April 9, 2022
Buster Keaton, who was born on October 4, 1895, was a comic known for his deadpan expression and his pork pie hats which were often destroyed during his film antics. He created brilliant gags during the height of his career. Early in his career, he created noteworthy parodies, and he developed his signature style, a combination of lucidity and precise acrobatics. According to Roger Ebert, because Keaton “worked without interruption” from 1920 to 1929, he was “the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies.” In 1959, he earned an Honorary Academy Award. He was recognized as the seventh greatest film director by Entertainment Weekly in 1996, and in 1999, the American Film Institute named him the 21st greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema. As a testament to his ability, six of his films have been placed in the National Film Registry.
Keaton’s father, Joseph Hallie “Joe” Keaton owned the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company with Harry Houdini; they performed and sold patent medicine. Buster, who was born Joseph Frank Keaton, got his nickname “Buster” after tumbling down the stairs without getting injured. When he was three, he started to perform with his parents. In his first appearance, a comedy sketch, he would provoke his father until his father tossed him against the backdrop or into the orchestra pit. Keaton was not hurt, although this did lead to accusations of child abuse, but he was able to prove to the authorities that he had no evidence of an injury. The experience also led to the development of his deadpan expression because he had to keep himself from laughing while being thrown as he recognized that when he laughed, the audience laughed less.
After Vaudeville, He Met "Fatty" Arbuckle
When Keaton was 21, he and his mother headed to New York, and Buster made the transition from vaudeville to film. In 1917, despite his initial reservations about film, when Keaton met Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios, Keaton was asked to just jump in. He was a natural and was hired on the spot. Curious about the camera, Keaton then asked to borrow a camera, which he dismantled and reassembled later in his hotel room. Keaton went on to perform in 14 Arbuckle shorts between their first meeting and 1920.
Keaton’s first starring role in a full-length feature came in 1920 in The Saphead. In the early 1920s, he continued to make successful shorts, and he was given his own production unit, Buster Keaton Productions. They made several two-reel comedies at first and then moved to feature-length films.
Keaton had a team of writers working on his films, but Keaton came up with the best of the gags himself. He performed dangerous stunts, and in one of them, the railroad water-tank scene in Sherlock Jr., he actually broke his neck, but didn’t realize he had until much later. In Steamboat Bill Jr., the façade of a two-ton prop house fell on Keaton. He had to stand in a particular spot as the façade fell, so his character was able to escape unscathed when his body passed through an open window.
His Greatest Film Led Him To Lose Some Control Of His Career
In 1926, he starred in his masterpiece, The General which Orson Welles praised as “the greatest comedy ever made…and perhaps the greatest film ever made.” The General, which received mixed reviews at the time, was about the Civil War and included both physical comedy and an epic locomotive chase. After The General, his distributor, United Artists, insisted he work with a production manager who controlled expenses and interfered with some story elements. He made two more films, before entering a business deal that he would call the worst of his life.
When He Lost His Artistic Independence
Unfortunately, after he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he lost his artistic independence, and his career went into decline. In 1928, he completed his final originally developed/written silent film, Cameraman. Once signing with MGM, he had to use a stunt double, as MGM wanted to protect their investment. Keaton made the switch to the talkies and appeared in a series of films with Jimmy Durante which proved to be popular. Keaton’s final film with MGM was 1933’s What! No Beer? Although the film was a hit, Keaton was so demoralized that the studio fired him. He then accepted an offer to make Le Roi des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1934, which was followed by a film in England, The Invader (1934). The film was released in the U.S. in 1936 as An Old Spanish Custom. Concurrently, in 1932, his first wife, Natalie Talmadge divorced him, and he descended into alcoholism fueled by the loss of his creative license and the divorce. He was briefly institutionalized and then married his nurse, but it ended in divorce in 1936.
He Managed To Stage A Comeback
He returned to Hollywood in 1934 and worked on two-reel comedies for Educational Pictures. In 1937, he wrote gags for the final three Marx Brothers comedies. He was hired by Columbia Pictures in 1939 to star in 10 two-reel comedies over a two-year period. Jules White directed most of the shorts, and they ended up being Keaton’s least inventive comedies. Although both Columbia and White wanted him to make more, he declined.
He managed to recover in the 1940s, with the help of his third wife Eleanor Keaton. He started to work on less strenuous feature films and went back to gag writing. He took character roles in both A and B films, with film historian Kevin Brownlow calling his last feature of this period, El Moderno Barba Azul (1946), the worst film ever made. Luckily, he would continue to reinvent his career.
He Has Had A Lasting Influence
In 1949, critics rediscovered him, and he ended up with cameos in films like Sunset Boulevard (1950), and he was in Limelight (1952), the only time he would appear on film with Charlie Chaplin. He then started to make television appearances, including his own show, Life with Buster Keaton (1951). He reportedly ended the show because he was unable to come up with new material, but he appeared on other shows, including The Ed Sullivan Show and The Twilight Zone; he was able to recreate his silent film routines, even in his 50s. He made around 70 guest appearances on television shows from 1950 to 1964. He continued to appear in film, with his last commercial film appearance in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), a film in which he completed many of his own stunts, although, by that point, his health was declining. In 1966, just before his death, he appeared in The Scribe, a safety film produced by the Construction Safety Associations of Ontario. On February 1, 1966, he died of lung cancer, but his influence has lived on. As Mel Brooks, who has credited Keaton as a major influence, has said, “He made me believe in make-believe.”