1920: One Week (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Eddie Cline); Convict Thirteen (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Scarecrow (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline). 1921: Neighbors (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Haunted House (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); Hard Luck (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline) The High Sign (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Goat (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Mal St. Clair); The Playhouse (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Boat (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline). 1922: The Paleface (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); Cops (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); My Wife's Relations (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Blacksmith (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Mal St. Clair); The Frozen North (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); Day Dreams (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Electric House (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline). 1923: The Balloonatic (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Love Nest (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter with Cline); The Three Ages; Our Hospitality (co-director). 1924: Sherlock Jr. (co-director); The Navigator (co-director). 1925: Seven Chances; Go West (+story). 1926: Battling Butler; The General (co-director, co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1927: College (uncredited director). 1928: Steamboat Bill, Jr. (uncredited director); The Cameraman (+producer, uncredited director). 1929: Spite Marriage (uncredited director). 1938: Life in Sometown, U.S.A.; Hollyivood Handicap; Streamlined Swing.
1917: The Butcher Boy (Fatty Arbuckle comedy) (role as village pest); A Reckless Romeo (Arbuckle) (role as a rival); The Rough House (Arbuckle) (role); His Wedding Night (Arbuckle) (role); Oh, Doctor! (Arbuckle) (role); Fatty at Coney Island (Coney Island) (Arbuckle) (role as husband touring Coney Island with his wife); A Country Hero (Arbuckle) (role). 1918: Out West (Arbuckle) (role as a dude gambler); The Bell Boy (Arbuckle) (role as a village pest); Moonshine (Arbuckle) (role as an assistant revenue agent); Good Night, Nurse! (Arbuckle) (role as the doctor and a visitor); The Cook (Arbuckle) (role as the waiter and helper). 1919: Back Stage (Arbuckle) (role as a stagehand); The Hayseed (Arbuckle) (role as a helper). 1920: The Garage (Arbuckle) (role as a garage mechanic); The Round Up (role as an Indian); The Saphead (role as Bertie ?the Lamb? Van Alstyne). 1922: Screen Snapshots, No. 3 (role). 1929: The Hollywood Revue (role as an Oriental dancer). 1930: Free & Easy (Easy Go) (role as Elmer Butts); Doughboys (producer, role as Elmer Stuyvesant). 1931: Parlor, Bedroom & Bath (producer, role as Reginald Irving); Sidewalks of New York (producer, role as Tine Harmon). 1932: The Passionate Plumber (producer, role as Elmer Tuttle); Speak Easily (role as Professor Timoleon Zanders Post). 1933: What! No Beer! (role as Elmer J. Butts). 1934: The Gold Ghost (role as Wally); Allez Oop (role as Elmer); Le Roi designer Champs Elysees (role as Buster Gamier and Jim le Balafre). 1935: The Invader (The Intruder) (role as Leander Proudfoot); Palookah from Paducah (role as Jim); One Run Elmer (role as Elmer); Hayseed Romance (role as Elmer); Tars & Stripes (role as Elmer); The E-Flat Man (role as Elmer); The Timid Young Man (role as Elmer). 1936: Three On a Limb (role as Elmer); Grand Slam Opera (role as Elmer); La Fiesta de Santa Barbara (role as one of several stars); Blue Blazes (role as Elmer); The Chemist (role as Elmer); Mixed Magic (role as Elmer). 1937: Jail Bait (role as Elmer); Ditto (role as Elmer); Love Nest on Wheels (last apearance as Elmer). 1939: The jones Family in Hollywood (co-scenarist/scriptwriter): The Jones Family in Quick Millions (co-scenarist/scriptwriter); Pest from the West (role as a traveler in Mexico); Mooching through Georgia (role as a Civil War veteran); Hollywood Cavalcade (role). 1940: Nothing but Pleasure (role as a vacationeer); Pardon My Berth Marks (role as a reporter); The Taming of the Snood (role as an innocent accomplice); The Spook Speaks (role as a magician's housekeeper); The Villain Still Pursued Her (role); Li'l Abner (role as Lonesome Polecat); His Ex Marks the Spot (role). 1941: So You Won't Squawk (role); She's Oil Mine (role); General Nuisance (role). 1943: Forever and a Day (role as a plumber). 1944: San Diego, I Love You (role as a bus driver). 1945: That's the Spirit (role as L.M.); That Night with You (role). 1946: God's Country (role); El Moderno Barba azul (role as prisoner of Mexicans who is sent to moon). 1949: The Loveable Cheat (role as a suitor); In the Good Old Summertime (role as Hickey); You're My Everything (role as butler). 1950: Un Duel a mort (role as comic duellist); Sunset Boulevard (Wilder) (role as a bridge player). 1952: Limelight (Chaplin) (role as the piano accompanist in a music hall sketch); L'incantevole nemica (role in a brief sketch); Paradise for Buster (role). 1955: The Misadventures of Buster Keaton (role). 1956: Around the World in Eighty Days (role as a train conductor). 1960: When Comedy Was King (role in a clip from Cops); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Curtiz) (role as a lion tamer). 1963: Thirty Years of Fun (appearance in clips); The Triumph of Lester Snapwell (role as Lester); It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Kramer) (role as would-be surfer); Film (role as Object/Eye); How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (role as Bwana); Sergeant Deadhead (Taurog) (role as Private Blinken); The Rail-rodder (role); Buster Keaton Rides Again (role). 1966: The Scribe (role); A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Lester) (role as Erronius). 1967: Due Marines e un Generale (War, Italian Style) (role as the German general). 1970: The Great Stone Face (role).
Part of parents' vaudeville act, The Three Keatons, from 1898; when family act broke up, became actor for Comique Film Corp.; moved to California, 1917; appeared in 15 two-reelers for Comique, 1917-19; offered own production company with Metro Pictures by Joseph Schenk, 1919, produced 19 two-reelers, 1920-23; directed ten features, 1923-28; dissolved production company, signed to MGM, 1928; announced retirement from the screen, 1933; starred in 16 comedies for Educational Pictures, 1934-39; worked intermittently as gag writer for MGM, 1937-50; appeared in 10 two-reelers for Columbia, 1939-41; appeared on TV and in commercials,from 1949; Cin?math?que Fran?aise Keaton retrospective, 1962.
Joseph Francis Keaton in Piqua, Kansas, 4 October 1895.
Served in U.S. Army, France, 1918.
Married 1) Natalie Talmadge, 1921 (divorced 1932), two sons; 2) Mae Scribbens, 1933 (divorced 1935); 3) Eleanor Norris, 1940.
Of lung cancer, in Woodland Hills, California, 1 February 1966.
Buster Keaton is the only creator-star of American silent comedies who equals Chaplin as one of the artistic giants of the cinema. He is perhaps the only silent clown whose reputation is far higher today than it was in the 1920s, when he made his greatest films. Like Chaplin, Keaton came from a theatrical family and served his apprenticeship on stage in the family's vaudeville act. Unlike Chaplin, however, Keaton's childhood and family life were less troubled, more serene, lacking the darkness of Chaplin's youth that would lead to the later darkness of his films. Keaton's films were more blithely athletic and optimistic, more committed to audacious physical stunts and cinema tricks, far less interested in exploring moral paradoxes and emotional resonances. Keaton's most famous comic trademark, his ?great stone face,? itself reflects the commitment to a comedy of the surface, but attached to that face was one of the most resiliently able and acrobatic bodies in the history of cinema. Keaton's comedy was based on the conflict between that imperviously dead-pan face, his tiny but almost superhuman physical instrument, and the immensity of the physical universe that surrounded them.
After an apprenticeship in the late 1910s making two-reel comedies that starred his friend Fatty Arbuckle, and after service in France in 1918, Keaton starred in a series of his own two-reel comedies beginning in 1920. Those films displayed Keaton's comic and visual inventiveness: the delight in bizarrely complicated mechanical gadgets (The Scarecrow, The Haunted House); the realization that the cinema itself was an intriguing mechanical toy (his use of split-screen in The Playhouse of 1921 allows Buster to play all members of the orchestra and audience, as well as all nine members of a minstrel troupe); the games with framing and composition (The Balloonatic is a comic disquisition on the surprises one can generate merely by entering, falling out of, or suppressing information in the frame); the breathtaking physical stunts and chases (Daydreams, Cops); and the underlying fatalism when his exuberant efforts produce ultimately disastrous results (Cops, One Week, The Boat).
In 1923 Keaton's producer, Joseph M. Schenck, decided to launch the comic star in a series of feature films, to replace a previously slated series of features starring Schenck's other comic star, the now scandal-ruined Fatty Arbuckle. Between 1923 and 1929, Keaton made an even dozen feature films on a regular schedule of two a year?always leaving Keaton free in the early autumn to travel east for the World Series. This regular pattern of Keaton's work?as opposed to Chaplin's lengthy laboring and devoted concentration on each individual project?reveals the way Keaton saw his film work. He was not making artistic masterpieces but knocking out everyday entertainment, like the vaudevillian playing the two-a-day. Despite the casualness of this regular routine (which would be echoed decades later by Woody Allen's regular one-a-year rhythm), many of those dozen silent features are comic masterpieces, ranking alongside the best of Chaplin's comic work.
Most of those films begin with a parodic premise-the desire to parody some serious and familiar form of stage or screen melodrama, such as the Civil War romance (The General), the mountain feud (Our Hospitality), the Sherlock Holmes detective story (Sherlock, Jr.), the Mississippi riverboat race (Steamboat Bill, Jr.), or the western (Go West). Two of the features were built around athletics (boxing in Battling Butler and every sport but football in College), and one was built around the business of motion picture photography itself (The Cameraman). The narrative lines of these films were thin but fast-paced, usually based on the Keaton character's desire to satisfy the demands of his highly conventional lady love. The film's narrative primarily served to allow the film to build to its extended comic sequences, which, in Keaton's films, continue to amaze with their cinematic ingenuity, their dazzling physical stunts, and their hypnotic visual rhythms. Those sequences usually forced the tiny but dexterous Keaton into combat with immense and elemental antagonists: a rockslide in Seven Chances; an entire ocean liner in The Navigator; a herd of cattle in Go West; a waterfall in Our Hospitality. Perhaps the cleverest and most astonishing of his elemental foes appears in Sherlock, Jr. when the enemy becomes cinema itself?or, rather, cinematic time and space. Buster, a dreaming movie projectionist, becomes imprisoned in the film he is projecting, subject to its inexplicable laws of montage, of shifting spaces and times, as opposed to the expected continuity of space and time in the natural universe. Perhaps Keaton's most satisfyingly whole film is The General, virtually an extended chase from start to finish, as the Keaton character chases north, in pursuit of his stolen locomotive, then races back south with it, fleeing his Union pursuers. The film combines comic narrative, the rhythms of the chase, Keaton's physical stunts, and his fondness for mechanical gadgets into what may be the greatest comic epic of the cinema.
Unlike Chaplin, Keaton's stardom and comic brilliance did not survive Hollywood's conversion to synchronized sound. It was not simply a case of a voice's failing to suit the demands of both physical comedy and the microphone. Keaton's personal life was in shreds, after a bitter divorce from Natalie Talmadge. Always a heavy social drinker, Keaton's drinking increased in direct proportion to his personal troubles. Neither a comic spirit nor an acrobatic physical instrument could survive so much alcoholic abuse. In addition, Keaton's contract had been sold by Joseph Schenck to MGM (conveniently controlled by his brother, Nicholas Schenck, head of Loew's Inc., MGM's parent company). Between 1929 and 1933, MGM assigned Keaton to a series of dreary situation comedies?in many of them as Jimmy Durante's co-star and straight man. For the next two decades, Keaton survived on cheap two-reel sound comedies and occasional public appearances, until his major role in Chaplin's Limelight led to a comeback. Keaton remarried, went on the wagon, and made stage, television, and film appearances in featured roles. In 1965 he played the embodiment of existential consciousness in Samuel Beckett's only film work, Film, followed shortly by his final screen appearance in Richard Lester's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.?GERALD MAST