Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Sunday, May 15, 2005

BUSTER KEATON

Tempest in a Flat Hat

By Edward McPherson. Newmarket. 288 pp. $26.95

Buster Keaton (1895-1966) brought a superb set of assets to movies: an athlete's body, a vaudevillian's instincts and a mechanic's curiosity. His wiry physique could answer to multiple demands -- dashing, leaping, pratfalling, catapulting, getting flattened by bullies and, in one case, slammed by the full contents of a railroad water tank. His showmanship was so well-developed that MGM kept him on the payroll as a gagman for other comedians long after the studio's ham-fisted management and his alcoholism had combined to end his stardom. As for the tinkering, Keaton's first day in front of a camera ended with him taking the instrument home, and then apart, to see how it worked. In short order, he became a cinematic quadruple threat: actor, writer, director and technical wizard. And then another ingredient kicked in, the one no one had known was there: filmmaking genius.

In this spiffy new biography, Edward McPherson is especially good at describing the ingenuity at the heart of Keaton's career. Consider an early, two-reel tour de force, "The Playhouse." A precursor to the restaurant scene in "Being John Malkovich," the film is all Buster, almost all the time. That is, the playhouse audience is composed of nothing but Busters -- every man, woman and child. Same with the orchestra: Buster after Buster after Buster. And when the curtain goes up, here come the Buster Keaton Minstrels, nine cavorting replicas of guess who.

As McPherson explains, for the on-stage sequence Keaton in effect split the screen into nine fragments, one for each minstrel, "courtesy of a custom-designed shuttered lightproof casing that fit over the camera. . . . To create the minstrels, the shutters simply were opened one at a time, with the film rewound in between. However, mechanical precision was not enough. It took the steady arm of cameraman Elgin Lessley -- the human metronome -- to crank each exposure at exactly the same speed. And then -- to achieve onscreen synchronicity -- Buster had to give nine flawless, identical performances. . . . One slipup -- by anyone, on any take -- would ruin the strip of film, and with it all the previous work." To see how fiendishly well Keaton and Lessley collaborated, rent "The Playhouse" from your video store and be wowed.

Buster was born Joseph Frank Keaton to parents who danced and clowned in medicine shows and vaudeville. When the child took an accidental tumble at age 18 months, a family friend picked him up, remarking "My, what a buster!" As McPherson notes, the term was "show-biz slang for a fall," in this case extended to the one who fell. The parents had to dodge the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to work Buster into their routines. Once they did, he got mixed up in barrages of roughhouse as The Little Boy Who Cannot Be Damaged. His dad insisted that Buster suffer these indignities without mugging, and the boy's naturally sad eyes combined with the enforced stoicism to beget his trademark stone face.

He started acting in films in New York, as second banana to Fatty Arbuckle. By Christmas of 1919, Keaton had relocated to Hollywood and become a headliner, earning $1,000 a week. He developed a loose, improvisational, collegial style of preparation that owed much to Arbuckle's example. "Buster rehearsed his scenes only lightly, if at all," McPherson writes. "He simply discussed the relevant action with the cameraman and the other actors, then rolled the film. . . . The cameramen . . . had their standing orders: no matter what, keep filming." Unlike so many other silent-era comedians, Keaton relied less on slapstick than on ingenuity, crack stunt work (almost always by the star himself) and surprise.

The apotheosis of the Keaton approach is the fluidity of "Sherlock, Jr.," in which a projectionist dreams his way into the film he is showing. It all looks effortless, but the trickery required meticulous preparation. Keaton's entry into the movie is followed by a series of vignettes in which the background undergoes wild changes while he remains immobile. To effect this, the crew had to measure him "from multiple angles using surveying instruments." As McPherson sums it up, Keaton had "filmed the impossible." "Sherlock, Jr." and the longer, more textured "The General" are the summits of his career, perhaps of silent comedy itself.

Thanks to the enlightened standoffishness of his producer, Joe Schenck, who had his own studio, Keaton enjoyed a free hand during most of the 1920s. But in late 1927 Schenck decided to do other things and urged Keaton to sign with MGM. His friends, Charlie Chaplin among them, warned him against it, but Keaton, stung by a series of flops (including -- unaccountably -- "The General"), felt he had little choice. It was a decision he came to regret bitterly: The studio's sausage-making machine was inimical to the kind of freewheeling non-schedule on which Keaton had thrived. They wanted scripts with every shot spelled out in detail, they wanted predictability, they wanted tight budgets, they wanted control. The MGM lion ate Keaton up.

McPherson glides over Keaton's later career, when he made journeyman comedies for fly-by-night studios, took small parts in Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" and Chaplin's "Limelight," appeared on countless TV shows, and enjoyed belated recognition as a legend. That's a wise move. Keaton's glory is his work of the late teens and the '20s, which McPherson evokes with insight and enthusiasm. Of the sublime "Sherlock, Jr.," he concludes that after we've watched it, we're "a little better off." Too grand a claim to make for an 80-year-old silent comedy? Not at all. ·

Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of Book World.