The Silent Type: Buster Keaton

Each month, Visual Film Diary profiles the lives of five actors, directors, producers, and/or major players in film history to chronicle foremost contributions to cinema. This month we will be profiling five men who rose to legendary status during the silent film period and helped to define key aspects of performance, cinematic technique, and modern celebrity that are still celebrated today. Join us for the first installment of our July theme, The Silent Type.

No one, except Charlie Chaplin, can rival the comedic genius of silent film comic Buster Keaton. In his six decade-long career, beginning with his introduction to physical comedy in his parents' vaudeville act and ending with his rediscovery in the 1960s by European film scholars, Keaton defined a kind of slapstick humor that remains unparalleled today. While his contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd (both of whom we will be profiling this season) were giants of physical comedy in their own right, not even they could match the level of Keaton's intensity and dedication to performing his own stunts (stuntmen, Keaton claimed, "don't get laughs"). Throughout his career Keaton defied modern conceptions of what was possible to put in front of a camera and, it sometimes seemed, the laws of physics. His sophistication as a performer, due to his rigorous training in stunts from the age of three, is what saved his life time and time again, and what made him a star. It would be useless to talk about main players in silent films without first profiling this giant of the era- a man whose star was built on hard work, crumbled due to pressure from alcoholism and the iron grip of the Studio System, and was later put together with help from a new generation of fans.

Born on October 4th, 1895 to traveling vaudeville performers at their stop in Piqua, Kansas, Joseph Frank Keaton was immediately immersed in the culture of his performer parents. As soon as he was able to walk he was introduced as a fellow vaudevillian in his parents' show; he and his father, Joe "Hallie" Keaton, would perform stunts that usually involved the older Joseph Keaton throwing his young son around the stage, while his mother, Myra Keaton, played the saxophone. These performances, though never actually harming Keaton, looked so brutal that on several occasions his parents were brought into police stations on counts of child abuse. Keaton himself would frequently have to bail his parents out, not with money but by showing the officers his clear, unbruised skin. Keaton later said of this period that he had so much fun performing the stunts, which gradually increased in difficulty as he developed a proper technique for taking falls, that he would often openly laugh. Noticing that the audience didn't laugh as much when he appeared happy, he developed his trademark "stone face" demeanor- steely, unsmiling, wide-eyed, and dour.

Keaton himself often retold the story of his nickname's birth, in which, as a six-month old child, he fell down a flight of stairs and came out unscathed, prompting his family friend Harry Houdini to exclaim, "What a buster!" While it's probably unlikely that this event occurred, it is a fact that Houdini was close with Joe Keaton, even doing a traveling act with him that involved physical comedy and selling phony medicines after the show.

The family continued on the vaudeville circuit until the late 1910s, when Keaton, now a young man, found himself in the army stationed in France. After a year he was released, his division having been deployed only six months before the end of the war, and made his way to New York City, where he met and befriended the popular (and later, infamous) film actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Arbuckle encouraged Keaton to get into motion pictures, despite Joe Keaton's dislike for them. Keaton was curious; he borrowed a camera from Arbuckle's studio set, brought it to his hotel room, dismantled it, reassembled it, and returned it. He decided, now knowing the literal ins-and-outs of the motion picture process, that he was in.

Most of Keaton's films were produced in the 1920s, though for several decades in the mid-twentieth century it was thought that the bulk of these pictures were lost (many were rediscovered by the actor James Mason when he bought Keaton's old house and discovered film rolls; others were quietly kept by MGM). Beginning his film career in comedic shorts with Arbuckle and others, Keaton transitioned to full-length features once he became the head of Charlie Chaplin's old studio unit, renamed Buster Keaton Comedies. Although only appearing once beside Chaplin, in 1952's Limelight, Keaton and Chaplin both enjoyed an enduring mutual respect. In a 1960 interview, Keaton said, "I classify Chaplin as the greatest motion picture comedian of all time," affirming his belief that "no one" has ever reached the stature of Chaplin as a comedy giant.

In the 1920s, Keaton made some of his most famous full-length features, often churning out more than one great film in a year; these films include Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The Cameraman (1928), and The General (1926), which is widely regarded as Keaton's masterpiece. However, at the time of its release, the film went over-budget and was panned by critics, leading his distributer, United Artists, to revoke Keaton's full control over his work. This was the first strike against Keaton's creative genius, a move that would later be completed when, fearing a financial collapse, he signed with MGM, a move that he famously called "the worst decision of my life."

Although Buster Keaton was a wildly popular comedic presence in the 1920s, and, by all accounts, making a great deal of money, his financial troubles largely stemmed from his irresponsible personal spending habits coupled with his wife's. Keaton's first wife, actress Natalie Talmadge, was entirely dependent on Keaton's income, using nearly 1/3 of his fortune to purchase clothing alone. In 1926, Keaton shelled out $300,000 (an amount roughly equivalent to $4 million in contemporary currency) to build a mansion in Beverly Hills. This was a very bad decision for Keaton's finances, and he later admitted that "I took a lot of pratfalls to build that dump." The home would later be purchased by actors James Mason and Cary Grant.

Facing financial difficulty, Keaton effectively sold his soul to MGM in 1928. The major studio immediately cut off Keaton's control of his films, and demanded that he use stuntmen to perform the more dangerous of his physical comedy routines. Between the lack of creative control over his films and his personal troubles with his family, Keaton was severely depressed and lapsed into a deep alcoholism. During the late 1920s and early 1930s his alcoholism became so problematic that he was institutionalized (and found himself able to slip out of a straightjacket using his physical prowess).

Finally, after an episode in 1933 during which a blackout drunk Keaton woke up married to his nurse (a woman who didn't even know his first name), he hit rock bottom. He stayed married to this woman, Mae Scriven, for two more years until she caught him in bed with a socialite and threw him out. It wasn't until 1940 that Keaton was able to pull himself back together; his marriage to his third and final wife, Eleanor Norris, marked the end of his binge-drinking days and led to a reform of his character. Norris, 23 years his junior, was a skilled performer who went on to star in live double acts with Keaton during the 40s and 50s. Basically every source agrees that Norris should be credited with saving Buster Keaton's life by helping him quit drinking and working with him to salvage the remaining scraps of his career.

From 1940 on, Keaton left the studio system for good, choosing to lend his talents to feature films, in which he was often consulted for comedy direction, as well as to television appearances. Though basically serving in a non-speaking role, Keaton famously appeared in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) as one of Norma Desmond's fellow washed-up silent film stars. Other film appearances during this later period of Keaton's life were mainly cameos, such as in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), which was released after his death from lung cancer the same year at the age of 70.

In my opinion, the fact that Keaton lived until 70 is a fairly incredible feat. Having borne witness to many of his famous stunts, it seems as though one of the many inevitable injuries attained in stunt-work would have been enough to shave a few years off of the old boy's life. Yet, that was the magic of Keaton, and what set him apart from his contemporaries like Chaplin and Lloyd. While Chaplin would keep the audience members on the edge of their seats by just barely surviving a scrape with death, Keaton took the plunge every time. He fell off of buildings and waterfalls and out of moving vehicles and windows, and he actually did it. Once, during the scene in Sherlock Jr. in which a torrent of water falls on him from a water tower, Keaton actually broke his neck and didn't realize for years. The most famous scene in Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which the facade of a house falls onto Keaton and he escapes unscathed because of his position under an open window, was shot in one take because Keaton refused to practice it, claiming that he didn't want to waste a full wall for something he was sure he could do once anyway. Keaton once said of his tricks, "The secret is landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment."

Buster Keaton's films fell into relative obscurity in the years leading up to his death. It was only in the later years of his life that film scholars worldwide began to rediscover and appreciate Keaton's work- something that surprised him greatly. Orson Welles called The General "cinema's highest achievement in comedy- perhaps the greatest film ever made." Today he is recognized as one of the greatest film performers and directors in cinematic history, and for good reason. Just take a look at any one of the video compilations of Keaton's comedy routines online, or even watch his full-length films, several of which are available for free on Youtube, and you'll see why Keaton's contributions to comedy- and to movies- are so enduring.

Join us next week as we profile a very different star of the silent screen- a man whose celebrity status was unmatched, and whose untimely death resulted in one of the first episodes of celebrity-induced mass hysteria in the United States.

From Sherlock, Jr.

That eye roll...

Keaton said of Billy Wilder's 1959 drag comedy Some Like It Hot: "I liked the picture very, very much... it was awful hard to do what [Wilder] did in that picture... because the minute a man puts on women's clothes you've got a farce comedy on your hands. It's awful hard to tell a legitimate story, and he darned near did with that picture."