Buster Keaton

Comedian

  • Born: October 4, 1895
  • Birthplace: Piqua, Kansas
  • Died: February 1, 1966
  • Place of death: Woodland Hills, California

American filmmaker and actor

Keaton was a visionary filmmaker whose best work has risen in critical estimation to the point where he is now accepted as Charles Chaplin’s equal in terms of originality, comic style, and a representation of American culture that has a whimsical, sometimes surreal beauty akin to a lovely dream.

Area of achievement Film

Early Life

Buster Keaton was literally born into the world of entertainment. His parents, Joe and Myra, were touring with a traveling medicine show owned by Myra’s father when Joseph Frank Keaton was born in a small town in Kansas in 1895. Myra was billed as “America’s first lady saxophonist,” while Joe specialized in acrobatic stunts that included the young Keaton almost from infancy. According to family legend, Keaton was given his name by Harry Houdini, who exclaimed, using trade jargon, “That’s some buster your baby took” when young Keaton was thrown, characteristically unhurt, from the stage. Subsequent scholarship suggests that Joe Keaton spread the story as a part of his inventive campaign to publicize The Three Keatons.

The young Keaton was able to learn many of the skills that were featured in his films while touring with his family on the vaudeville circuit, skills including mimicry, gymnastic agility, restrained composure amid chaotic motion, and resilience under physical duress, as well as a capacity for improvisation. By 1902, Keaton was already the center of many routines, and he had begun to take small parts in the melodramas that often accompanied the Keatons’ shows.

In 1917, when the Keatons ended their family act, Buster traveled to New York to find work in a Broadway revue where he met Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and began to appear in the short films that Arbuckle directed for Joseph Schenck’s Comique Film Corporation. With Arbuckle, Keaton was able to continue the collaborative approach that he had honed with his family, and by 1918, he had appeared in a dozen films and become Arbuckle’s assistant director. He was drafted into the armed forces in 1918, went on a short tour in France and entertained the troops, and returned to Hollywood in 1919. Upon his return Schenck offered him the opportunity to make short films, purchasing Charles Chaplin’s Mutual Studio to give Keaton full control of production.

Life’s Work

Keaton’s first featured role was in The Saphead (1920), a comedy based on the Broadway play The Henrietta. While preparing for the part, he directed his first short film, The High Sign (1921), and made another seventeen two-reel films before Schenck offered him a chance to direct, star in, and edit a full-length feature. That film, The Three Ages (1923), marked the beginning of a relatively brief but extraordinary creative run. Schenck was primarily a producer, and he recognized Keaton’s nascent talents as an inventor of singular comic sequences. The Three Ages was written by a team of three, including Clyde Bruckman, who became Keaton’s writing partner through the 1920’s, but Schenck gave Keaton complete control over the narrative structure of his films, the gags that (according to Bruckman) he thought up, the stunts he devised (and which only he could perform), and the final editing, which he did himself.

The Three Ages provided a comfortable transition from shorts by linking three separate stories. Our Hospitality, which was released the same year, mixed amusing moments, a water rescue displaying Keaton’s athletic skills at their peak, and a story that depended on a historical recollection of an older, rural America. With Sherlock, Jr. (1924), Keaton moved into totally new territory, as the film revealed his fundamental understanding of film form and displayed his inventive wit in extended comic sequences that built beyond the premise of a simple humorous idea. Just as Chaplin had developed a comic personae that became one of the most identifiable icons of the twentieth century, Keaton introduced in Sherlock, Jr., the essential character that he was to play in one version or another to the close of the silent era. He had already begun to use the flat hat that became one of his trademarks, and he had drawn from his vaudeville experiences the apparently composed visage that makes him seem unruffled amid turmoil.

In Sherlock, Jr., Keaton appears as a young man employed as a projectionist-janitor in a movie theater whose real ambition is to be a master detective in the mode of the great Sherlock Holmes. The disparity between his desires and his prospects is at the core of comic contrast. In a temporary state of dejection, he falls asleep in the projection booth. It is at this point the film advances beyond anything that the cinema had yet exhibited.

In an astonishing sequence, Keaton’s projectionist, while still apparently asleep, moves out of his character’s body in a deft demonstration of the technical effects possible even in 1924, and is lured into the film he has been projecting, a parallel story to his own situation but on a much higher economic level. The allure of the life depicted on the screen and the temptation to literally become a part of the “reality” occurring there is conveyed superbly, as Keaton leaps into the action, is thrown out, and then returns again to become a part of the film. Then, to indicate the full range of the time-space continuum that film can inhabit, he is continually compelled to readjust his bearings as the film shifts locations just as he orients himself. This sequence remains powerful even for audiences in the twenty-first century. Through the remainder of the film, Keaton as the “crime-crushing-criminologist” Sherlock, Jr., is involved in the kind of rapid-fire stunts that delighted audiences with their visual audacity. Among the films Keaton is known for, Sherlock, Jr., is a particular high point, but he matched that standard several more times.

The Navigator (1924) took Keaton’s fascination with machinery to another level. He had already used automobiles and railroad cars in motion to put his character into apparent peril, and in The Navigator he used an entire ocean liner as a vast set with which to explore and experiment. The General (1926) presented a vision of the Civil War that rivals D. W. Griffith’s in the notorious The Birth of a Nation (1915), while following the heroic exploits of a modest, misunderstood, and intrepid locomotive engineer. The spectacular bridge collapse was one of the most expensive takes in film to that time, the climactic battle an unusual blend of comic and sober moments, and both sides given a sympathetic and understanding treatment. Nonetheless, the film was not as profitable as his previous efforts, which caused Schenck to begin to have doubts about Keaton’s methods of production. College (1927) was partially influenced by Lloyd’s successful The Freshman (1925) and included in the credits the revealing listing of Harry Brand as production supervisor. Brand was also acknowledged for Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and Schenck then transferred Keaton to MGM from United Artists, where he made The Cameraman (1928), the last film that belonged with his other works of the silent era.

The remainder of his life was, sadly, a long decline, as he attempted to recapture the magic that seemed an element of his being in the 1920’s. His sound films for MGM from 1929 to 1933 were unsuccessful, the educational shorts he made from 1934 to 1937 only of historical interest, and the short films he made for Columbia from 1937 to 1941 similarly unremarkable. His appearances in other sound features ranged from self-parody to bitter homage (Sunset Boulevard, 1950) to bizarre incongruity (Beach Blanket Bingo, 1965). One of the last films he appeared in, a twenty-three-minute adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s script (Film, 1965) seemed appropriate as a blend of fascinating possibility not fully realized, a summary of his life following his signature work of the silent era. Keaton died in 1966 in Woodland Hills, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.

Significance

Although Chaplin was regarded as the premier comic film master when the silent era ended in 1927, Keaton’s work is accepted as equal to that of Chaplin in terms of originality, comic style, and a representation of American culture that has a whimsical, sometimes surreal beauty akin to a lovely dream. He was a visionary creator whose films depict a version of an earlier, idealized America that resonates as a fond recollection of what many believe to have been a more innocent time. The basic character he conceived with small variations for his best films appealed to audiences in the 1920’s and continued to delight film viewers in the twenty-first century.

Keaton was a classic underdog, surrounded by bigger, more sophisticated rivals, his persistence, good nature, indestructibility akin to the figures in animated cartoons, and his instinct to assist others in trouble, was and still is immensely congenial. Combined with an exceptional athletic ability that included the agility, speed, balance, and flexibility of a champion soccer player or gymnast, Keaton’s feats are still startling, and they demonstrate how effective visual comedy can be without the assistance of the special effects that most contemporary films utilize. Particularly for an audience that is unfamiliar with older, silent, black-and-white film, Keaton’s best work is like a revelation.

Bibliography

Benayoun, Robert. The Look of Buster Keaton. Translated and edited by Randall Conrad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. A lavishly illustrated volume in the form of a visual encyclopedia that also contains provocative and incisive comments on Keaton’s films.

Dardis, Tom. Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down. New York: Limelight, 1988. Makes good use of interviews with Keaton’s contemporaries, and provides a reliable filmography.

Knopf, Robert. The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. A good blend of film scholarship and accessible information. Reliable and sensible.

Meade, Marion. Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase. New York: Harper, 1995. An informative examination of the legends that developed around Keaton’s life, offering as accurate a version of Keaton’s life as can be assembled.

Sweeney, Kevin, ed. Buster Keaton: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. A collection ranging from the beginning of Keaton’s career to his work in the 1960’s. Includes a useful chronology and a basic filmography.

1901-1940: August, 1912: Sennett Defines Slapstick Comedy; June 26, 1925: Chaplin Produces His Masterpiece The Gold Rush; December, 1926: Keaton’s The General Is Released.