Those movies took his storytelling and comedic skills to even greater heights, capped by The General, which often makes the top-movies-of-all-time lists.īut they weren’t enough to save him, as personal troubles (a bad marriage, a drinking problem) coincided with a bad contract he signed with MGM, which took away all his creative control as a director. He went on to produce almost twenty comedy shorts before he started making feature films, many while still in his twenties. The rest he and his crew improvised as they were shooting - but you’d never know it.īuster first burst into the movies in 1917 in Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s two-reeler The Butcher Boy, taking death-defying falls that he had learned performing in his family’s vaudeville act starting when he was four. He had about half the gags worked out ahead of time, he said. The train set that takes dishes to the kitchen. The phonograph that converts into a stove. The Murphy bed that folds into the wall and becomes a piano. Tellingly, such routines became mainstays of Warner Brothers cartoons decades later.īuilding contraptions - Buster might have been an engineer in another life - was another source of gags. In another gag, he’s hiding in a streamship paddle wheel, which soon becomes a hamster wheel, as he races to keep upright. One misstep and he would have been a goner. In more than one feature he walks away from a house, and suddenly the entire façade falls on him - missing him, as he stands in a window opening. When he sits at the edge of a wooden board extending off the top of a house, and saws it until it breaks, that’s really him falling to the ground. Buster stands behind a man in a queue that never moves - finally realizing it’s a mannequin talks earnestly to a girl through bars before a different angle reveals not a prison but a gate writes from New York that he is cleaning up the city, at which point we see him street sweeping.īuster never used a stunt man, no matter how dangerous the scene. In films like Cops - two-reelers, or twenty-minute shorts - one funny bit followed another in quick succession. And no one was better at creating them than Buster Keaton. If you wanted to keep the audience entertained, the storytelling had to be almost entirely visual. The only dialogue came in brief title cards between scenes. To appreciate Buster Keaton (1895–1966), you have to imagine a time before modern film technology: no CGI, no special effects, no color, no booming surround sound - or any sound at all, except for live musical accompaniment, usually a piano. So when I had a chance to finally go to Los Angeles a few years ago, it turned into something of a pilgrimage to search out the locations where Buster shot some of my favorite scenes. He was, to my mind, the brightest of the silent film comedians, but not just that: he created films that are as funny today as they were a century ago. In eight brief seconds, the scene captures many of the things that make Buster Keaton unique: his athleticism, his plucky underdog persona, his fearlessness, and his sheer inventiveness in coming up with gags one after another.
Buster shows off his ingenuity and daring in Cops.
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