Buster Keaton’s Comedy

Keaton appeared in fifteen Fatty Arbuckle “shorts” from 1917 to 1920, then obtained his own studio and, with full creative control, made twenty shorts and eleven longer “features,” from The Saphead in 1920 to The Cameraman in 1928. But within a few years after his last silent feature, Keaton was nearly forgotten — until 1949, when the critic James Agee ranked him with Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon in a Life magazine cover story on “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Agee’s assessment revived Keaton’s career and inspired increasing critical esteem. Andrew Sarris ranked Keaton as one of the greatest directors of all time. By the 1990s, Keaton’s reputation had begun to surpass even Chaplin’s.

Agee correctly asserted that Keaton “brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights,” but his emphasis on the actor’s stoicism and “mechanistic gags” made the result seem far more distant than Keaton really was. “He was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work,” wrote Agee (ignoring both W. C. Fields and the great amount of real sentiment in Keaton’s films). “Beneath his lack of emotion,” he continued, “there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia,” though there was “a fine, still, and sometimes dreamlike beauty.”

All the grand cliches about Keaton begin with Agee. Tom Dardis’s 1979 biography, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down, depicts the comic as a melancholy, sexually promiscuous alcoholic whose father had beat him and whose second wife resorted to prostitution when their finances ran low. Robert Knopf, in his 1999 The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton, argues that Keaton “achieves the surrealists’ goal of blending dream and reality in cinema, and thereby expanding our vision of human life in a material world.” Even the play-wright Samuel Beckett contributed to the legend of Keaton as melancholy philosopher, casting him as “the man” in his gloomy Film (1996). As Dardis puts it, Keaton’s films have come to be seen “as paradigms of the human condition, as existential films.”

This is a serious distortion of film history. Keaton’s movies are often brilliantly zany, and a few contain sequences that turn out to be dreams, but this does not make him a surrealist. Surrealists do not try to make dreams seem real; they impose dream logic on reality.

In the 1999 Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton, Keaton fan John Bengston shows just how realistic Keaton’s films really were. In contrast to many comic filmmakers of the time, Keaton shot almost all his films on location, and he packed them with long shots that placed the characters firmly in real places. He made Cops (1922), Sherlock, Jr. (1924), and Seven Chances (1925) on locations throughout California. He filmed College (1927) at USC and UCLA, shot Go West (1925) in the Arizona desert, and recorded the underwater scenes of The Navigator (1924) in Lake Tahoe. His first feature, The Saphead, opens with bustling exterior shots of Wall Street. To film a conference room overlooking the ocean for The Navigator, Keaton had his crew build a set near the San Diego harbor so that audiences would be able to see the sea through the windows. The Cameraman includes extensive sequences shot in New York. Keaton even went to Oregon to film The General (1927) on the last remaining narrow-gauge railroad tracks of the type used during the Civil War. For the film’s climax he burned a wooden bridge to send a real locomotive crashing into a river, allegedly the most expensive shot in film until that time.

Keaton’s comic realism served a vision quite antithetical to the existentialism now so frequently attributed to him. His zenith spanned the transition from the Victorian era to the Machine Age, and his films consistently satirized the follies of the modern world. In his first solo picture, the two-reeler One Week (1920), Keaton and bride Sybil Seely assemble a prefabricated house given to them as a wedding present. A shot of Keaton and Sybil in their splendid wedding clothes in a drab neighborhood, glumly sitting on a crate labeled, “HOME: Portable House Co.” captures the age’s passion for gadgets, shaky adherence to traditional values, and impossible dreams of perfect efficiency. It turns out that Keaton’s former rival has switched the numbers on the crates, and despite the couple’s hard work, the house turns into a ghastly lump of mismatched pieces and freakish angles.

The comic bleakness of the film’s ending is particularly striking: Finding out that they have built their house on the wrong lot, Keaton and Sybil prop it on barrels to move it. The house gets stuck on the train tracks — of course! — and as the newlyweds cover their ears in anticipation, the train passes by on a parallel track. As they breathe a sigh of relief, another train roars past and demolishes the house.

This sense of the twentieth century’s implacability suffuses Keaton’s films and fits neatly with his film persona. He was a little man, short and slight, but also muscular, surprisingly strong, fast, and agile. He had to be, or his characters would have had no chance to survive. In The Electric House (1922), Keaton, a botanist, is mistakenly hired to wire a mansion for electricity and install all the latest gadgets. This he does with characteristic abandon, creating dining chairs that move automatically, a pool table that returns the balls to the rack, and other such impressively unnecessary gadgets. The real electrical engineer, however, exacts revenge by switching around the wires, and the predictable comic chaos ensues. Keaton ultimately manages to put things right, but that is when the film becomes really interesting. The house’s owner angrily fires him, and the owner’s daughter rejects him. Keaton then attempts suicide by drowning and fails, ending up shot out of a sewer pipe onto a river bank.

Such unambiguously bitter endings are common in Keaton’s early, short films. Daydreams (1922) closes with Keaton trying unsuccessfully to shoot himself. At the end of Cops, he is rejected by his girlfriend and gives himself up to the hundreds of angry policemen who have been chasing him throughout most of the film. (The last shot shows his porkpie hat resting on a tombstone bearing the words “The End.”) The first half of Hard Luck (1921) depicts Keaton in several unsuccessful suicide attempts. The feature College ends with a sardonic depiction of “happily ever after”: a cramped apartment, angry arguments, and then two gravestones.

Largely, however, this cynicism is confined to the early shorts; most of the features have straightforward happy endings. Moreover, although the surfaces of the films are often brittle and sardonic, the ideas underneath them are solid and decent. Keaton wants a wife, children, a church wedding, a good job, a decent house, stability, and a chance to make something of himself. The respect of his elders, mostly men, is necessary to obtain all these, notably in The Saphead, The Navigator, Battling Butler (1926), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), in each of which he plays a spoiled youth who must prove his mettle before he can marry his sweetheart.

Success in Keaton’s films is measured by achievement: piloting a boat, building a house, fixing a car, winning a boxing match, filming a tong war, catching a whale, catching a stolen locomotive, capturing a jewel thief. Keaton struggles against great odds: a cyclone in Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Union army in The General, policemen in Cops and Daydreams, a stampede in Go West, an avalanche of boulders and would-be brides in Seven Chances (1925), and, always, the rivals out to grab his girl through muscle or guile. Despite the hopeless odds, Keaton perseveres, and his best films — The General, Sherlock, Jr., The Navigator, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and Seven Chances — track his progress from unworthiness to redemption.

What Agee and other critics have mistaken as existential resignation is simply Keaton’s American tenacity. A little man with big problems — the diverse horrors of modernity — Keaton cannot afford to be frivolous. He was called “the Great Stone Face,” but he refrained from smiling in his films because his characters had much work to do before they could gain the women they desired. The young ladies agree with this arrangement, and they frequently pitch in to help, often comically, as when Marion Mack, in The General, tries to stoke the train’s fire by dropping a few tiny twigs into the boiler. (Keaton reaches forward to strangle her, then stops and kisses her.)

Unlike Chaplin, who is an unabashed individualist and even something of an aristocrat underneath his shabby clothing, Keaton wants to fit in, and his films support conventional morality against Jazz Age libertinism. In Chaplin’s films, a character’s worth is expressed not in the morality or social appropriateness of his actions but in the grace and style with which they’re performed. In Keaton’s world, character is expressed through what a person does rather than how he does it. In fact, Keaton’s rare jaunty moments usually presage disaster, as in Daydreams when he leaps onto a ferry boat to escape the police and waves at them sardonically — only to discover that the boat is arriving, not leaving. Keaton shows a sharp eye for hypocrisy, and his films mock deviations from conventional morality rather than adherence to it. Chaplin’s world is rather antinomian, while Keaton’s is quite thoroughly Victorian. A title card in The Three Ages (1923) describes the modern age as a place of “speed, need, and greed.”

Keaton himself was unfit for that modern age. He unwisely gave up his own studio and signed with MGM in 1928, and within half a decade his career and personal life were in a shambles. He lost creative control over his films and descended into alcoholism, divorce, and bankruptcy. Teamed in a series of talkies with Jimmy Durante, whose verbal humor never meshed with Keaton’s physical emphasis, he faded away. In 1933 he was released from MGM.

He quickly displayed, however, the same determination in his life that he had shown on screen. He gave up drinking, found the right woman in third wife Eleanor, and resumed acting and gag writing (although for much less money and with no creative control). From the appearance of the Agee essay until he died in 1966, he had no trouble finding work — though he was usually reduced to playing a befuddled old man (as in Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini) or merely himself, a once famous silent film star (as in his cameo role in Sunset Boulevard).

In all his greatest films, Keaton regularly drives his protagonists into astoundingly harrowing situations from which even Keaton’s ingenuity, athleticism, and perseverance cannot save them. Something else must intervene. In The General, for example, Keaton plays Johnnie Gray, a train engineer whose locomotive has been stolen by Union raiders. Chasing after them in another engine, Johnnie finds a railroad mortar on a side track and attaches it to his car to fire shells at the marauders. Unfortunately, the mortar car becomes uncoupled as it bounces on the tracks, and the gun lowers until it is aimed directly at Johnnie in the engine up ahead. By some odd miracle, the mortar fires just as the engine is rounding a corner, and the shell misses Johnnie.

Similarly, in Steamboat Bill, Jr., Keaton finds himself standing before a house during a violent windstorm. The entire front section of the house falls forward onto him, and he escapes death only because a large, open window happens to pass over him as the facade crashes to the ground. In Hard Luck (1921), Keaton, “fired from his job, jilted by his girl, and down on his luck,” as a title card puts it, attempts various methods of suicide, all of which fail quite implausibly. In The Navigator, Keaton and sweetheart Betsy are attacked by cannibals while on their yacht. They escape into a canoe, but it springs a leak. Sinking and surrounded by cannibals, they appear to be doomed. He takes her into his arms and they slide into the sea — only to arise moments later on a surfacing submarine.

In some of his early short films (most notably Sherlock, Jr.,), Keaton explains the miracles by revealing the narrative as a dream, but in the later features this hoary device would not work, and he did not use it. Of course, that means that the countless hairbreadth escapes require some other explanation, and in his influential 1966 biography, Keaton, Rudi Blesh supplied the most popular one: The great comic had a fatalistic conception of “man at the mercy of both chance and The Machine.”

That same year, however, Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times’s obituary, noted that Keaton required of audiences a certain spiritual sensitivity. Crowther was right. If the films had really been about existential fatalism, the characters in them would not have survived the catastrophes they faced. Keaton’s films are, in fact, the cinematic equivalent of the Argument from Design — all the clues point to the existence of a God the Designer, even in the midst of modern chaos. Modern man’s attempts to build a purely human order always fail, while the providential design of the world often triumphs.

In The Saphead, for example, Keaton ineptly tries to appear modern — cynical and hedonistic — to win his girl, Agnes, because a book has told him, “The modern girl has no use for old-fashioned men.” Terribly ashamed, he confesses: “I’ve tricked you into loving me — when you know the truth I’m afraid you won’t care for me any more. . . . I’m good! . . . I’ve tried my best to get over it — but I can’t and I still kneel down and say my prayers every morning — before I go to bed.” This wins Agnes’s love. Keaton’s goal in Seven Chances is to get to a church and marry his true love, and in Neighbors (1920) he is trying to reach the preacher’s house for the same purpose. The climax of The Scarecrow (1920) finds Keaton and his fiancee racing through the streets on a motorcycle seeking a preacher. They literally run into one, and he begins the ceremony perched on Keaton’s fiancee’s lap on the motorcycle.

In My Wife’s Relations (1922), The Blacksmith (1922), and Spite Marriage (1929), by contrast, Keaton is married in civil ceremonies and the unions turn out to be catastrophes. Indeed, through all Keaton’s films, when he relies on his fellow men, it leads to disaster, and when he puts his trust in God, all is well.

There are some explicit nods to Christian imagery in these films. Keaton imitates Samson in The Three Ages, finally defeating his rival and winning the day. In The Saphead, Keaton’s character, Bertie Van Alstyne, is nicknamed “The Lamb.” Similarly, just after Keaton’s implausibly failed suicide attempts in Hard Luck, he encounters a man walking across water. Keaton tries it and falls in; the man was a pool cleaner walking on stilts.

It’s not typically Christian imagery that characterizes Keaton’s movies, however, but a Christian worldview — or rather, an old-fashioned Christian knight set loose to walk through a modern landscape that isn’t knightly or Christian. He is always in the world but not of it, which is the source of the curious gracefulness he shows and the simultaneous disaster he makes of things. Both the lightness and the darkness of the comedy of Buster Keaton derive from the fact that he is a hero — in a world in which God alone still recognizes heroes.

S. T. Karnick is editor in chief of the Hudson Institute’s American Outlook magazine.