On a dark night, in a nameless town, a nameless man decides to end his life. He sees a pair of headlights approaching. Why not make it quick, step out in front of a car? He walks out into the road and goes into a half crouch, with hands on his knees and eyes squeezed tight like someone who can feel a sneeze coming on. The two headlights hurtle toward him and go on hurtling, passing harmlessly by on either side: two motorcycles. The man opens his eyes, straightens up, and walks off as if nothing had happened. That is his problem: he wants something to happen, but nothing keeps on happening, in a big way.
The scene comes from “Hard Luck,” a two-reel Buster Keaton movie made in 1921. The movie lasts twenty-two minutes, and was lost for more than sixty years. The final scene is still missing. The reconstructed film proved to be unreconstructed Keaton—a sequence of sight gags that would have little or no logical connection were it not for the man at the center of them. Whether he is suffering the impact of the gags or willing them into being is hard to tell, but they flock toward him as though his very nature were a kind of magnetic north. “Hard Luck” is dumbly plotted, cheaply shot, and drizzling with age; there is no reason it should do anything except stutter along. And yet it flows. Again and again, the hero tries to do away with himself—by swallowing a bottle of poison that turns out to be boot, leg hooch, by lying in front of a tram that never reaches him—with a will that verges on the heroic. He courts death as if his life depended on it. Still, there is no despair on his face, not a whiff of melodrama. He seems to favor the minor-league emotions: determination, embarrassment, a gentle breeze of ennui. So what is it with this guy? Where does he fit in?
Nearing the millennium, we like to think that black comedy is our specialty, our big number—that, after all that’s happened, we’ve earned it. But Buster Keaton was there before us. If you’re looking for irony and fatigue, high speed and hard luck, the strong toil of grace, then Keaton is your man.
Joseph Frank Keaton was born on J October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas. This year, therefore, we are celebrating two important anniversaries: Keaton was born a hundred years ago, and so was cinema. The more one thinks about this coincidence, the happier it seems. It has been agreed, for the sake of argument, that the images projected by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 signalled the fact that pictures were now officially in motion. Since then, it’s been a blast. No other medium has accelerated with such outrageous brio from a crude new technology to a fully expressive art form; on the other hand, many movie lovers fear that it may have stalled along the way and is currently heading with equal haste in the opposite direction.
In a sense, it’s all Buster Keaton’s fault. He was just too good, in too many ways, too soon. We call his films comedies, but the more closely you inspect them the more convincingly he seems to have invaded and mastered other genres. No action thriller of the last, blood-streaked decade has matched the kinetic violence at the end of “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” in which a storm pulls Keaton through one random catastrophe after another. Anyone who thinks that the movie-within-a-movie is a recent conceit, the province of “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and “Last Action Hero,” should check out “Sherlock Jr.,” a film in which Keaton dreams himself into another film: he strolls up the aisle of the theatre, hops into the action, and fights to keep up with its breakneck changes of scene. As for “The General,” where do you start? It’s a film about a train, but it’s also a spirited romance, peppered with bickering and longing, and its evocation of the Civil War period has never been surpassed. Keaton’s transformation from a hapless Ashley Wilkes type into a manly serial kisser—a Rhett without the bombast—is not something that he needs to sell us. We just believe it. He is the first action hero; to be precise, he is a small, pale-faced American who is startled, tripped, drenched, and inspired into becoming a hero.
These days, we look down on physical comedy; critics like to say that movies “descend” into slapstick. Physical comedy has gained a reputation for being cheap, an easy way out for directors and performers when their ideas run dry. The old skills seem to be fading: nobody knows how to take a fall anymore, and some of what we sit through is cruder than the antics of the Keystone Cops. When the Cops pitched off trucks or bopped their adversaries over the head, the craziness was hardly sophisticated, but the energy felt appropriate to the spirit of a quickening industry: every frame was a space to be filled, like a shop window. Early movies didn’t descend; they rose to the occasion of a speedy, febrile art that was itself founded on the spinning of a reel, whereas the physical gags of today (what you can find of them) come across as mean and tired.
We know that Buster Keaton entered the world in the fall of 1895. The exact point at which he entered the world of entertainment is harder to pin down, although there is a photograph that shows his father, Joseph Keaton, in blackface, with a baby Buster plumped down between his legs. Joe came from Quaker stock, but he grew up a drifter and a brawler, with a high kick that could break a man’s jaw; he quit his home state of Indiana and wound up in Frank Cutler’s Comedy Company, a troupe that worked the new small towns south of the Cherokee Strip. He also fell for Cutler’s daughter, Myra; they married in 1894, and made a meagre living in travelling medicine shows. In 1899, they moved their act to New York to try their luck in vaudeville; within a year, “The Two Keatons” became “The Three Keatons”; soon after that, the billing changed to “BUSTER, assisted by Joe & Myra Keaton.” The toddler had become a professional performer at an age when most people are still amateurs at going to the toilet. Buster was once sent to school, but the experiment lasted less than a day.
It was no surprise that he came to the attention of the Gerry Society, which fought against the injustices of child labor. As part of the act, his father would grab hold of a suitcase handle stitched to the back of Buster’s jacket, swing him through the air, and let go. Sometimes the boy would be spread flat and pushed around the stage as if he were a mop: Joe wiped the floor with him. In an effort to deter the Gerry investigators, Joe took his son to the mayor of New York; Buster was stripped bare and inspected for bruises. No one believed that a youngster should be kicked and hurled for a living, let alone that he might enjoy the experience, and might relish the refinement of his skills. There is an argument that the famous Keaton expression is not just restrained but close to tears, that he is musing on miseries past and is bent on blanking them out, and that his screen persona was essentially rooted in a form of child abuse. The trouble with this theory is that the adult Buster was anything but blank: within the quietude of his gaze—backstage, behind the eyes—there is a chorus of emotions, many of them running close to eagerness and joy. In Keaton’s universe, violence means no harm; the scene from “Battling Butler,” in which he pummels a guy into submission, is weirdly out of character and is difficult to watch. In any case, he revered his parents and learned almost everything he knew about comedy from their example. Joe Keaton was later employed in some of his son’s movies, together with other cronies from vaudeville.
Slapstick toughened and seasoned the young Buster. The bruises mattered less than the muscles. Keaton’s pictures often play on his shortness (he was five feet six) or play it up by casting him against men shaped like grain silos. The archetypal Buster plot—the one that fuels “College,” “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” “The Navigator,” and a host of shorts—involves the weedy, hapless loner who slides into the jaws of fate, finds undreamed-of strength, and gets the girl. It is a measure of Keaton’s delicacy as an actor that we can believe in this transformation, because he himself was a strongman from the start. When the shy scholar of “College,” taunted by his beloved, finally strips down to running gear and joins the other athletes, we notice just how sinewy and streamlined he really is. The shape never changed: from the time Buster was a boy, that amazing, rectangular head remained too big for the torso beneath it. The mismatch is just right: you feel sure that the body will never fly out of control while the mind is in command. No wonder Buster balked at doubles; it is just conceivable that another man, with similar training, might have survived the ordeals that assault a Keaton hero, but no one else could have borne g them with such equanimity. As Buster & explained, “stuntmen don’t get laughs.”
Keaton was not unbreakable. While working on “The Electric House,” in 1922, he smashed an ankle; two years later, in “Sherlock Jr.,” the gush from a water tank blew him off the top of a train. The impact knocked him out, and gave him gruesome headaches; in 1935, an X-ray showed that he had broken his neck. Having been reared as a human beach ball, Keaton was able to survive jolts that would have killed a normal, non-rubberized person. The weird thing is that, unlike Jerry Lewis or Jim Carrey, he never melts or weakens into bendiness. The traditional Buster stance demands that he remain upstanding, full of backbone, looking ahead. His moral attitude and his physical attitude are indistinguishable; where Lewis and Carrey cringe and swank, Keaton holds firm. Nothing is more exhilarating than the great sequence in “The General” in which he clambers onto the roof of his locomotive and leans gently forward to scan the terrain, with the breeze in his hair and adventure zipping toward him around the next bend. It is the angle that you remember: the figure perfectly straight but tilted forward, like the Spirit of Ecstasy on the hood of a Rolls-Royce.
The theatrical career went on until 1917. The Three Keatons found fame, toured England, and then broke up. And then: “I was walking down Broadway—down along Eighth or someplace—and I met an old vaudevillian, and he was with Roscoe Arbuckle. Roscoe asked me if I had ever been in a motion picture, and I said, ‘No, I haven’t even been in a studio.’ And he said, ‘Well, come on down to the studio Monday and do a scene or two with me and see how you like it.’ ”
That, at least, is the story that Keaton gave to an interviewer in 1958. His biographer Rudi Blesh makes it more prosaic: in “Keaton” (1966) Blesh writes that the vaudevillian took twenty-one-yearold Buster to visit the Colony Studio, on East Forty-eighth Street, where three pictures were being shot—one with Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle; one with Constance Talmadge, starring opposite the charmingly named Harrison Ford; and one with Norma Talmadge. (Luckily, no one told Buster that four years later he would marry the third Talmadge sister, Natalie, and that all three sisters and their mother would move in with him.) Buster started work with Arbuckle the next day.
It is typical of Keaton that his first instinct was to find out precisely what happened inside a camera. He was a gadget freak, stirred by his good fortune at being on hand for the youthful, exploratory years of a new mechanical medium; you sometimes feel that his movies’ obsession with machines is a homage to that era. The guy who practically crawled into Arbuckle’s camera is the same guy who stuffed his films with trains and boats and whiled away his later years by rigging up vast contraptions designed to pour a shot of bourbon or crack walnuts. One of the disappointments of Keaton’s first full length feature, “The Three Ages,” is that much of it is set in Stone Age and Roman times, both of which are sadly gizmo-free. He does his best, and piles up the chariot gags, but it isn’t until he hits the modern era that you sense him relaxing into the chaos of mechanized society. He drives a low-grade automobile over a bump in the road, and the car just crumbles beneath him. Rerun it on video, in slow motion, and you can see Buster riding the collapse like a surfer, hanging on to the steering wheel, coming beautifully to rest as the wave of wreckage breaks.
None of this is an indictment of the industrial age. It is Chaplin who took that noble, simpleminded line: when he walked away from the conveyor belt in “Modern Times,” his hands still tightening an invisible bolt, the joke implied that the human soul was under threat from machinery, and that man must strive to escape its grip. Keaton, more thoughtfully, identifies an element of play: his work suggests that man and machine are a good match—that man, on occasion, can even come out on top. In “Sherlock Jr.” we see him perched precariously on the handlebars of a fast-moving police motorbike; far from panicking, he soon settles into this new arrangement, considers his options, crosses his legs as if he were perched on a sofa, and prattles amiably to the cop. In his coolness, his love of improvisation, his casual reluctance to be crushed, Keaton moves further away from the querulous, jumpy genius of Chaplin and closer to someone like Fred Astaire, who could come upon the chugging pistons of a ship’s engines and hear within a matter of seconds the excitable rhythms of a new dance.
Buster worked with Arbuckle on and off for three years. Together, they made fifteen two-reelers, some of them disconcerting to watch. For one thing, Keaton was still in the process of paring down the smile. Most people think of him as the essence of deadpan; they should take a look at “Fatty at Coney Island” and catch the chirpy, shining grin that splits Buster’s face. You can see a milder version of it in “The Saphead,” his first starring feature, when Buster’s character reads his name in a newspaper. His smile is not unattractive; it just turns him into a different being. If, from 1920 on, Keaton chose not to beam at the surrounding world, it was not because he was privy to some unrelieved grimness but because a steady, tight-lipped expression is the only look that remains, like a good suit, suitable for all occasions. It respects, even expects, catastrophe, but it also honors sweetness—especially when Keaton closes his eyes, as if to sniff an unseen rose.
“The Saphead” is about a wealthy idler who can barely summon the energy to become a profligate; “The High Sign,” made the same year, saw Keaton cast as a rootless bum. The opening title reads like Camus for cowboys: “Our Hero came from Nowhere—he wasn’t going Anywhere and got kicked off Somewhere.” Taken together, the two movies demonstrate Buster’s enviable talent for playing every octave of the social scale. He didn’t hate the rich, and he refused to rain pity on the poor. With mawkish cunning, Chaplin had turned the Little Tramp into a potent symbol of the downtrodden; Keaton, less consciously, embarked upon a decade of films that would range across the American experience, from the Wild West to the Stock Exchange. All he asks of his characters, whatever their status, is that they not spurn the opportunity for self-reliance. Rollo Treadway, the hero of “The Navigator,” numbed by his millions, drifts through the days like a sleepwalker and uses his chauffeur to get from one side of the street to the other; it is only when his yacht is set adrift, when he is all at sea, that he can wake himself up and function as a complete being. Chaplin would never have given Rollo the chance; he would have used the character in passing and knocked his hat off with a rock. Chaplin was reluctant to shake off his Englishness or his touchiness about class, and his work represents the last gasp of Victorian melodrama; Keaton drew the first breath of modernism in film, and was the first—Griffith notwithstanding—to show why America would be the movies’ natural home.
By 1920, Keaton was making his own pictures, under the aegis of Arbuckle’s producer, Joseph M. Schenck. Over the next eight years, they made nineteen shorts and ten full-length features together—from “The High Sign” to “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” Keaton is invariably listed as a co-director and, occasionally, as co-writer, with friends such as Eddie Cline and Clyde Bruckman. Bruckman told Rudi Blesh, “I was at Buster’s house or he at mine four or five nights many a week—playing cards, horsing around, dodging the issue. Then, at midnight, to the kitchen, sit on the sink, eat hamburgers, and work on gags until three in the morning.” The perfect life, surely: a utopia of creative brotherhood. But Bruckman added a twist. “Those wonderful stories were ninety percent Buster’s,” he said. Keaton tempts us toward the auteur theory but proves that it is not incompatible with a loose-limbed habit of collaboration. He reminds you ofOrson Welles: whatever the movie, he spiced it with his own obsessions. Even the earliest shorts proceed on the understanding that tumult is all the wilder for being arrested in mid-flow, and that a concentration of closeups should be regularly dissolved by the discreet retreat of the camera. Keaton’s long shots, in which a forlorn figure dashes through serene open spaces, are the deep breaths of an artist who knows the value of the long view.
Keaton’s narrative beat was partly a matter of technique. Until he came along, cameras had been undercranked for slapstick, thus insuring that the projected image was twice as fast—and therefore, it was believed, twice as funny—as human activity in real time. Keaton saw neither the justice nor the logic of this practice, and he was the first, according to Bruckman, to shoot comedy at standard speed; the life that he saw around him didn’t need whipping up—it was funny enough as it was. Moreover, it was funny even when it was boring; Keaton’s real daring lies less in the technical advances he devised than in the moral progress he made with them. There is nothing more adventurous in the Keaton ceuvre than the low-key, unhurried opening of “The Goat,” a 1921 short, in which a starving Buster is sent to the back of a breadline, on the sidewalk outside a clothing store. Not realizing that the two men in front of him are mannequins, he stands and waits, and the camera waits with him. He shuffles his feet, leans against the wall, clasps his hands behind his back, and so on. This seems to me a moment of revolution: after the Keystone Cops, and after the universal truths, or truisms, that rang out so majestically from “Intolerance,” here is a guy doing zilch. The movies have learned to tolerate ordinary existence, and even to celebrate its paltry pleasures; Keaton practices what Griffith preached.
Nothing, I guess, is more ordinary than getting married and settling down. In “One Week” (1920), a strong candidate for the perfect short film, Keaton takes homemaking literally. Starting from a plain, gag-rich premise—a pair of newlyweds are given a house in kit form, but with the wrong set of instructions he fashions a surreal nineteen-minute epic of trial and error, which also happens to be a touching portrait of a marriage. Some commentators think that Keaton’s pictures are let down by the slenderness of female characterization; Daniel Moews, in his dogged 1977 study “Keaton: The Silent Features Close Up,” thinks that Buster’s women are “late Victorian hangovers in the long tradition of medieval courtly romance” and that “the heroines, desirable though they may be, exist only as pretexts for initiating his adventures.” No one could watch “One Week” and agree with Moews. The actress playing the bride, Sybil Seely, has that perky, outdoorsy, try-anything hardihood that separates the women of pre-Hays Code cinema from the lacquered, innuendo bound creatures who arrived later. She is Buster’s unquestioned equal in the film; they pull through together. In one extraordinary scene, Seely is in her bath, the tops of her breasts exposed; she drops the soap on the floor, grins at us, and reaches out for it. At this point, a hand covers the lens, although Seely doesn’t look as if she would mind either way. So there you are: near-nudity and a self-conscious camera back in 1920. You wonder just how much Jean-Luc Godard had to invent.
If only Keaton’s first marriage had been such bliss. In 1921, he married Natalie Talmadge, and three weeks after the wedding the happy couple posed for a publicity shot in Photoplay: Buster sits beside her sporting a ball and chain. They had two sons—Joseph, born in 1922, and Robert, born in 1924-and Natalie would pain Keaton deeply by changing the boys’ surname to Talmadge after she divorced him, in 1932. If there was misery on both sides, Keaton, at least, knew better than to let it sour his movies. In “Seven Chances” (1925), the prospect of marriage becomes pure farce: Buster plays a man of such eligible wealth that the climax finds him running away from an entire churchful of wannabe brides. When he finally gets the girl he really wants, his attempts to snatch a crowning kiss are blocked by the successful efforts of the minister, the bride’s mother, the best man, and a pet Dalmatian. His frustration is a good joke, but its chief function is to deny us the comfort of a major chord—to scrub the last traces of sentimentality from what threatens to become a love story. Maybe this is why Keaton leaves some viewers cold: his pictures suggest that love, like courage, must be proved in action. Hearts are there to be won, not warmed. It was a tough job for any woman, romancing the stone face.
In celebration of Buster’s centennial, a New York company called Kino on Video has issued three boxed sets of Keaton videos: thirty silent films in all, freshly transferred to tape. The quickies are a revelation, and the full-length features reassert their power; viewers will be amazed at how little has dated. If we are honest, we should admit to ourselves that the acting styles of early Hollywood now look overheated—that some of Garbo’s swoons, in short, can make us giggle. Even in a classic such as F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” (1927), the hero is still indicating anguish by gripping the hair at the sides of his head and staring saucer-eyed at absolutely nothing. In Keaton’s work there is none of this. He pioneered the art of underacting. Heaven knows, he gave his heroes plenty to react to; the fact that they chose to scoot away from trouble or else to face it with tranquillity was a sign that film was ceasing to be merely an extravaganza. Keaton’s character is more interesting than his surroundings; whatever they toss at him, he doesn’t rave or gape—he doesn’t hype what movies can do. In the final scenes of “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” what matters is not the ferocity of the wind: it is the tiny leap that Buster gives as he pushes into that wind—the endless, fruitless comedy of needing to press on. “Such frustration in that little body!” Louise Brooks once said.
After “The Navigator” became a smash hit, in 1924, Keaton was given a contract for six features: two a year, at twenty-seven thousand dollars per picture—serious money in those days. He built the Italian Villa, one of the grandest properties in Beverly Hills, and spent fourteen thousand dollars moving a line of trees from the front to the back. By the time filming began on “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” in 1927, Buster’s work was netting him an annual income of two hundred thousand dollars: nothing could go wrong. Needless to say, everything went wrong. “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” his final masterpiece, foundered at the box office, as “The General” had done the year before. In 1928, Joe Schenck dissolved Buster Keaton Productions and handed the outfit over to his brother Nicholas, at M-G-M. There Irving Thalberg grasped the genius of Keaton straight off, but it flew right past Louis B. Mayer, who, true to form, failed to see what was so funny about the man. The well-oiled new mechanisms of the dream factory soon snagged on someone like Keaton, who hired people because they could bat ideas around instead of writing a script, because they were good at cards, and because they were his friends. According to Keaton’s third wife, Eleanor, “His guys all played baseball, and if they’d be stuck for a gag or something, they would go out and play ball. And then somebody’d say, ‘Oh, hey, I know how to do that,’ and they’d go back to work. One of the first things Buster did was get a ball club together at M-G-M. And Louis B. Mayer wouldn’t stand for that.”
Keaton made one good movie for M-G-M, “The Cameraman,” and then began to slide. In 1930, he made his first starring talkie, “Free and Easy.” There was nothing wrong with what Eleanor Keaton calls “his bass-baritone gravelly voice”; he never shared the indignity of John Gilbert, the silent, smoldering Romeo who opened his mouth and instantly changed into Tweety Pie. Keaton didn’t object to words; he just didn’t need them. Unhindered by dialogue, he had floated movies to the limits of their form. Where could he go from there? Earthbound and unwanted, he became a serious drinker and then a complete joke; his last film for the studio before it fired him, in 1933, was the sadistically titled “What, No Beer?” Natalie filed for divorce; in 1934, just to round out the dreadful burlesque, Keaton was declared bankrupt. He entered a sanitarium and wound up marrying a nurse named Mae Scriven—“in an alcoholic stupor,” according to the Keaton scholar Jim Kline, although the pair went on to live together for two years. In 1937, in a spasm of generosity, M-G-M took him on again—this time as a gag writer—on a starting salary of a hundred dollars a week. This was like hiring Shakespeare to paint scenery. It is upsetting to follow the chart of Keaton’s decline, and difficult to fix its lowest trough; I would suggest the sight of Buster caught up in a pie fight during a 1939 comedy about the early days of movies, “Hollywood Cavalcade.” By that time, it was commonly thought that this was the silent stars had done: they had chucked custard pies. The truth, of course, was that not once in all the pictures that he made in the twenties had Buster Keaton thrown a single custard pie.
The rehabilitation came late, but not too late. In 1938, over a bridge table, he met a blonde. Eleanor Norris was nineteen at the time, a hoofer at M-G-M. She had never seen a Buster Keaton movie. They were married in 1940, and it was Eleanor who set Buster back on the track and saw it carry him to his final fame—to what he eloquently described as “that genius bullshit.” These days, Eleanor Norris Keaton lives in a condo in North Hollywood, and I visited her there on a roasting August day. To knock at the door of her house is a curious sensation: you half expect the front of the building to swing down and fall on top of you, tugged by the spirit of slapstick past. But I made my way safely up the stairs, past Japanese posters of Buster’s best-known films. At the top stood Mrs. Keaton, spry and immaculate at seventy seven, and rightly protective of her husband’s reputation.
She wasn’t the first person to want to look after the guy. “He must have had fifteen or twenty mothers and fathers,” she recalled. “I guess they’d seen this helpless creature on the screen, so everybody adopted him and set out to take care of him.” No one understood more clearly than Eleanor Keaton, though, that the helplessness was an act. “He never played for sympathy. Ifthey wanted to feel sorry for him, that was their problem, not his,” she said, adding, “Chaplin was just the opposite.” Yet, as we sat there drinking iced tea and talking about Buster Keaton, I found my take on the man beginning to shift and fray. Even if he wasn’t vulnerable, there was still something disturbing in his eagerness to take the rap. The sequences in “Cops” and “Seven Chances” in which he was harried by howling mobs sprang directly from Keaton’s own fear. “Couldn’t stand crowds,” his widow said, and she went on to recount a time when an aging Buster gave the slip to adoring fans at the Cinémathèque in Paris, ducked down an alley, and threw up with nerves. The all-American star was almost English, sometimes, in his desire to evade confrontation. “I guess he just didn’t want to make waves,” Mrs. Keaton said. “If somebody dropped a glass and broke it in the kitchen, you know, he’d figure out a way it would be his fault. He knew that he’d wrecked his own career with drink.” It’s a bizarre turnaround: involved in every minute of his movies, Keaton can take more solitary credit for his achievements than any other filmmaker, and yet he behaved as if everything were his fault—as if the thousands of pratfalls were a punishment for irredeemable crimes, most of which he had never committed. Keaton hated to make a scene, and out of that distaste rose some of the most elegant scenes ever filmed.
Buster cut back on the drink, but he kept on smoking two packs a day. The war years were among the leanest of his life; Marion Meade, in her new biography, “Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase,” cites an M-G-M memo of 1942 that describes Buster as almost destitute. Not so, says Meade: Eleanor was still dancing for a living, after all, and Buster’s principal daily duty was to drive his wife to the studios. After the war, he found a new career in Europe performing old vaudeville routines, and picked himself a few delicious minor roles: one of the bridge players in “Sunset Boulevard,” a sorrowful presence opposite Chaplin in “Limelight.” But true salvation arrived toward the end of the forties, in the squat shape of television; at the age of fifty-four, Buster refreshed some old slapstick for “The Ed Wynn Show.” On the strength of this, he was awarded his own program, which ran for four months at the start of 1950; for the rest of his life, he made good money from TV appearances (Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson) and commercials.
Keaton’s late works are a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is his 1964 slot for Budweiser; on the other, there is the exotically titled “Film” (1965), the only movie written by Samuel Beckett. Buster plays the anonymous, self-haunting wreck who scuttles through the twenty two minutes of action, or inaction. We do not see him head on until the closing frames; he seems to be summoning both the courage to look himself in the face and the almost irretrievable memory of what that face once was. “Film” is not widely liked, or widely seen, perhaps because it offers a frightening spectre. How often does cinema, our shrine to beautiful people, dare to reveal the unstoppable blighting of beauty, let alone reveal it to the blighted themselves?
Buster Keaton died on February 1, 1966, and was buried with a rosary and a deck of cards. It’s the neatest possible combination—a little light sinning with built-in penance, and a guarantee of eternal good luck. Somewhere, high above the clouds, someone is getting skinned.
Keaton’s great pictures are, in the best sense, feature films; they are meditations on a face. Those deep-lidded, dark-rimmed eyes, the carved prow of the profile—no living person has ever looked like Buster Keaton. Louise Brooks said he was the most beautiful man she ever saw, and she wasn’t exactly a frump herself. Risking absurdity, every Buster fan longs to read a story, or a genealogy, or a philosophical position into Keaton’s aspect. You can’t help it; once you catch his eye, there’s no looking away. Viewed from the side, he has always reminded me of the solemn, grieving figures in Giotto’s frescoes. The critic Stanley Cavell tries a different tack. “I see the speculation of Heidegger exemplified in the countenance of Buster Keaton,” he writes. This would have been news to Buster, who never tried to exemplify anything except the art of landing on your butt without jarring your spine.
But even if Keaton didn’t exemplify intellectual theories—there is nothing abstract about being crunched between two carriages of a train—his movies nevertheless send you into the realm of idle perplexity that is traditionally prowled by the intellect. By his own admission, Keaton wanted nothing more than to raise a laugh. But the regularity with which he gets that laugh, and the fact that he refuses to join in it, force you to marvel at his struggle for happiness in the teeth of a ridiculous fate. “Be like the headland against which the waves break and break: it stands firm, until presently the watery tumult around it subsides once more to rest. . . . The thing could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have emerged unembittered. . . . The mind can circumvent all obstacles to action, and turn them to the furtherance of its main purpose, so that any impediment to its work becomes instead an auxiliary, and the barriers in its path become aids to progress.” Thus Marcus Aurelius, in his “Meditations.” It seems as clear an account of Buster Keaton as you will find, and it restores him to his status as the leading stoic of cinema. As Marcus makes plain, stoicism involves not willful gloom but a temperate acceptance of the eternal Heraclitean flux. For instance, the hero of “The Three Ages” flees a police station, runs up a fire escape to the roof, leaps toward the next-door building, misses the parapet, drops three stories through canvas awnings, and catches hold of a drainpipe, which then swings around a hundred and eighty degrees, rifling the hero through an open window and straight into a pole, down which he slides, coming to rest on the back of a fire engine, which moves off and hastens back to the very police station he started from. If that isn’t eternal flux, I don’t know what is.
The best comedy entails the near avoidance of tragedy, a sidestep away from the cliff’s edge. Buster Keaton knows where the edge is; in truth, he can’t get it out of his mind. That is why his films give off such a weird, flexible maturity, a wisdom not set in its ways. Sitting through a score of them, I was left to wonder what kind of man would feel driven to create such a modest, ennobling body of work from close shaves. “A tremendously nice person, you know, but also a man of secrets,” Orson Welles said of Keaton, adding, “I can’t even imagine what they were.” Keaton family legend had it that when Buster was nearly three years old a cyclone picked him up, blew him down a street, and deposited him gently four blocks away. The incident eventually wormed its way into “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” but the cyclone twisted deeper still. It is Keaton’s Rosebud, you might say: impossible to verify, probably a tall tale, and by no means an explanation of the man. Yet, for all that, it is an image that flowers perennially throughout his work. He launches himself into one whirlwind after another—into car wrecks, capsizings, wars, and marriages—not so much to test his nerve or his aptitude as to savor the primal shock of coming through unharmed. Buster Keaton sleeps through bedlam. His eyes are the heart of the storm. ♦
