Happy 123rd birthday to Buster Keaton.
One evening when I was in college I plunked myself down in a stiff lecture-hall seat for “Wednesday Night at the Movies,” which is what we called the American film studies class taught by Andrew Sarris, the film critic for the Village Voice. Sarris was a world-class windbag—his lectures were often longer than the films that followed them—but he knew his stuff cold, and I saw many cinema classics for the first time thanks to his class. Sarris’ topic on this particular night was Buster Keaton, and the chosen feature was “Steamboat Bill, Jr.”
I didn’t know it, but there was a Keaton revival mushrooming at the time. The Great Stone Face’s rightful place in cinema history had been obscured by the enormous shadow of Charlie Chaplin for decades, and many of his films were thought to have been lost forever. In a weird circumstance that could have come right out of “Sherlock Jr.,” Keaton’s homage to sleuthery, his old Hollywood mansion had been purchased by the actor James Mason, and Mason had discovered a stash of flawless prints of many of Keaton’s films in a hidden compartment in the house. Raymond Rohauer signed a distribution deal with Keaton, and it was one of his prints that Sarris was screening that night.
Most film professors would have opted to show Buster’s much-honored masterpiece, “The General,” but I owe Sarris one: “Steamboat Bill Jr.” was, for me, the perfect introduction to Keaton.
First, it’s propelled by one of Keaton’s most charming story lines—an effete man-child struggles to gain the love of rugged father by helping him save his decrepit steamboat business.
Second, it’s set in Keaton’s favorite milieu—the great outdoors, where the laws of physics (especially gravity and momentum) and the natural cycle of wind, rain, and fire rule but where steady, resolute men can harness those forces to do amazing things.
Third, it’s a silent film, so outside of the rare, terse titles (Keaton’s films had the fewest, shortest titles of the silent era) the film is a relentless visual feast, a cavalcade of pure-cinema moments that deliver everything from subtle character revelations to perfectly executed sight gags to jaw-dropping, what-did-I-just-see impossibilities. You could make a strong case that Buster Keaton was the greatest stunt man in the history of film, and some of his greatest physical feats and gymnastic pratfalls are immortalized within the frames of “Steamboat Bill Jr.”
Within a few months, the Elgin Theater in the Village hosted a major Keaton retrospective, and I was there every night. I remember sitting at one showing behind a street performer I had seen in my neighborhood named Philippe Petit, who two years later would become famous for his high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center—exactly the kind of person who would appreciate Buster Keaton and who would have been appreciated by him.
When Buster Keaton entered his formative years, he was already a seasoned, professional clown. From the age of three, his miniature Irishman character was a key part of his parents’ highly successful vaudeville act, which consisted mainly of Keaton’s father throwing him all over the theater in a cyclone of familial violence. Buster (whose nickname was bestowed on him by family friend Harry Houdini) discovered that he got bigger laughs when he froze his little face into a mask of adult-level seriousness and endured his treatment silently. He was purely visual comedian from the very beginning.
Buster left the family act when he turned 22 in 1917. He signed a lucrative contract to be a part of a major Broadway show, but before rehearsals began he ran into Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, an acquaintance from vaudeville, on the street in New York City. Arbuckle had gone into the movie business, and he invited Keaton to visit his New Jersey film studio the next day. Keaton ended up an extra, and stole the film.
Before he left that day, Buster had the cameraman open the camera and explain how it worked. Within a week, Keaton had gotten out of his theater contract and signed with Arbuckle at one sixth the salary. Two years later, after starring in a series of shorts, Keaton owned his own studio and was producing highly successful feature films.
Keaton’s films were instantly popular because they were distinctly different. His stoic everyman character made Chaplin’s tramp look manic by comparison, and, unlike Chaplin, Keaton never went for pathos. Buster spurned the easy, cost-effective use of constant cross cuts to achieve visual effects in favor of long, extended, uninterrupted camera sequences. The power of Keaton’s films was that what you saw was actually what happened in front of the camera. But despite his theater background, Keaton never ever thought of film as a way to photograph what would happen on stage. He understood immediately that film was an infinitely better medium for his comic genius than the theater ever was or would be. And so, from the very start, Keaton’s films were films. The best of them—“The General,” “The Navigator,” and “Steamboat Bill Jr.’’—are some of the purest films in the history of that medium, even though they are some of the first.
In his short homage to vaudeville, “The Playhouse,” Keaton plays everyone—the performers, the musicians in the pit orchestra, the audience, even a chimpanzee. The nine members in the minstrel show act? Nine separate Busters, all on screen at once, singing and dancing in unison. The film people in Hollywood returned again and again to see minstrel act in “The Playhouse” and to try to determine how Keaton achieved it. Buster had covered the camera lens with nine strips of tape. One strip was removed and at a pre-arranged signal Buster, placed at the far edge of the stage, started the routine. The film was then rewound back to the starting point, another sliver of the lens was exposed, and Buster performed the act again. The same film was exposed and rewound nine times—and in those days cameras were hand cranked—and no seams are visible in the shot.
Although he worked all his life, Buster Keaton lost control of his films as talking films were introduced and lost a couple of decades to alcoholism. He lived to beat the bottle, marry the love of his life, retire to a modest ranch outside of Los Angeles, to see his own resurrection as a film genius, and to attend film festivals in the U.S. and Europe dedicated to his phenomenal body of work.
(The director Peter Bogdanovich just released a solid documentary, “The Great Buster,” but the best telling of Buster’s life and career remains Kevin Brownlow’s three-part television series from 1987, “A Hard Act To Follow.” All of Keaton’s features and most of his short films are available from Kino Films.)