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Buster Keaton—how did I miss this?

Buster Keaton in The Goat (1921)

My public school education has failed me. I have heard the name Buster Keaton used from time to time and had a vague idea about him being in some old films (wasn’t it either him or Charlie Chaplin that hung off of the clock tower?), but in my last blog post, I mentioned in passing that I didn’t know much about him. This generated an explosion of comments from various members of my family. My mother said that my grandmother “was a great fan of Buster”. My brother wrote to me almost immediately with this reply.

In reference to your latest blog entry, you mention Buster Keaton, and I just wanted to mention that I’m a huge fan.  He grew up in Vaudeville learning that if he had a deadpan expression in the middle of physical comedy, it got a lot more laughs.  So, he would be thrown around on stage but kept a very stoic expression and earned his moniker, the “Great Stone Face”. He was a great physical comedian and director.  On top of that, he was very much an acrobat, pulling off elaborate stunts, all the while maintaining his “stone face”.

His great gift to us all are the movies where he directed and starred in the 1920s, with the General being his masterpiece.  Sadly, it was extremely expensive and had mixed reviews at the time.  Going against the advice of other silent film greats (Chaplin and Harold Lloyd), he signed with MGM, but lost his independence and so his art greatly suffered.  He was usually teamed up with Jimmy Durante who was almost his polar opposite in comedy – very exaggerated expressions hamming up everything. (Durante is basically a cartoon character.)

My advice is to watch everything of his in the 1920s with exception of:

  • The Garage (Fatty Arbuckle short)
  • The last three of the decade (Tide of Empire, Spite Marriage, & Hollywood Revue of 1929)

Limelight (1952) is also good, and he actually does steal the spotlight from Chaplin in his minor role.  (I also highly recommend Chaplin’s films.)

I mentioned this to my wife while we were driving, and she told me all kinds of things about him, like how a lot of silent film stunts involved machines and reflected some of the tension at the time with the Machine Age and the dystopian feeling associated with widespread machinery. I also found out that my oldest son was a huge fan and that he influenced a wide range of people, like Jackie Chan’s acting. So, I am apparently THE person in the family that did not know a lot about him.

Harold Lloyd (not Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin) in Safety Last! (1923)

I looked up more online. His parents were vaudeville actors, and he started acting with them as a young child; he got the name “Buster” after he fell down a flight of steps. It was actually Harold Lloyd that hung from the clock. … It is better to discuss Buster Keaton, of all people, visually. Here is a video on YouTube I found that discusses his influence much better than I could.

I watched some more videos of him, starting with The General (1926). Maybe I am being (not) old-fashioned, but I can’t help thinking about how dangerous a lot of this is (like climbing between cars on a moving train).

Here is The General. It is from a Confederate perspective. As my brother later told me, it was part of the “Lost Cause” sentiment in US cinema at the time. Take a break from everything else and watch Buster:

Believe it or not, this was inspired by a true story. The 1862 “Great Locomotive Chase” in Georgia during the Civil War.

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One response to “Buster Keaton—how did I miss this?”

  1. Artemis (Weir 2017) – Floyd’s Blog

    […] Buster Keaton—a famous actor in silent film comedies. I’ve heard references to him over the years but don’t know much about him. (The ensuing discussion from listing him here resulted in another blog post.) […]

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