The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton (review)

The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton. Robert Knopf. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1999. Pp. 217. $39.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

It's arguable that Keaton's reputation is fading; arguable, too, that we'd enjoy him more if we could shed expectations we may not be aware of having, as that good cinema is today's big-budget cinema, achieving a realism such as the stage once aspired to: a well-made plot unfolding from beginning to end, its happenings rooted in a real world. One Keaton film that did match such criteria was The General (1927). Unlike his other silent features, it was based on a book, a book moreover with a well-made plot, drawn from something that happened during the Civil War. Northern soldiers commandeer a Southern train and head north, destroying telegraph wires important to the Dixie war effort. Its conductor (Buster) pursues them "initially on foot, then in a handcar, and finally with a locomotive he discover[s] along the way" (87-8). To this Keaton added a second train chase--Northern soldiers chasing Buster back south--also a lady abducted and later rescued along with the train. These symmetries "contribute to scholars' claims for The General's classicism" (88).

On the other hand, the best-remembered detail of Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)--the entire front framework of a three-storey building falling forward toward us onto a dazed Keaton, who escapes unharmed because he is standing exactly under a descending attic window-frame--was just one climax in an "explosion of attractions," the stunts and gags of which "no longer advance the story as the earlier ones did" because Keaton seems to have decided that the "narrative momentum" could by then look after itself (98). So what happens to the well-made plot? It gives way to a series of sketches held together by the magnetic presence of Keaton. In vaudeville the unit of attention was ten to twenty minutes long. Story-line, in short, is replaced by vaudeville.

And, as Knopf repeatedly emphasizes, the world of vaudeville was the world in which Buster Keaton grew up, and "Keaton's films . . . survive as living artifacts from vaudeville" (10-11). Buster's father and mother were vaudeville comedians. Soon after he could walk he joined their act, and "from the time Buster became a regular part of the Keatons' act, falling down was Buster's main occupation" (23). "He is hurled all over the stage," one reviewer noted of the ten-year-old star, "grabbed by the tails of his long Prince Albert, shot across a long table on a slide, turns a somersault and stands on his feet at the edge of the footlights with about the funniest grin on his face that a human being ever worked his countenance into" (26). Though later the grin was replaced by a face of wondrous immobility, a Buster immune to any degree of buffeting was to become his classic persona. In a still from The Garage, a 1920 two-reeler, we see a car of that era sitting flat on the ground, its headlights, fenders, and all four wheels having fallen off in unison, to lie symmetrically disposed round the corpse of the car. The driver on whom this disaster has been visited is Fatty Arbuckle. He looks dismayed. Beside him sits Buster Keaton, hands on knees, looking coolly detached. Ah, yes; another day, another wreck. That photo isn't in the book we're discussing; you can find it on page 134 of Rudi Blesh's Keaton (New York: MacMillan, 1996).

The Keaton of stony detachment was developed in Buster's vaudeville days. Film permitted the disasters from which he seems so detached to far exceed the capacity of any stage. A car wreck, yes. Or a huge waterfall, site of some of Keaton's most amazing gymnastics (Our Hospitality, 1923). But the logic behind these filmed sequences remains that of vaudeville: we tend...