JCSM Shareware Collection 1993 November/JCSM Shareware Collection - 1993-11.iso/cl980/bestart.lzh/BUSTER.ART

Text File | 1993-02-09 | 10.5 KB | 195 lines

                     BUSTER KEATON: STONE-FACED OPTIMIST

                               By Robert Bloch

         It was 1922, in a Chicago theater.  He was up on the screen,
         and I was in the audience.  He didn't, of course, see me-but
         I saw him and (gave him the greatest tribute a five-year-old
         could possibly bestow on a comedian: I laughed so hard (I
         wet my pants.

         The film was one of his classic two-reelers, The Boat
         (1921).  I didn't know it was a classic -- for that matter,
         neither did Buster Keaton, for unlike Chaplin, he was never
         concerned with his own status or image.  He wanted only to
         make us laugh.

         In the years that followed I made it a point to see Keaton's
         movies again and again.  My trousers remained dry, but I
         never stopped laughing.

         His great short subjects were superseded throughout the
         twenties by his great silent features.  With the coming of
         the talkies he gained a voice but lost his independence.  A
         combination of studio interference and domestic difficulties
         ruined his career and his private life; comedy gave way to
         tragedy.

         Almost any Hollywood hack could have written the rest of the
         script.  The dialogue is obvious;
              Buster:   Please, Mr. Jennings -- you've got to help me!
              Producer: Sorry, kid.  We just can't use you.
              Buster:   Look -- all i'm asking for is a chance -- a
                        chance to make people laugh again.
              Producer: It's too late for that now.  You're through,
                        Buster -- washed up!  Don't you understand?
                        You're not funny anymore!

         The rest of the story is also obvious: bouts with the
         bottle; an endless round of humiliations and rejections; and
         then God and scriptwriter willing -- a final opportunity for
         a comeback, out of the blue.  For one brief moment the hero
         again takes center stage, only to be struck down, dying, as
         the sought-after laughter echoes in his years.

         Come to think of it, Chaplin used such a script for
         Limelight (1952).  But Keaton would never have played it; he
         wasn't one for self-pity or even audience sympathy in his
         films.  And he didn't play it that way in real life.

         The humiliations and rejections were there, and for a time
         he used drink as a weapon against them.  But like the
         indomitable little man he played on screen, he never
         succumbed to defeat, and in the end his sheer perseverance
         brought salvation.  It took twenty-five years of cheap
         two-reelers, sleazy foreign features, brief cameo
         appearances in American films, summer stock, gag-writing for
         other comedians,  European circus performances, television
         guest shots -- but he never gave up.  Somewhere along the
         line he won the girl--his wife Eleanor Norris--and discarded
         the bottle.  By 1960 he was again economically secure and on
         the verge of fresh acclaim from a new generation.

         It was then, thirty-eight years since I saw him on the
         screen, that I met Buster Keaton in the flesh.  I'd been
         working on scripts in Hollywood for a few months when a
         Writers Guild strike was called.  During this period of
         unemployment, friends invited me to Griffith Park to play in
         a baseball game between writers and actors.  There, warming
         up on the field, was the actors' star pitcher: Joseph
         Francis Keaton III -- Buster himself.

         I did a double take.  Was this pudgy, baldheaded, elderly
         little man really the Great Stone Face?


         The game began.  The pudgy little man disappeared, and in
         his place was a superbly controlled athlete, leaping into
         the air for difficult catches, running bases at championship
         speed, doing comic slides, backflips, and pratfalls with
         dazzling timing.

         He struck me out.

         Later, after I was introduced by mutual friends, Mr. and
         Mrs. Keaton drove me to their Woodland Hills Home.
         Somewhere along the way they became Buster and Eleanor.

         Over several years I came to know something of the face
         behind the stoic mask.  Buster loved to laugh.  The man who
         played The Friendless One in, Go West (1925), was, in fact,
         gregarious -- fond of card playing, group sports,
         entertaining.  At parties he reminisced with a ukulele,
         reproducing with amusing accuracy the songs and routines of
         vaudeville performers he'd met through his parents' act,
         "The Three Keatons."

         In private moments, he enjoyed recalling summer vacations at
         Muskegon, Michigan, where he led the everyday life of a
         Midwestern boyhood.  Only when urged would he talk about the
         bad times -- candidly but without bitterness.  Once I was
         bold enough to ask what had sustained him through the long
         years of decline.  His reply was revealing: "No matter how
         tough things got, I could still walk into a restaurant
         anywhere in the world and get a good table.  Even when
         Hollywood forgot me, the audiences remembered..."

         What  they remembered has been analyzed in detail by film
         historians.  His astonishing mechanical ingenuity, the
         love-hate relationship with machinery, is immortalized in
         films built around a boat (The Navigator, 1924) and a train
         (The General, 1926).  His camera tricks are dazzling in The
         Playhouse (1921), in which the entire cast of a vaudeville
         show, the orchestra in the pit, and the audience consist of
         Buster himself in scores of disguises, including Buster made
         up as a trained chimpanzee and nine members of a blackface
         minstrel troupe.  His virtuosity is even more brilliant in
         Sherlock, Jr. 1924); as a motion picture projectionist, he
         walks into the screen and becomes a part of the film itself.
          He had unerring timing and sheer perfection in his
         routines, the sudden, unexpected bite of his mordant humor,
         the amazing range of emotional nuances he conveyed without a
         smile.

         But the real secret of his genius is simple.  Unlike other
         great silent screen comedians, Buster Keaton was inimitable.

         Charlie Chaplin's imitators were legion, and some, like
         Billy West, almost defied detection.  Harold Lloyd's
         go-getter or coward-turned-hero roles were duplicated by
         Johnny Hines and Douglas MacLean.  Harry Langdon's simpleton
         was a stock figure of the day, paralleled by Lloyd Hamilton
         and other innocents; his white clown makeup was reminiscent
         of Larry Semon's.  Raymond Griffith's sophisticate echoed
         Max Linder.

         But no one ever imitated Buster Keaton.  Lloyd was a fine
         athlete; Keaton, a great one.  Griffith's unflappable fop
         was in no way superior to Keaton's portrayals in The
         Navigator or Battling Butler (1926).  Lloyd and Chaplin were
         masters of the sight gag, but Keaton equaled or surpassed
         them.  And his use of gags was more ethical.  Unlike Lloyd
         or chaplin, he was not petty or malicious; yes, he would use
         a gag to outwit an enemy, but he never stooped to revenge.
         At times Keaton seemed to be as confused and gullible as
         Langdon, but he was more resourceful.  Once he sized up the
         situation, he took direct and (usually) effective action.

         Chaplin's mastery of mime involved exaggerated mugging to
         indicate reaction; Keaton's pantomime made its point without
         facial acrobatics.  And while Chaplin was shameless in his
         plea for audience sympathy -- witness the mawkish,
         interminable death scene in Limelight -- Keaton met indignity
         with dignity.

         Only Keaton was versatile enough to incorporate elements of
         many comedic styles into a broader and deeper
         characterization which stands unequaled to this day.

         The ridiculous little figure in the pancake hat, slap-shoes,
         and baggy trousers may have resembled a knock-about
         vaudeville performer.  The resemblance ended there.  Inside
         that costume was Buster himself.

         Chaplin was a supreme clown, Griffith a deft caricature,
         Langdon a baby, Lloyd the eternal boy -- but Keaton,
         combining their roles and adding the dimension of his own at
         attitude toward life, was a man.  The motionless face
         surrounding the busy body represents a mature approach to the
         problems of life -- a combination of thought and action.  And
         though both thoughts and actions are comic, the element of
         recognition is always apparent.  Buster Keaton used the
         screen as a mirror.  And in that mirror, the Great Stone Face
         we see is always our own.

                             GODOT'S BEGINNINGS?

         Many people wonder where Samuel Beckett got his inspiration
         for his play Waiting for Godot.  Beckett was a great fan of
         Keaton's and wrote his short Film (1965) with Keaton in
         mind, and Keaton did star.  Is it possible That Beckett saw
         Keaton in a minor role in a film called That Loveable Chat
         (1949)?  In that obscure movie, a man waits for the return
         of his partner who has their fortune in his possession.  He
         waits and waits, but his partner never comes.  The partner's
         name?  Godot.

         (Robert Bloch has written the screenplays for many films
         dealing with the macabre, including Strait-jacket, The Night
         Walker, The Deadly Bees, The Torture Garden, and The House
         That Dripped Blood.  He is the original author of Psycho.)

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