Much has been made about James Agee’s affectionate judgment of Buster Keaton: “Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies. . . he was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.”
As for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity; surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.”
Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. . . no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. . . I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.”
That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age. Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp — at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. Late in life, Keaton remembered…
…a night away back in 1920 when Charlie and I were drinking beer in my kitchen. He was going on at a great rate about something new called communism which he had just heard about. He said that communism was going to change everything, abolish poverty. The well would help the sick, the rich would help the poor. . . .
I myself have gone through life almost unaware of politics, and I only wish my old friend had done the same. He must know by now that communism, wherever it has been practiced, bears not the slightest resemblance to the benign system he described to me forty years ago.
That sort of ordinary common sense shines through in Buster Keaton movies like The Cameraman. Meanwhile, as communism became a faddish preoccupation of liberals in the 1920s and ’30s, Chaplin’s movies became increasingly politicized and culturally rebellious, culminating in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a subversive serial-killer comedy that Chaplin considered “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career” even as ordinary Americans fled from it in droves, leaving it to flop catastrophically at the box office. Based off a script by Orson Welles and championed by critics like the selfsame James Agee who praised the work of Keaton’s silents, it nevertheless repulsed American theatergoers. The elderly serial killers of Arsenic and Old Lace at least were portrayed as crazy — Chaplin’s sardonic wife-murderer justifies himself by pooh-poohing his comparatively meager killings when set against the much greater casualties of war.
By the end, the guy who had started by wagging a cane and walking funny fancied himself one of the greatest artistes of the age, whereas Keaton judged his own career far more humbly, seeing himself as a mere gag man and entertainer. With feet (and ego) firmly on the ground, he was thus able to see Chaplin’s preening leftism for what it was: “I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do, Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers. Neither of us had time while growing up to study anything but show business.” It’s to Keaton’s credit that he realized this, and wasn’t seduced by the pretty lies being sprinkled throughout Hollywood by commies in those decades.
Keaton saw the core difference between Chaplin’s artistry and his own as a moral one. “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with a bum’s philosophy,” he wrote. “Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman and honest.” During The Cameraman, for instance, we see Buster’s character celebrating America’s favorite pastime, working hard to get ahead, courting his girl in a decent way, and continually acting honorably whenever a moral choice presents itself. By the picture’s conclusion, he’s become more than the butt of jokes, more than a thinly veiled political message, and more than a pouting beggar soliciting other people’s pity. He’s become a hero, by virtue of his actions being grounded in the same basic morality of the country in which he grew up and found fame. This came easy and natural for Keaton, with no guru or faddish ideology necessary — after all, he spent decades entertaining average Americans sitting a few feet away from the stage, and he served honorably with our troops in France during World War I.
If Buster Keaton has a single artistic disciple in modern times, it’s the Hong Kong martial artist Jackie Chan (another guy we’ll be studying in more detail later on in FCML). Like the elder comedian, Chan found himself entertaining on the stage from a young age as an acrobat, and later parlayed the skills gained in that endeavor into the most inventive and astounding physical comedy of his era. Eschewing the herd of stars attempting to ape Bruce Lee, he chose instead to embrace the style of the American silent comedians of old, particularly Keaton. It’s a perfect example of someone in our day taking an art form declared dead for fifty years and finding a way to make it relevant again.
It’s no mistake that, like Keaton before him, Jackie Chan became one of the most popular movie stars of his time. Like James Agee wrote those many years ago, we haven’t lost or outgrown our craving for “laughter as violent and steady and deafening as standing under a waterfall,” the kind that only true physical comedy induces. Even in this age of special effects and CGI fight scenes, when geniuses like Jackie Chan bring it alive again au naturel, audiences respond.
I think it’s a tragedy that Buster Keaton died of cancer at the age of seventy in 1966, and hence didn’t live long enough to view movies like Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985). If he did, he would have seen in Jackie Chan a true kindred spirit rekindling fires that seemingly died out for good with The Cameraman in 1928. When asked about his influences, Chan routinely puts Keaton at the top of the list, going so far as to say, “I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster.”
If The Great Stone Face were still with us, even he would have to crack a smile upon hearing that.
This concludes our look at silent comedy great Buster Keaton and his final masterpiece, The Cameraman (1928).
Previous posts in the series “Buster Keaton and The Cameraman“
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
As we learned in Part 1 of this series, we’re lucky in that over just the past few decades enough film has been discovered in various places to piece together a pretty fine quality copy of The Cameraman for DVD. Thus here in 2010 we are privy to a far better presentation of the picture than any previous generation save for the one that saw it fresh at the theater in 1928.
There are various versions floating around on the internet (if you don’t mind the terrible image, for instance, you can watch the entire movie on YouTube if you wish), but your best option is to either buy or rent the TCM Buster Keaton Collection. (here’s the same set for rent at Netflix — choose Disc 1 to watch The Cameraman.)
And remember what I said when we were discussing D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms — for the best silent movie experience, try watching it completely silent without the cheesy organ tracks that the DVDs include, and if your player/computer permits it try slowing down the playback by 5-10% to eliminate the herky-jerky too-fast motion that plagues so many films of the era. The movies come across much better when you do.
Review of TCM’s Buster Keaton Collection DVD set: Here’s a nice review of the TCM DVD set containing The Cameraman, with some background on the making of the film, the recovery of the best version, et cetera.
Jackie Chan’s homage to Buster Keaton: From his classic movie Project A, a series of gags on a bicycle that instantly beg comparison to the great physicality and boffo laughs of The Great Stone Face.
[youtube -Fl43rq3Zqw — click here to watch in full-screen]
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.