The Art Of Buster Keaton
By: Ronald Falzone |
Saturday January 22, 2005 |
| The battle has been raging for nearly fifty years. Who was the greatest film comedian, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton? The question would have annoyed Chaplin: "I am, of course," he would undoubtedly have sniffed. |
| For Keaton, the question was perplexing. Beginning with the reemergence of his work in the late 50's and until his death in 1966, Keaton would be uncomfortable with any talk of his being a "genius."
In so many ways this dichotomy also explains the fundamental difference in their work. And, by extension, it also answers the question. Both men and their art were the products of their environment. London slum-bred Chaplin was the son of deranged mother whom he worked hard to entertain. Keaton was the eldest child of a knockabout American vaudeville family whose father would hurl his son across the footlights at any audience member who dared to be unruly while dad was onstage. These respective personae would seep into the work of each man. Chaplin's films are all about Chaplin: The performer in performance. Always trying to please, his narrative lines are frequently broken so that we can marvel at his precise and brilliantly choreographed routines. All other elements are reduced to melodrama and overstatement. Never was this more clear than in A Woman of Paris (1923). The only silent film directed by Chaplin in which he did not perform, it is awash in unearned sentimentality and easy theatrics. Keaton, on the other hand, was something Chaplin never quite became, a first-rate director. Unlike Chaplin's "hey, look at me" approach to story, Keaton's films feature a character fully engaged with his environment. As a director, this meant complex narrative lines matched with a willingness to give dimensions to characters played by actors other than himself. Beyond this, Keaton was one of the great visual stylists of the silent medium. Right from the start, Keaton seemed possessed of an almost preternatural ability to ignore pain. As legend has it, when he was six months old, Keaton took a tumble down a long flight of stairs. Without a whimper, he got back up on his knees and crawled away. The great magician Harry Houdini witnessed this moment and was said to remark, "What a buster!" (theatrical slang for "what a fall"). Oft-repeated, this story is wrong in one respect: Houdini wasn't present. Although he and Joe Keaton would be friends and occasional co-performers, Houdini did not meet the family for another dozen years. The fall, though, was apparently real and the line more likely to have come from some obscure vaudevillian. Still, it is a great story and, like most legends, Keaton's reputation would always rest on experiences restructured to suit the needs of his own mythology. Take another example. While performing in New York in 1917, Keaton was offered the opportunity to observe silent great Fatty Arbuckle shooting his comedy short, The Butcher Boy. An immediate rapport sprang up between the two men. Arbuckle spontaneously invited Keaton to improvise a bit for the movie which he did without hesitation. Again true in all but one respect. Keaton's delightful piece of "improvisation" with a can of molasses and a hat was actually a bit he had long perfected in the family act. Completely true, though, is what happened next. Keaton asked to borrow the camera for the night. With a mechanical aptitude that frequently goes hand in hand with a gift for slapstick, Keaton dismantled the camera and rebuilt it by the next morning. With his "education" in filmmaking now complete, Keaton left vaudeville and began a fruitful partnership with Arbuckle and film mogul Joseph Schenck. Over the next six years, Keaton would marry Schenck's sister-in-law, Natalie Talmadge, form his own production company, and create a series of perfectly constructed short comedies. Drawing on his vaudeville past yet respecting the differences between it and his new medium, Keaton developed a comic vision unique among his contemporaries. Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon and others operated in a world where their characters confronted unscrupulous villains then dealt with the obstacles those bad guys would place in their paths. Certainly villains exist in Keaton's work but they rarely do more than motivate the story. In his short masterpiece, One Week (1920), a newly married couple receives a build-it-yourself prefabricated house. The wife's spurned boyfriend gets his vengeance by changing the numbers on the boxes so that correct assembly will be impossible. And that's the last we see of the bad guy. Keaton was never interested in the villain; he wanted to spend his time on the ramifications of the villainy. One of Keaton's other great lessons from vaudeville is well-displayed in the end of this same short. Keaton understood that a punchline is best employed as a fake, a diversion from the real end of the joke. Keaton and his bride discover that they have built their house on the wrong lot. Forced to move it, they jack the house onto a series of barrels and roll it toward its actual resting place. The move, though, is stymied when the house gets stuck on the train tracks. Desperately trying to push the house off the tracks as a speeding train is bearing down, the couple realize that it is impossible. They jump from the tracks just as the train rushes by...on the set of tracks behind the house. The moment has been filled with comic tension and the release of the joke is perfect. We and the couple relax. Any other director would have been proud of this moment. Keaton, though, then pulls the ace out of his sleeve. A split second after we have let out a breath, another train, now on the right track, barrels through the house. Keaton has topped his own joke. In The Boat (1921), Keaton fully employs for the first time what would become his signature. Although most of his films contain a love interest, his true love is frequently an object: a locomotive in The General, a cow in Go West (1925), a ship in The Navigator (1924), etc. The title character (for it really is a character) in The Boat, is a smart little vessel meant to be the new home for Keaton's family. In keeping with Keaton's own love of mechanics, the boat is a marvel of pragmatic engineering. When it approaches a low bridge a simple tug on the rope slides back the masts so that it can easily glide underneath. What bedevils Keaton is not the make-up of the boat, it is in its response to the less controllable surrounding environment. It pulls down the house when Keaton tries to force it through a too small doorway, it continues to slide underwater when he attempts to launch it (the deadpan look on his face as he sinks with it gives credence to his nickname, "The Great Stone Face"). Most memorably, the environmental enemy rears up in the guise of a storm at sea. Keaton, trapped in the hold of an endlessly revolving boat, lays the groundwork for every similar sequence from Astaire's Royal Wedding (1951) to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Champing at the bit to get into features, Keaton took an oddly cautionary approach when finally took the chance. Three Ages (1923) is less a feature than it is three comedy shorts strung together. Keaton took this route so that he could release each individually if the feature itself did not work. Inspired by D.W. Griffith's 1916 epic, Intolerance, the movie takes the basic Keaton character from the Stone Age to ancient Rome to the then-modern era of jazz and bootleg hooch. Keaton peppers the story with naive yet hilarious special effects (the dinosaur in the first segment is particularly impressive...and funny) and a liberal sprinkling of humorous anachronisms. Although far from one of his best, Three Ages announced his presence in the feature market and set his course for the next ten years. Gaining confidence with each successive feature, Keaton displayed a gift that none of the other comedians cared to emulate. In general, comedy was played against bland backdrops and nondescript exteriors. The other comedians wanted to keep the amount of art direction to a minimum for fear that it might detract the viewers' eyes from their performance. Keaton went in the other direction. Although his formal education amounted to one day in school (barely literate, his various wives would have to read him the scripts), Keaton had a profound love of both the natural world and of history. One or both of these would be threaded through his stories giving them a truthful sense of time and place. This bestows a freshness today that is woefully missing in most other silent comedies. Like his compatriots, Keaton like to work in set-pieces, large scale comic sequences around which the overall story could be built. It is in these set-pieces that his great gifts for environment and history are the most full evolved. Environment gets its most perfect rendering in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Keaton built a complete river town, exact in all its details. What made it an engineering marvel, though, was that it was not built to last; it was built to be destroyed. The film climaxes with Keaton's newfound father being unfairly arrested. As Keaton tries to save him a windstorm whips up. Besieged on his way to the jail, Keaton has to weave and bob his way through every flying object imaginable. He is canted by the wind, pelted by stones, and, in the most dangerous stunt of his career, standing under a building just as it crashes down. He is saved from catastrophe because he happens to be standing in the exact spot where the small second floor window lands. "Exact" is probably too mild a word. Had Keaton been off by three inches in any direction, the six ton facade would have crushed him. The natural environment also sabotages Keaton in Seven Chances (1925). As a bachelor who must be married by 7:00 o'clock that evening if he is to inherit $7,000,000, Keaton becomes the target of every gold digger in town. Chased down the street by literally thousands of brides, Keaton created one of his most spectacular and spectacularly funny set-pieces. What he didn't have was a topper, a wow ending. After a disastrous preview, he went back into production and found what he needed. At the height of the chase, Keaton veers into a canyon and begins to run downhill. He dislodges a small rock which begins to roll after him. This kicks off another rock and another and another and so on until Keaton is now being chased by as many boulders as he is women. Dodging each with precise timing, eventually his little avalanche catches up with the women and finally forces them to disburse. (It was also during this chase that the extent of Keaton's ability to withstand pain reached its zenith. Running across the tops of train cars, Keaton grabs onto the nozzle of a passing water tower. As the train rushes underneath and past him, the spout lets out a torrent. Keaton is driven to the ground. In the same shot we can see him get up and run off to the horizon line. The stunt made him dizzy and he knocked off for the day but was back at it the next. Ten years later, it was discovered that he had broken his neck when the water pushed him down onto the ties.) Keaton's eye for history was at its best when his stories took place in 19th Century America. In Our Hospitality, he makes dazzling use of narrow-gauge railroad and of the customs of the hill country. His greatest achievement in this arena, though, is most certainly The General. Set during the Civil War and with a visual style based upon the wartime photos of Matthew Brady, The General has a look so precise that for years high school text books used stills from the movie to convey a sense of the period. Some even published these stills with photo credit going to Brady! The General is Keaton's confluence point, the movie in which all the threads of his artistry come together. Based very loosely on an actual incident in the Civil War as reported by William Pittenger in his excessively flattering self-portrait, "The Great Locomotive Chase," The General is the action film as comedy. To do this, Keaton completely changes the point of view of the book. Instead of telling the "heroic" story of the Yankee's theft of a Confederate train, Keaton looks at it from the more sympathetic viewpoint of the train's engineer. It isn't about stealing a train; it's about having one's train stolen. Or, to be more precise, having the love of one's life kidnapped. Keaton divides the narrative into three perfectly conceived set-pieces. In the first, Keaton is the hunter, chasing after the Yankee dogs who have stolen his beloved "General." Once he has caught up with them, the narrative now shifts to the tale of his getting secret information and having to escape with it (a rainstorm is wonderfully used as the bedeviling natural enemy in this section). The third section reverses the first. Keaton is now the prey, a man being chased by an enemy who cannot afford to let him get away. Each of these sections allows its own comic thrust as well as supplementing the overall dramatic tension of the story. Never forgetting that The General is also an action film, Keaton provides his audiences with something no one would have expected in a comedy: A full-blown Civil War battle sequence that is at once harrowing and hilarious. This dichotomy is perfectly captured when the blade of Keaton's obviously broken sword flies out of the handle. The projectile flies through the air and plants in the chest of a Yankee sniper. The sequence also contains one of the most spectacular moments in silent film (as well as the single most expensive shot of the whole silent era). At the height of the battle the train chasing The General attempts to ford an unstable bridge. It collapses out from under the engine and sends it crashing into the river. The engine was real, the bridge built for the shot. Sadly, it is precisely what makes The General a great film that also poisoned it in the eyes of the public. Not used to so much real tension in a comedy as well as so much bloodshed, the audience stayed away in droves. The expensive movie would not make back its initial cost until it was rereleased more than forty years later. Its failure at the time put a major chink in Keaton's independent armor. Although College (1926) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. would follow, it became increasingly harder for Keaton to find the money. Finally, in 1927, partner and brother-in-law Joe Schenck convinced Keaton to give up his company and take a contract offer from MGM. Keaton took his advice and made the biggest mistake of his life. For all its size and vaunted reputation, the MGM of the late twenties was already well on its way to being an assembly line. And, like all assembly lines, individualism is crushed in favor of conformity and adherence to "company policy." Production chief Irving Thalberg was glad to have Keaton but had apparently never seen any of his movies. Although his first film with the studio, The Cameraman (1928), was among his best, Keaton saw his power eroded and his creativity sapped. For reasons known only to Thalberg, the Keaton persona was altered into something that he had detested and therefore avoided throughout his career: The sad clown, the downtrodden character who begs for the audience's sympathy rather than - as Keaton had always done - earn its respect. Keaton's response to this was devastating. His marriage, always a tenuous affair, crashed on the rocks and he sunk quickly into an alcoholic stupor. Within a few short years, the toll was obvious. His later MGM performances show a man out of phase, his timing off and his eyes bloodshot. The lowest blow came when the studio forced him to play the sidekick in a series of comedies with the abrasively vulgar and loud comic Jimmy Durante. Keaton's gifts were so depleted by alcohol at this point that his presence in these films is barely noticeable. If Keaton's story had ended there it would have been a tragic one indeed. Fortunately, it didn't. Although he spent most of the 1930's drowning in a vat of whiskey, Keaton's need for work and an almost inhuman desire to perfect whatever he worked on eventually took precedence over his drinking. In this, he was aided by his third wife, Eleanor. Although nearly thirty years his junior, their 25 years together would prove to be the happiest of Keaton's life. In the late thirties, Keaton became a gag writer, eventually finding his way back onto the MGM lot where his films The General and The Cameraman were being remade as Red Skelton vehicles. Then, after another several years in relative obscurity, Keaton was rediscovered. Beginning with a short-lived television show and a consistent career making television commercials (which he loved doing), the Keaton name began to reemerge. In 1957, Keaton acted as technical adviser (although with no real input) on The Buster Keaton Story with Donald O'Connor. Although profoundly mediocre as a film, it did bring back memories of he great comic as well as providing Keaton with enough income to live out the rest of his life in the relative comfort of his much-beloved farm. The signal moment in his rebirth, though, came with a chance meeting with art house proprietor Raymond Rohauer. Although their business relationship would be fraught with problems until Keaton's death, it was Rohauer who was responsible getting Keaton's films back into theaters and shown in retrospectives at major international film festivals. Soon, he was back to performing in features and working with artists as diverse as Richard Lester and Samuel Beckett. When Charlie Chaplin died in 1977, he did so in a villa in Vevey, Switzerland. For Keaton, it was on his chicken farm in Southern California. In both cases, the media made note of their career achievements, their life stories, and, yes, the similarities and differences between them. The real tale of their respective deaths, though, can be seen in the way each faced it in much the same way they had faced their lives. Chaplin surrounded by the wealth and the large family that he had sired, remembering with sentimental nostalgia a past when he had been the biggest thing on the planet. Keaton's death, like his life, was humble. He spent the afternoon playing bridge, undoubtedly bemused by the reaction to his past films and pleased for the nice reviews he was getting for his role in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He then went off to sleep and quietly expired. Both different. Both the same as they had always been. Any opportunity to watch Keaton is a joy to be treasured so one must look with great pleasure at the work that Kino Video has been doing over the past few years. They have accumulated enough of the rarely seen Keaton-Arbuckle films to fill up two separate DVDs. Even more impressive, they have released "The Art of Buster Keaton," a ten disc collection of his independent features as well as a solid selection of his shorts. All come with the best available transfers (allowing for the imperfect way many of the negatives had been stored over the years) and featuring a bonus disc of priceless material from home movies, television appearances (including one of his only dramatic performances), shorts and commercials. If ever a box set were a compulsory addition to a home library, "The Art of Buster Keaton" is it. |
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