car, and a boat virtually destroyed for the sake of a laugh. But there's a risk to humor like this in Keaton's universe, which has always been alluring because he world is tangible and often so realistic it invokes the conceit of surrealism. The Boat provides a set-up almost too fake for its own good: after the boat completely sinks, the title card "You can't keep a good boat down" appears and the boat, wonderfully dry and safe, reappears in the next scene as if nothing had happened. It's a distracting break in the traditional Keaton milieu of things that seem possible even if they aren't.

And although there is plethora of originality in these shorts, some have become dismissible because Keaton would refine a certain element in a better film later. The Balloonatic (1923) offers a vertiginous joy-ride as Buster accidentally climbs on-board a flyaway hot-air balloon, but the bulk of the short is him surviving in the wilderness alongside a girl with whom he's fallen in love — scenes and gags done better in the features Our Hospitality and Battling Butler. His short Daydreams (1922), of which only an incomplete version survives today, presents Keaton as a boy determined to make something of himself in the city so he can win a girl's affection, but in the end he becomes chased by police officers in a retread from Cops, released earlier that year. (Although the short is noteworthy for a single scene where Keaton dons a disguise and looks vaguely like Chaplin's Tramp.) The antics at sea in The Love Nest (1923) are in performed in a slightly different, but better, form in The Navigator.

But still, there are many who believe Keaton's shorts are better than his features. Considering them as a whole, I can't say I'm one of them; I will say, though, that One Week, The High Sign, and Cops should be essential viewing for anyone interested not only in comedy or silent films but cinema in general. They are masterpieces in their own right, more sophisticated than perhaps any other silent shorts I've ever seen, and represent on a small scale the already expansive and wild vision Keaton possessed and would bring to life in his features.

The shorts, ranked first by star and then chronologically:

One Week (1920): ★★★★★
The High Sign (1921): ★★★★★
Cops (1922): ★★★★★

The Play House (1921): ★★★★½

The Scarecrow (1920): ★★★★
The Goat (1921): ★★★★
The Blacksmith (1922): ★★★★
The Electric House (1922): ★★★★

Convict 13 (1920): ★★★½
Neighbors (1920): ★★★½
The Boat (1921): ★★★½
Daydreams (1922): ★★★½
The Balloonatic (1923): ★★★½
The Love Nest (1923): ★★★½

Hard Luck (1921): ★★★
The Frozen North (1922): ★★★
My Wife's Relations (1922): ★★★
The Haunted House (1921): ★★½

The Paleface (1922): ★★

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Buster Keaton: An Appreciation

I first saw Buster Keaton on a snowy night in January, a few weeks into the spring semester of my freshman year in college. It was during an introductory film course, and weekly screenings were held Monday evenings in the biology building, which had an empty theater big enough to hold the approximately 150 enrolled students. As so often is the case with introductory film courses, we began with the origins of cinema. That night's screening included Sherlock Jr., one of Keaton's many masterpieces, although at the time I knew neither Keaton's name nor the possibilities in the world of silent comedy. It's now been many years since that night. I don't remember anything else we watched; probably A Voyage to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery, and maybe even a Griffith or Chaplin short, but I can vividly remember Keaton — Keaton and the dollars outside the theater; Keaton on top of the boxcars and taking a nasty spill when hit with a torrent of water; Keaton and the billiards table; and Keaton in the most memorable of sequences, straddling the handlebars of a motorbike and cruising down a highway of near-misses thinking there was someone actually driving the damn thing.

And I remember that I hadn't laughed so hard at a film in a long time. After the screening was over, I bundled myself back into my layers and made my way back to the dormitory. This was at a Midwestern university in the depths of winter, the trees heavy with ice and the patches of grass covered in wind-blown snow; the maintenance teams were out in the full force, dropping rock salt on the roads and sidewalks, but the results were hardly perfect. Shortly before reaching a key crosswalk, my left foot touched a spot of black ice and slipped out fast behind me. I stumbled but kept my balance, preventing myself from falling onto the sidewalk. And then I asked myself the sort of question I've come to ask myself time and time against when my klutziness got the best of me: How would Keaton have handled that?

It's a question a viewer comes to ask himself numerous times in a Keaton film. Perhaps not necessarily how such a thing will be done, but what exactly Keaton is going to do. Modern psychology teaches us that our understanding of humor — ultimately resulting, if all goes according to plan, in a laugh — is formed largely within a brain that isn't built for such a thing. We are always trying to solve something in black and white, our brains so focused on logic and reasonable prediction that when something incongruous to our expectations occurs, our brain has to shift gears in an attempt to make sense of the words or the action. It is a shift in expectation, so often formed through illogical behavior, that stimulates sections of our brains. It's why a Groucho Marx punch-line that can hit your mind so bluntly — the words steer you in one direction, the pun shocks you back to earth.

Keaton — born Joseph Francis, he earned the nickname "Buster" performing as a young man with his vaudevillian family, known for being able to "take a buster" in the way he could fall — plays this expectations game in his comedy. In the best of Keaton's films, things rarely turn out the way we expect they will. It is not simply that he will fall, flee, or fly, but it is what awaits him at the end of that momentarily airborne journey. This works because Keaton's is also a comedy of space, of expertly constructing and implementing set-pieces down to the millimeter so that everything goes according to plan. That plan, of course, is for everything not to go according to plan for the character on screen. When Keaton jumps from one building to another, for example, there is a good chance that Keaton-the-character has drastically underestimated the distance and fails in a gloriously funny fashion; Keaton-the-director, who performed all of his stunts, knows exactly the degree to which he will fail and has it worked out perfectly. In an important way this is different from standard slapstick. David Thomson notes that most silent comedies "did little more than film the comedian's 'act,'" which usually included some sort of slapstick or physical humor; but Keaton's films are elaborate works of art built with the camera in mind — in other words, films, not mere performances. Chaplin, who also made films and avoided simply performing an act, often fell as well, but in a way that tried to defy gravity. Keaton fell in a way that worked with gravity; his world is occupied with physical objects that have real weight and often real consequences.

I have no answer to the question of who was better, Chaplin or Keaton, nor do I have a specific answer to the question of whether I prefer one to the other. Most days I'm able to address the issue by saying my heart loves Chaplin and my head loves Keaton. I tend to agree with Andrew Sarris, who says the difference between the two is the difference between poise and poetry, that Keaton should be acknowledged as a "superior director and inventor of visual forms" (note the obfuscation of whether his films were better), and that unlike Chaplin, Keaton's films proved inimitable. But I also find myself agreeing with Walter Kerr in the sense that Chaplin is instantly accessible because "his comedy is contained entirely in his persona, a persona so multi-layered that it cannot be exhausted." Film critics split hairs when they try to decide who's better, but if Keaton is comes ahead for many, Kerr argues in The Silent Clowns, it's because he was more "compulsively analytical," a trait that speaks well to a critic's mind. Keaton is at once an observer and a participant in his own films. While Chaplin's persona has remained a relative constant in film appreciation, Keaton's films have produced ebbs and flows of attention, although today they have acquired as fervent a love among some as any auteur.

But perhaps no other auteur needs his works to be as delineated as Keaton. By today's standards, his career feels shockingly short. He began in the 1910s, playing second-banana to Fatty Arbuckle in a series of short films, and ended his career writing jokes for other comedians and appearing in cameo roles in film and television in the 1950s and 1960s. But these films do not encapsulate what is meant by "the films of Buster Keaton," the way we might mean something when we say the films of Hitchcock or Chaplin. Keaton's self-designed output — his true work as a cinematic auteur — was entirely constrained within one decade and made entirely in glorious silence. His first independent release (and thus the beginning of his filmography from most perspectives) came out in 1920; what is regarded as his last was released in 1929.

And as if that was not complicated enough, we must consider this peculiar (for Hollywood, at least) aspect of Keaton's personality: he was comfortable letting a co-director claim a title card all to himself. Toward the end of the silent era his name is strikingly absent from the films he made, at least from the director, producer, and writer cards; and yet, they were all cut of the same cloth, all blueprinted by Keaton himself. Take one look at Steamboat Bill Jr., with the character's furious struggle against a storm and that famous falling wall, and say with a straight-face that such a film is more the development of Charles Reisner instead of Keaton. Some might claim that is auteur theory run amok, but it is undeniable that Keaton was the mechanic behind all his contraptions, buoyed by his producer to choose most of his own paths and develop his own vision. Writes Roger Ebert: "[Keaton] usually used the same crew, worked with trusted riggers who understood his thinking, conceived his screenplays mostly by himself. ... Like Chaplin and Lloyd, he was a perfectionist who would reshoot sequences until the laughs worked, would take as long as necessary on a single shot, would supervise every element of his films. No filmmaker has ever had a better run of genius than Keaton during that decade."

This independence and artistry is documented in numerous Keaton biographies, and it is reinforced by fact. Keaton, like Chaplin, worked best in the realm of loose scripts, open shoots, and on-screen experimentation. Producer Joseph M. Schenck, Keaton's brother-in-law and the man behind Arbuckle's comedies who helped transition Keaton into a solo career, afforded the filmmaker an independence to develop his unique brand of comedy and filmmaking without much interference. That was the era of the Keaton masterpieces.

Critics and scholars mourn the fall of Keaton for the same reason we mourn the early fall of Orson Welles: they were geniuses crushed by the studio. Schenck and Keaton (against the advice of everyone, including Chaplin) sold Keaton's contract to MGM, where he was able to make two more films — The Cameraman and Spite Marriage — with relative freedom until the intersection of two disastrous developments: the indifference of the studio system's bottom line and the emergence of sound. Although someone like Alfred Hitchcock flourished in defiance of the studio system's often unreasonable constraints (often undercutting his producers and slyly playing a game of give-and-take to get what he wanted), Keaton was not the kind of artist who could hold up under such a boss. He was fired from MGM in 1933, an alcoholic who had lost his wife, and forced into joke-writing and cameos to make his living. Whenever he went behind the camera again in the sound era, the results were not the same.

And yet, could it have been any other way? As we shall see over the course of this month, Keaton is often revered as the most silent of the silent comedians. Kerr writes that Keaton was silent in the way of "stillness of emotion as well as body, a universal stillness that comes of things functioning well, of having achieved occult harmony." For film critic James Agee, the silence was critical in how Keaton sought to create his cinematic world: "He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood."

Maybe if silent films had not fallen out of favor as quickly as they did, and if the studio heads at MGM had been more appreciative of Keaton's creative process, he could have been able to continue making film after film, delighting audiences with his slapstick, his pratfalls, his intricately constructed set-ups, his masterful attention to detail behind the camera. Or maybe he, unlike Chaplin, could never have made the transition to sound, even if he hadn't foregone his independence. (Although certainly there are many who contend Chaplin never fully transitioned into the sound era, either.)

Keaton lived long enough to see a slight resurgence of interest in his films, driven in large part by a 1949 article Agee wrote for Life magazine that trumpeted "Comedy's Golden Era." He died in the mid-1960s without seeing the steps taken by the film criticism and academic communities to place him in the pantheon of great American directors. He did not suffer the egomania that Chaplin did — in Keaton's autobiography, he calls Chaplin the greatest of the silent comedians, whereas Chaplin's autobiography doesn't even mention Keaton — so perhaps he expected to float away into the cinematic limbo of Harold Lloyd or Harry Langdon. Perhaps, too, he could not have imagined that sixty years after Agee he would still be the subject of retrospectives, this time in the fields of film theory, history, and criticism in academic environments, articles and books, and blogs across the Internet.

Taking into consideration that I have already examined the films of Chaplin, my summer series on silent films must involve the works of Keaton. I have heard Keaton's voice, but I cannot hear it in my head now, the way I can call up the purring tones of Chaplin's well-spoken but faded accent. Keaton is silent in all the best ways. Today he is loved, but still not in the same way as other film directors or stars. Unlike the characters he plays on screen, Keaton as a director needs that extra boost from writers willing to lend it to him. In Agee's retrospective on silent comedy, he wrote: "Perhaps because ‘dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than ‘dry’ wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly." The next month on Screen Savour will be an act of not caring mildly, of diving into Keaton's films with the same energy he had when diving into water. Or a window. Or a car. Or between a man's legs. Or over a man's shoulder. Or any number of possible maneuvers that made Keaton unmistakably Keaton.

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Screen Savour's First Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of Screen Savour. Thanks to all my great subscribers, readers, and commenters. I hope you've enjoyed the last year, and here's to another.

If you'd like to catch up on what I've managed to accomplish in the previous 365 days, please feel free to peruse my archives, available on the right-hand side of your screen. There are complete filmographies of Alfred Hitchcock and Charles Chaplin. The decade list allows you to browse all my full-length reviews and essays available on the site, and for easier navigating, let me to say you'll find films from the 1910s through the 1960s (I haven't begun addressing cinema from the 1970s onward yet). You can check out my five-star reviews in the scroll box, or track my progress through the National Film Registry. There are even some top-ten lists available.

What I haven't loaded into easily navigable will soon find their way into the directory. Until then, thanks again for everyone who visits.

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