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Buster Keaton: Charlie Chaplin
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Although his career lacked the resilience of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton may well have been the most gifted comedian to emerge from the cinema's silent era. And while his skills as a gag writer and physical comic were remarkable, Keaton was one clown whose understanding of the film medium was just as great as his talent for taking a pratfall. Keaton... had a roller-coaster career in which he fell just as far as he rose, though he was fortunate enough to enjoy a comeback in the later years of his life.
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With this delightful film, Buster Keaton rivals Charlie Chaplin for comic poetry and pathos. Keaton's character, known only as Friendless, is a Midwestern boy who is down on his luck. After an abortive attempt to get by in the city, he follows Horace Greeley's advice to "Go West, young man!" As a result, Friendless winds up on a cattle ranch and is about the most unlikely cowboy imaginable (in fact, he never does trade in his porkpie hat for a ten-gallon). Various bits of comic business abound; standouts include the milking scene and a card game in which Friendless accuses a player of cheating. The sharpie tells The Great Stone Face "When you say that -- smile!"
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Buster Keaton is the only creator-star of American silent comedies who equals Chaplin as one of the artistic giants of the cinema. He is perhaps the only silent clown whose reputation is far higher today than it was in the 1920s, when he made his greatest films. Like Chaplin, Keaton came from a theatrical family and served his apprenticeship on stage in the family's vaudeville act. Unlike Chaplin... Keaton's childhood and family life were less troubled, more serene, lacking the darkness of Chaplin's youth that would lead to the later darkness of his films. Keaton's films were more blithely athletic and optimistic, more committed to audacious physical stunts and cinema tricks, far less interested in exploring moral paradoxes and emotional resonances. Keaton's most famous comic trademark, his "great stone face," itself reflects the commitment to a comedy of the surface, but attached to that face was one of the most resiliently able and acrobatic bodies in the history of cinema.
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Over the last couple of years mk2 éditions in France has released the Chaplin features and now some of the Keaton works. Distributors in other territories are using these materials for their own local releases. The Australian company Madman has joined these ranks and four Keaton releases are available at the time of writing with a boxset of the same discs planned for later in the year. Certainly the Keaton features and some of the short films have been available on DVD before. Happily these new releases are lovingly restored and are certainly the copies to purchase.
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In comparison to the comedy of Chaplin, Lloyd and Langdon, Keaton's was the more abstract in alluding to human experience. As Raymond Durgnat has commented, there is something especially archetypal about the Keaton figure who 'acquires all the desperate simplicity of an everyman' [1]. Paradoxically this tendency towards abstraction was heightened by the attention Keaton paid to accuracy in the evocation of time and place. Invariably favouring the long shot, he wanted to show the action, not synthesise it at the editing table. Yet to Keaton the camera was more than a means of recording the comedian's `act'. Keaton was fascinated with and excited by the appearance of things.
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Keaton's personal life had stabilized with his 1940 marriage, and now he was taking life a little easier, abandoning Columbia for the less strenuous field of feature films. Throughout the 1940s Keaton played character roles in both "A" and "B" features. Critics rediscovered Keaton in 1949 and producers now hired him for bigger pictures. He guest-starred in such films as Sunset Boulevard (1950), Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). He appeared in Chaplin's Limelight (1952), recalling the vaudeville of The Playhouse. With the exception of Seeing Stars, a minor publicity film produced in 1922, Limelight was the only time in which the two giants of silent comedy would appear together on film.
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