You know Buster Keaton’s work even if you’ve never watched one of his films. Those Chuck Jones “Looney Tunes” cartoons, Bugs and Wile E. Coyote? Pure Buster. Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.,” a film in which a character in the audience of a movie theater climbs into the film he’s watching, inspired both Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. Johnny Knoxville and the “Jackass” gang drew on the live stunts Keaton popularized, in long, unbroken takes. “Spider-Man: Homecoming” director Jon Watts modeled the anarchic, physical-comedy sequences on Keaton’s work. Jackie Chan is a gymnastic Buster Keaton.
A fond documentary expertly written, directed, and narrated by the film historian and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, “The Great Buster” revels in Keaton’s intricately engineered physical comedy while sketching out a life story of rapid rise, equally precipitous descent, and surprising return to glory.
Keaton grew up on the vaudeville stage alongside his parents and soon found himself the star attraction. While there were child labor laws to deal with — “No child under the age of 16 shall do acrobatics,” etc. — the Keatons noticed that there were no restrictions on kicking their son in the face. One time, father Keaton chucked little Joe (nicknamed Buster, slang for a pratfall, by Harry Houdini) at a heckler in the audience.
A chance meeting with silent film star Fatty Arbuckle on the streets of New York launched Buster into the world of movie comedies, and after Arbuckle’s studio moved to Southern California in 1917, Keaton came into his own: first writing and directing original shorts, then full-length features. The greatest of these is the 1927 Civil War action-comedy spectacular “The General” — a recent poll of international film critics by the BBC deemed it the 10th greatest comedy ever (Keaton’s “Sherlock Jr.” and “Seven Chances” ranked 18th and 51st in the same survey). It can be viewed on Amazon Prime, as can the same year’s classic “College.” Yes, these are silents, which is a barrier for a lot of people, but don’t let that dissuade you: After you’ve been watching for half an hour, you barely notice. (Tell me, would “Jackass” or a Jackie Chan chase lose much if you took away the audible dialogue?)
Keaton did everything differently from the greatest comedy superstar of the era, Charlie Chaplin. Whereas Chaplin mugged, mewled, and begged for the audience’s love, “the Great Stone Face” perfected the art of deadpan (Bogdanovich notes that though Keaton had expressive eyes, he never smiled). Where Chaplin’s films are delicate, sentimental, even cloying, sometimes with, as one writer put it, “Marxish” undertones — most notably in his hapless-proletariat film “Modern Times” in the Great Depression — Keaton’s films were rumbustious and kinetic. Chaplin’s skill was all in his face and body, whereas Keaton’s was in ingenious use of props and sets. “I always want an audience to outguess me but then I double-cross them,” Keaton said, forever subverting expectations.
The famous gag in 1923’s “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” — in which the facade of a house topples onto Keaton, standing perfectly positioned beneath the falling window frame — that has inspired countless homages, including one by Knoxville and a couch gag on “The Simpsons,” could have crushed the actor if he had moved even a few inches off his mark. In another film, he escapes his pursuers by grabbing onto a car that is moving past him so rapidly that his feet fly off the ground. He broke his neck on still another film, yet completed the take (and didn’t learn about the fracture until years later). He was knocked unconscious by a cannon blast on another set. Keaton would shake his head in disbelief at the lameness of today’s green-screen digital cinema.
The films were expensive to make, relying heavily on improvisation, those insanely complicated sight gags, and extensive fine-tuning that involved playing films for test audiences, then doing reshoots. Keaton’s method was broken by MGM’s heavily regimented system and by the advent of the sound era in the late 1920s. “Just when we got it right, it was over,” Chaplin said. Keaton’s films flopped, his marriage fell apart, and his ex-wife stripped the Keaton name from their children. So he crawled into a bottle. At one point he was carted off to a mental hospital in a straitjacket. By the time he sobered up, he could barely find work, settling for $100 a week writing bits for MGM in the late 1930s.
Yet Keaton became a star all over again in the 1950s, albeit on a diminished scale. Forgotten by audiences, he turned out to be the perfect man to go undercover doing ridiculous stuff in front of unsuspecting bystanders for the smash TV show “Candid Camera.” He earned $50,000 for the rights to a biopic about him and happily lived with his third wife on a ranch he bought with the funds. He snapped up $5,000 to $10,000 a day filming commercials and regularly appeared on other TV shows. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his movie work and another for TV. Plus, he was the only actor to feature in both a short made by Samuel Beckett (“Film”) and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” — in the same year.
Working until the end, as usual, Keaton was indignant about doing his own stunts in a 1965 Canadian instructional film called “The Scribe.” But as Keaton was dying of lung cancer, a double had to be called in. Keaton was a comic force of nature. In the end, only God could stop his clowning.
