Buster Keaton
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Buster Keaton (1895 – 1966) was an American actor, comedian and director. He is best known for his silent film work, in which his trademark was physical comedy accompanied by a stoic, deadpan expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".
Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" as having made him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies". In 1996, Entertainment Weekly recognized Keaton as the seventh-greatest film director, writing that "More than Chaplin, Keaton understood movies: He knew they consisted of a four-sided frame in which resided a malleable reality off which his persona could bounce. A vaudeville child star, Keaton grew up to be a tinkerer, an athlete, a visual mathematician; his films offer belly laughs of mind-boggling physical invention and a spacey determination that nears philosophical grandeur."
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him as the 21st-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema.
Working with independent producer Joseph M. Schenck and filmmaker Edward F. Cline, Keaton made a series of successful two-reel comedies in the early 1920s, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), Cops (1922), and The Electric House (1922). He then moved to feature-length films; several of them, such as Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928), remain highly regarded.
The General is viewed as his masterpiece: Orson Welles considered it "the greatest comedy ever made...and perhaps the greatest film ever made".
In 2018, Peter Bogdanovich released The Great Buster: A Celebration, a tribute to Keaton featuring Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Werner Herzog and Quentin Tarantino, among others. Keaton's art has inspired full academic study.
His career declined when he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and lost his artistic independence. His wife divorced him, he lost his home, and he descended into alcoholism. He recovered in the 1940s, remarried, and revived his career as an honored comic performer for the rest of his life, earning an Academy Honorary Award in 1959. Late in his career, Keaton made cameos in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Chaplin's Limelight, Samuel Beckett's Film and the Twilight Zone episode "Once Upon a Time". Keaton is often described as having been ahead of his time; Anthony Lane wrote "He was just too good, in too many ways, too soon...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."
Legacy and contribution
Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd are remembered as the great comic innovators of the silent era. Keaton enjoyed Lloyd's films highly and often praised Chaplin.
Keaton has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: 6619 Hollywood Boulevard (for motion pictures); and 6321 Hollywood Boulevard (for television).
A 1957 film biography, The Buster Keaton Story, starred Donald O'Connor as Keaton. The screenplay was vaguely based on his life, but contained many factual errors and merged his three wives into one character. Most of the story centered on his drinking problem, in the producer's attempt to imitate the success of I'll Cry Tomorrow, a sudsy biography about another alcoholic celebrity (Lillian Roth). The 1987 documentary Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, which won 2 Emmy Awards and was directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, is considered a much more accurate telling of Keaton’s story.
Keaton's physical comedy is cited by Jackie Chan in his autobiography documentary Jackie Chan: My Story as being the primary source of inspiration for his own brand of self-deprecating physical comedy.
Porkpie hats
Keaton designed and fabricated many of his own porkpie hats during his career. In 1964, he told an interviewer that in making the porkpie he started with a good Stetson hat and cut it down, stiffening the brim with concentrated sugar water. The hats were often destroyed during Keaton's wild movie antics; some were given away as gifts and some were snatched by souvenir hunters. Keaton said he was lucky if he used only six hats in making a film. Keaton estimated that he and his wife Eleanor made thousands of the hats during his career.
Filmography
- Three Ages (1923)
- Our Hospitality (1923)
- Sherlock Jr. (1924)
- The Navigator (1924)
- Seven Chances (1925)
- Go West (1925)
- Battling Butler (1926)
- The General (1926)
- College (1927)
- Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)
- The Cameraman (1928)
- Spite Marriage (1929)
