Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton: The Man Who Engineered His Own Danger

A two-ton, two-storey building facade falls flat onto a man standing with his back to it. He does not move. The frame of an open upstairs window passes over his body with a few inches to spare on either side, and he remains standing, expression unchanged. That shot, from *Steamboat Bill, Jr.* (1928), was calculated in advance, marked out on the ground, and executed once. It is the most concise available summary of Buster Keaton's method: comedy as a problem in applied physics, with the comedian's body as the tolerance.

The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged

He was born Joseph Frank Keaton on 4 October 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, to Joe Keaton and Myra Edith Cutler. His father had run a travelling show with Harry Houdini called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company. The story that Houdini named him — remarking that he was "quite the little buster" after a fall downstairs — is the popular one; historians think a fellow vaudevillian whose name is lost is likelier.

He joined the family act at three. *The Three Keatons* was knockabout in the most literal sense: his father threw him against scenery, into the orchestra pit and into the audience, aided by a suitcase handle sewn into the boy's clothing. Managers were accused, and occasionally Joe Keaton was arrested, but inspectors found no bruises and no broken bones, and the billing became a boast — "The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged." Keaton always insisted he had not been abused, and that the technique was precisely what kept him from injury.

That is the crucial fact about his craft. Before he ever saw a camera, he had spent more than a decade learning, at professional standard and nightly, how a human body absorbs an impact without harm. Everything he later built on film was constructed on top of that training.

Arbuckle, and a Camera Taken Apart

In February 1917, aged twenty-one, he met Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Offered a look at a film camera, Keaton took it back to his hotel room and dismantled it to see how it worked, then returned to ask for a job. He was cast in *The Butcher Boy* (1917), shot in a single take with no retakes. He served in the First World War, losing some of his hearing.

By 1920 he had his own operation, Buster Keaton Studios, set up under the producer Joseph Schenck, and between 1920 and 1928 he made nineteen silent shorts and ten silent features. The shorts alone — *One Week* (1920), *Cops* (1922) — established a grammar of escalating mechanical catastrophe. Seven of his films are in the National Film Registry, and Time later placed *Sherlock Jr.* among the hundred greatest films ever made.

The features were made at real physical cost. During *Sherlock Jr.* (1924) a torrent of water from a water tower came down on his neck; he broke it, and did not discover the fracture until years later.

The General

*The General*, released at the end of 1926, was his most ambitious film: a Civil War chase built almost entirely around two locomotives. Its central shot — a real engine going through a burning bridge and into the river below — was the most expensive single shot in silent film history.

Audiences and reviewers of the day were unimpressed. The picture was too dramatic for filmgoers who had come for a lightweight comedy, and it received mixed notices. Its reputation is entirely a later construction. Orson Welles eventually called it "the greatest comedy ever made... and perhaps the greatest film ever made."

The MGM Mistake

In 1928 Keaton signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He described the decision afterwards as an irretrievable mistake, and it was. The studio took away his direction, imposed scripts and supervisors, and insisted on stunt doubles for a performer whose entire art was the visible absence of one. His last American starring feature, *What! No Beer?*, came in 1933. His judgement of the era was flat: "the big companies were out to kill the independents."

His personal life collapsed alongside it. Natalie Talmadge, whom he married in 1921, divorced him in 1932 and took custody of their sons; a second marriage, to the nurse Mae Scriven, lasted from 1933 to 1936. He drank heavily. In 1940 he married Eleanor Norris, twenty-one years his junior, and by his own account she saved his life; the marriage lasted twenty-six years, until his death.

The Long Second Act

He worked continuously from 1933 to 1949 — two-reelers for Educational and Columbia, character parts in larger pictures, and, uncredited, as a gag man at MGM, supplying material for the Marx Brothers among others. He appeared in *Sunset Boulevard* (1950), *Around the World in 80 Days* (1956) and *It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World* (1963), and had a television series, *The Buster Keaton Show*, in 1950. In Chaplin's *Limelight* (1952) the two greatest figures of silent comedy shared the screen for the only time.

Why Buster Is Called a Genius

The recognition arrived late: the George Eastman Award in 1955, and an Academy Honorary Award voted in 1959 and presented at the 1960 ceremony. Roger Ebert judged that his run from 1920 to 1929 made him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."

The claim does not rest on intellect in the ordinary sense. Keaton's genius is craft: physical technique fused with gag engineering. The physical half is the vaudeville training — a body drilled from infancy to fall, roll and absorb collisions, which is why he could take a water tower to the neck or stand under a falling wall at all. The engineering half is rarer. Keaton built his gags as machines. A Keaton sequence is a physical system set in motion — a boat, a train, a house, a hillside of boulders — whose consequences unspool with the logic of a proof, staged in long takes with the camera far enough back to prove nothing was faked.

The counter-case is substantial. This is spatial intelligence, closer to an engineer's than a philosopher's, and much of it shaded into recklessness; a broken neck he failed to notice is not purely a mark of mastery. The gift also proved non-portable — the moment MGM took his control, the work stopped being good. And the verdict is largely posthumous: *The General* failed with the audiences it was made for. What secures the claim is that the films still work on viewers with no interest in film history.

Afterwards

He died of lung cancer on 1 February 1966 in Woodland Hills, California, aged seventy, in the middle of a late-career revival he lived just long enough to enjoy. His face — set, watchful, refusing to comment on the catastrophe unfolding around it — remains one of the few images from the silent era that requires no explanation to anyone.