Buster Keaton (Actor)

Buster Keaton known as the Great Stoneface for his unsmiling expression. (Photo: Fox Photos / Getty Images)

A vaudeville star before the age of ten, Buster Keaton was preparing to make his Broadway debut in 1917 when a meeting with Rosco 'Fatty' Arbuckle changed the course of his life and that of the cinema forever. 'The Great Stone Face' translated marvelously to the screen, somehow surviving the disasters that came hurtling his way, to eventually become along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd one of the most popular comic actors of the Silent Era. Keaton's immediate fascination with the new medium led him to take the camera home, disassembling and reassembling it to more fully understand its operation. If Chaplin's genius was fixing the camera and theatrically framing his Tramp's antics, Keaton created a more cinematic comedy, cleverly using his sense of the American landscape and instinct for interiors to beautifully record his jokes. Arguably the most innovative of the three, he was an early advocate of the moving camera, as well as a pioneer in special effects, and his films viewed today seem far more modern than those of his peers.

By the age of three, Keaton had joined his mother and father in their traveling show, rechristened The Three Keatons, although keeping him working earned the constant scrutiny of the Gerry Society, the turn-of-the-century child labor authorities. Legend has it that the great Harry Houdini, seeing the six-month old laugh delightedly after taking a tremendous header down a flight of stairs, remarked, "That's some buster your baby took." Myth or not, the nickname stuck, and Houdini took credit for coining it throughout his life. (Other sources indicate it was actor George Pardey who made the comment, the Keatons having not yet met Houdini.) One thing is certain, the Keatons struggled prior to Buster coming on board but became a success soon after he started appearing with them. Tossed about by his father in the most physical of acts, he soon developed a knack for falling coupled with his signature impassivity, a theatrical contrivance--very much in contrast with his off-stage demeanor--which he would maintain throughout his life. Keaton worked with his parents nearly 20 years until his father's excessive drinking led to the break-up of the act.

From his first days before Arbuckle's camera, Keaton understood that film demanded a more subtle acting style than had the stage, and in contrast to his fellow performers' extravagance, he was quiet, controlled, unhurried, economical and accurate. When Arbuckle left to make features for Paramount, Keaton took over the company with Joseph Schenck handling the business end of things as he had for Arbuckle. After appearing in the feature "The Saphead" (1920, on loan to Metro Pictures), Keaton embarked on directing two-reelers, helming 18 in all (plus the three-reel "Day Dreams" 1922) by the time of his feature directing debut, "The Three Ages" (1923), a spoof of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" (1916). Perfecting and enriching his craft, Keaton developed recurrent themes in the shorts, which he would transfer to the full-lengths. Starting with "One Week" (1920), he filmed the gag of the do-it-yourself house which comes crashing down before the comedian's somber gaze, and the house as intricate machine, either ingenious or infernal, became a staple of his shtick, walls collapsing while he remains unscathed, conveniently positioned under open windows.

In "The Playhouse" (1921), a tour de force of special effects unrivaled even to this day, Keaton played every part in a theater: the whole orchestra, the actors, all nine blackface minstrels, both halves of a dance act, and every single member of the audience, young and old, male and female. He was a generous collaborator, sharing directing credit with Eddie Cline on most of the shorts and three features, though Cline graciously conceded that Keaton was responsible for 90 percent of the comic inventions in their films. Working in the same atmosphere of experimentation and absolute artistic control that had characterized Arbuckle's operation, his team developed a sort of anarchic creative style, employing (in addition to houses) all manner of boats, herds of cattle, squads of police and armies of women, among other hostile devices, to imperil the Great Stone Face. Unlike Chaplin's warm comedies, Keaton's humor was cool and aloof, characterized by James Agee as "a freezing whisper not of pathos, but of melancholia." His humorless hero, far from exercising the Tramp's self-pity, exhibited a serene capacity for absorbing frustration and withstanding disasters without ever cracking while seeking a measure of serenity in a world where peace is hard to find.

Despite some delightful gags (i.e., Keaton thrown to an affable lion, manicures its claws), "The Three Ages" did not represent a significant advance over the shorts, but "Our Hospitality" (also 1923), a beautiful period piece, revealed for the first time the artist's love for trains while clearly demonstrating how his work stood apart from the conventions of the period. There was no speeded-up action, which he felt spoiled the timing of the gags, and none of the wild mugging that passed for comic acting of the day. He avoided studio sets, preferring natural locations, kept titles to a minimum and used close-ups sparingly, instead favoring the long-shot, especially as concrete proof that the stunts were real and not some cinematic hocus-pocus. He followed quickly with "Sherlock, Jr." and "The Navigator" (both 1924), assuring his place in film history. More than 60 years before Woody Allen would appropriate the gag by having a movie character step off the screen into life for "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985), "Sherlock, Jr." involved a projectionist stepping into and out of the movies he shows upon the screen, becoming subject to the plastic worlds of space and time that Keaton so deftly manipulated in all of his films.

A showcase of clever camerawork, "Sherlock Jr." featured a famous montage sequence which switches him rapidly from a garden to a busy street, to a cliff-edge, to a jungle full of lions, and so on--all without any apparent cuts in his own movements. Keaton remarked, "Every cameraman in the business went to see that picture more than once, trying to figure out how we did some of that." The virtuoso stunts were no less masterful, and Keaton, who did all his own stunts in the film, managed to break his neck in one fall but continued working, discovering the fracture ten years later. For "The Navigator" (co-directed by future Oscar-winning actor Donald Crisp), he provided himself with the biggest prop he could lay his hands on (an ocean liner) and drew from his lifelong joy in creating appealingly crazy mechanical gadgetry. Though his next three films ("Seven Chances" and "Go West" both 1925, and "Battling Butler" 1926) were not up to the standards set by his first features, "Battling Butler" actually out-grossed "The Navigator", and "Seven Chances" boasted time-lapse photography of a puppy growing to become a huge dog, as well as a scene in which Keaton entered a car and promptly exited after the background dissolved to a new location, a bit of movie shorthand greatly appreciated by his audience.

Returning to his love of trains gave Keaton the greatest prop of all for his masterpiece, "The General" (1926). Uncompromising as ever, he refused to use a model for the film's climax, shooting instead (at the unheard of cost of $42,000 for the single take) a real train crashing through a burning bridge, the frame including men on horseback moving on the river bank as proof it was no trick of the camera. Keaton mined history books obtaining " . . . the authenticity and the unassumingly correct composition of a Matthew Brady Civil War photograph", but his streamlined narrative with gags designed to further dramatic action only did not do well at the box office, perhaps because his audience preferred the fancy of his previous work. Deciding to play it safe, he modeled the disappointing "College" (1927) after Lloyd's successful "The Freshman" (1925) but returned to form with the brilliant "Steamboat Bill Jr." (1928), choreographing its phantasmagoric cyclone sequence as if it were ballet. Though he spun, slid, tumbled and eventually gained flight while apparently solid buildings collapsed and vanished magically, the public failed to appreciate his artistry, and the film bombed commercially.

Keaton's undoing came at the hands of his brother-in-law Joseph Schenck who persuaded him to abandon his own studio and join MGM. Chaplin and Lloyd both urged him not to give up his independence, but family pressure (particularly a spendthrift wife) led him to accept $3000 a week for the new arrangement. The studio insisted on completed, plot-heavy scripts in advance, nixing his proven working method of developing a narrative through improvisation, and it wasn't long before he was drinking heavily. Keaton battled for every gag on "The Cameraman" (1928), a film comparable to his pre-MGM features, and made two more comedies that were hits for MGM, his final silent (and by general agreement the last authentic Keaton film), Spite Marriage" (1929), and the talkie "Free and Easy" (1930), before mediocrity set in. By 1933 both studio and wife had dropped him as a hopeless alcoholic. Within a couple years, he was able to control his drinking and make two-reelers for Poverty Row's Educational until its demise in 1937, but after his final directing projects (three single-reelers for MGM in 1938 and 10 two-reelers for Columbia Pictures), the only work he could consistently obtain (besides the occasional bit part) was as a mostly uncredited gagman.

Agee's Life magazine essay ("Comedy's Greatest Era") of September 5, 1949 did much to revive interest in the forgotten Keaton. After a memorable cameo as one of Gloria Swanson's bridge four in "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), he acted for the first time with Chaplin in the latter's "Limelight" (1952) and was also working frequently in the new medium of television, often demonstrating the fine art of pie-throwing, though that brand of slapstick had not been a specialty during his heyday. The discovery by actor James Mason, owner of Keaton's former villa, in 1955 of a treasure trove of prints for all his silent features and many of the shorts guaranteed that future generations would know the genius of the 'Great Stone Face', and money received for "The Buster Keaton Story" (1957), starring Donald O'Connor, finally ended his perpetual poverty. Two years later, he garnered an honorary Academy Award for "his unique talents which brought immortal comedies to the screen". Happily married to his third wife Eleanor Norris, he lived modestly and worked steadily, earning nearly as much money in the last decade of his life as during his time at the top.

Keaton was pragmatic about his career, having known the ups and downs of show business since childhood. Although temporarily crushed by the impersonal studio system and a first wife only in it for the money, he rose from the depths, scratching by as a trouble-shooter who could come in and find unique solutions to plot problems. Keaton never lost his creativity, only his creative control, and the real loser was a public denied the kind of films he would have made had anyone allowed him to continue. Appearing at the Venice Film Festival of 1965 to a tumultuous reception climaxed Keaton's latter-day fame but also prompted the delighted and touched artist to say afterwards, "Sure it's great--but it's all thirty years too late." Keaton died shortly thereafter but lives on in his films, his art and life splendidly taken up by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill in their two-part TV documentary, "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow" (PBS, 1987), and addressed again in "Buster Keaton: Genius in Slapshoes" (A&E, 1995).