Keaton in Shorts

At the outset of his career as a solo film comedian, Buster Keaton would recall many years later, he urged his producer, Joseph Schenck, to permit him to make comedy features. A former star of the vaudeville stage, Keaton had just completed an apprenticeship as a supporting actor and assistant director to Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle on two-reel comedies for the Comique Film Corporation, founded by Schenck to showcase Arbuckle's comic talents in 1917. In late 1919 Arbuckle was recruited by Paramount to star in a series of carefully scripted feature-length films, far removed in style from the freewheeling physical comedy of Comique. This opened a space for Keaton to advance to the lead role at the small, independent studio. Schenck insisted, however, that his newest star, for whom he was about to launch an extensive promotional campaign, stick to making comedy shorts, a decision, Keaton suggests, that gave rivals Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd a head start in an unofficial race to make slapstick features.¹

It is not difficult to imagine why Schenck refused Keaton's request. By 1920 Chaplin's tramp figure was the most recognizable screen icon in the world, and Lloyd, who had diligently tried out two other screen personae in a career as a solo performer dating back to 1915, had recently struck pay dirt with the "glasses" character for which he is still remembered today. The gradual lengthening of comedies by Chaplin and Lloyd in the early 1920s was a logical outgrowth of the performers' popularity, as well as their ambitions to weave physical comedy into longer, and potentially more lucrative, formats. Keaton, however, had yet to develop the kind of marketable screen identity around which the first feature comedies of Chaplin and Lloyd were constructed.

In key respects, Keaton benefited from Schenck's decision. Working at a steady clip, Keaton's comedy unit—renamed Buster Keaton Productions in 1922—produced nineteen short films, two to three reels in length, over the next three years. Keaton forged close professional ties with a group of talented collaborators, including actor Joe Roberts, his on-screen comic foil; codirector Eddie Cline; cinematographer Elgin Lessley; editor J. Sherman Kell, and technical director Fred Gabourie, who continued to make a major contribution to Keaton's technically innovative comedies throughout the silent era. With little money at risk on any single project, Keaton was also able to experiment with comic ideas, exercising a relatively free hand. Over the next several years, Keaton's name came to stand in for a certain brand of ingenious comic filmmaking, with the sober-faced, gracefully acrobatic figure of "Buster" its most salient feature. Meanwhile Chaplin in The Kid (1921), and Lloyd in A Sailor-Made Man (1921), Grandma's Boy (1922), and Doctor Jack (1922), blended improvisational slapstick with carefully developed stories, four reels in length and more. By 1923 Keaton would be in a position to do the same.

Among its several virtues, Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films, 1917–1923, a four-disc DVD set released by Eureka! in the U.K. in 2006, provides the attentive viewer with the opportunity to examine closely Keaton's development as a comic performer and film director during these early years, beginning with his first appearance with Arbuckle in The Butcher Boy in the spring of 1917, and ending with his own final silent short, The Love Nest, in the winter of 1923. Nick Wrigley, production manager for the Eureka! "Masters of Cinema" series of which this collection is a part, is to be commended for drawing on the best available source material in the production of these videos, film footage located and restored by the U.S.-based preservationist, David Shepard, in partnership with Serge Lomberg and Eric Lange of Lobster Films, Paris. This archival material is not entirely new to video. It provided the basis for a companion...