Battling Butler (Buster Keaton, 1926)

Cast: Buster Keaton, Snitz Edwards, Sally O'Neil, Walter James, Budd Fine, Francis McDonald, Mary O'Brien, Tom Wilson, Eddie Borden. Screenplay: Paul Gerard Smith, Al Boasberg, Charles Henry Smith, Lex Neal, based on a play by Stanley Brightman and Austin Melford. Cinematography: Bert Haines, Devereaux Jennings. 

Rich man Alfred Butler (Buster Keaton) goes glamping with his valet (Snitz Edwards) and falls in love with a backwoods maiden (Sally O'Neil). When he's mistaken for the lightweight boxer Alfred "Battling" Butler (Francis McDonald), he has to prove his manly prowess to her burly father (Walter James) and brother (Budd Fine). Unfortunately, Keaton's comic routines in the boxing ring pale in comparison with Charles Chaplin's boxing scene in City  Lights (Chaplin, 1931). Keaton gets more laughs from entering the ring, getting tangled in the ropes, than he does while in it. Not one of Keaton's more inventive feature films, Battling Butler suffers a little from predictable plotting, derived from a Broadway musical that starred Charles Ruggles. Still, even a second-tier Keaton film is better than almost anyone else's standout movie.

The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton, 1928)

Buster Keaton in The Cameraman

Buster: Buster Keaton
Sally: Marceline Day
Stagg: Harold Goodwin
Editor: Sidney Bracey
Cop: Harry Gribbon

Director: Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton
Screenplay: Clyde Bruckman, Lew Lipton, Richard Schayer; titles by Joseph Farnham
Cinematography: Reggie Lanning, Elgin Lessley
Art direction: Fred Gabourie
Film editing: Hugh Wynn, Basil Wrangell

The Cameraman, Buster Keaton's first film under contract to MGM, isn't quite up to the standards set by The General (Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926) or Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner and Keaton, 1928), but then what is? Keaton plays a sidewalk photographer who is smitten with Sally, a receptionist in the studios of MGM's newsreel department. To try to win her, he buys an antique movie camera and sets out to get a job with the studio. Of course he screws up his first attempt and is shown the door, but several adventures later he succeeds in getting not only the job but also the girl. Keaton would come to regret signing with MGM, a studio strongly producer-driven, and he fought with producer Lawrence Weingarten over the concept and script for The Cameraman, eventually getting his own way after persuading the studio's creative director, Irving G. Thalberg, to back him. But the relationship with the studio was fated to end, especially when sound arrived and Keaton came to be seen as a relic of a fading era. There are some masterly moments in The Cameraman, such as the scene in which he and a much larger man struggle to change into their swimsuits in a too-small changing cubicle, (The scene, incidentally, gives us a glimpse of a shirtless Keaton, revealing a strikingly toned athletic body, the product of years of doing his own stunts.) There are perhaps too many scenes that Keaton is forced to share with a very cute trained monkey, distracting us from his own work, but this is probably the last of the great Keaton films.

The Navigator (Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton, 1924)

Buster Keaton always makes me grin. The first time I did it while watching The Navigator was when rich twit Rollo Treadaway (Keaton) puts on a straw hat and then gracefully steadies it with the crook of his cane. Keaton can do more with a hat -- or, later, hats -- than anyone, even Cary Grant with the outsize hat in my favorite scene in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937). And then the grin became a guffaw when Rollo gets in his chauffeur-driven limousine to go propose to Betsy O'Brien (Kathryn McGuire), another rich twit. The limo starts out and immediately makes a U-turn to the other side of the street, where Betsy lives. It's not just Keaton's physical grace and dexterity, for all that he pretends to be a klutz, or even the unexpectedness of some of the gags that make me so happy. It's primarily the sense of joy I get in watching a kid play with his toys. For Keaton has such wonderful toys in his movies. In The General (Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926) he has an entire antique railroad train to play with (and destroy); in Go West (Keaton, 1925) it's a herd of cattle; in Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner but really Keaton, 1928) it's a town in a terrific windstorm. So you can imagine his delight when he heard than a retired Army transport ship was for sale, and he could refit this enormous toy into the cruise ship Navigator and do with it as he pleased. And he certainly made the most of it, using the exposed decks and corridors for a hilarious game of unwitting hide-and-seek between Rollo and Betsy, turning the galley into an improbable kitchen for two rich twits who have never had to cook their own breakfast, and donning an old-fashioned diving suit for an extended underwater sequence: Keaton does the only pratfall I've ever seen anyone do underwater and in a diving suit, legs straight out as all the great slapstick comics did pratfalls. There are some occasional slow moments: The battle with the "cannibals" goes on much too long. But the pacing mostly stays so rapid that you want to rewind and watch some scenes to see what you miss -- a luxury denied his original audiences, who had to stay and sit through it twice. McGuire also appeared in Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), proving herself what any of Keaton's leading ladies had to be: game for almost anything, including repeated dives and dunkings.  Although Donald Crisp, better known to us as an actor, was an experienced director -- he has 72 IMDb directing credits from 1914 through 1930 -- he turned out to be a mismatch with Keaton, who took over and finished the film, sometimes reshooting scenes that Crisp had directed.

Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner, 1928)

This is probably the film I'd choose for someone who has never seen Buster Keaton and wants to know what all the fuss is about. It's not as neatly paced and well-balanced between comedy and action as The General (Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926), but it's non-stop funny. It contains what is perhaps Keaton's greatest gag, the scene in which the facade of a house falls around him, neatly landing with Keaton in the dead center of its open attic window. It also centers on the quintessential Keaton persona: the misfit who triumphs, stoic but determined, even in the face of parental scorn or the forces of nature, both of which supply most of the film's plot. For me, the iconic Keaton is the one who faces down the winds of a tornado, leaning in at a 45-degree angle, getting blown off his feet but rising to fight again. Of all the great comic personae, Keaton's was the most inner-directed. He never resorts to self-pity or pleads for pathos, as Chaplin sometimes did. When his father (Ernest Torrence) tries to replace his Eastern college wardrobe with something more befitting a Mississippi River steamboat captain's son, Keaton resists by slyly, repeatedly replacing the paternal choices with his own, a great crescendo of stubbornness and exasperation. Virtually all the elements of the Keaton persona are present in Steamboat Bill Jr., with one exception: the porkpie hat. But even it gets a brief cameo in a sequence in which Keaton tries on a sequence of hilariously inappropriate hats, modeling each one with the exception of the porkpie he is handed, which he rejects with disgust. (Pauline Kael suggests that Keaton parodies different movie stars of the era with each hat change, but this probably is lost on most contemporary audiences -- at least, it was on me.) Although the direction is credited to Charles Reisner and the screenplay to Carl Harbaugh, both were primarily the work of Keaton.

Go West (Buster Keaton, 1925)

TCM ran this Keaton feature with a two-reeler from 1917, Coney Island, directed by Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, in which Keaton plays a secondary role to Arbuckle. The remarkable thing about the earlier film is that Keaton hasn't found his stone-faced persona yet: He smiles and mugs in ways that we don't expect from him. Adapting the deadpan became, along with the porkpie hat, Keaton's trademark as a film comedian, and it's even alluded to in a scene in which Keaton's character, known only as Friendless, plays poker with a guy who cheats. When Friendless calls him on drawing from the bottom of the deck, the guy pulls out the familiar line from The Virginian: "Smile when you say that." Incapable of smiling, Friendless attempts the expression by poking up the corners of his mouth with two fingers. It all goes to show that when it came to expressiveness, Keaton was a master of body language, able to communicate love or diffidence or fear with the very angle of his stance. No one ever did a pratfall better than Keaton, once he discovered that the trick is to keep your legs stiff when you land on your butt. Go West is one of the lesser Keaton features, not quite in the league of The Navigator (1924) or Seven Chances (1925) or the sublime The General (1926). The gags are plentiful but they're not set up quite as well as in those pictures, or as elaborate as the ones in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928) and The Cameraman (1928). When the focus goes away from Keaton, as it does in the scenes in which he leads a cattle drive through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, causing much havoc, the film gets a little scattered. Keaton is at his best when he sets up a simple gag, as when he repeatedly arrives late for dinner with the other ranchhands, who get up and leave the table once he sits down, so that eventually he rushes in, sits down first, gobbles his dinner, and then gets up and leave the moment they sit down. This is the one in which Friendless finally finds a friend: a cow named Brown Eyes -- an outcast like himself because she refuses to give milk. Rescued from the slaughterhouse, Brown Eyes climbs into an automobile with Friendless and, seated beside him, rides away. Arbuckle, incidentally, has a bit part in drag in Go West, as a woman in the department store invaded by the cattle.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner, 1929)

Designed to show off the novelty of sound -- and, in two sequences, the coming novelty of Technicolor -- The Hollywood Revue of 1929 was enthusiastically received by critics and audiences, though it lost the best picture Oscar to The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929). Today, both movies are creaky antiques, despite the effort that MGM put into producing them. In fact, The Hollywood Revue often seems like an attempt to promote The Broadway Melody, which had opened three and a half months earlier, since it gives prominent spots to that film's stars, Charles King, Bessie Love, and Anita Page. The rest of it feels a lot like amateur night at MGM, as the studio's stars are trotted out for songs and skits that often feel tired and incoherent. In a few years, MGM would be boasting that it had more stars than there are in heaven, but many of the stars showcased in the Revue are forgotten today -- like King, Love, and Page -- or were on the wane -- like John Gilbert, Marion Davies, and Buster Keaton. The ones that remained stars, like Jack Benny and Joan Crawford, did so by reinventing themselves. The Revue, which modeled itself on theatrical conventions like the minstrel show and vaudeville, both of which were on the outs, failed to break ground for the Hollywood musical: It would take a few years for Warner Bros. to do that, with 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and the unfettered imagination of Busby Berkeley taking the backstage musical formula of The Broadway Melody and some of Sammy Lee's choreographic tricks from the Revue -- including overhead kaleidoscope shots -- and improving on them. The Revue has a few highlights even today: Joan Crawford trying a little too hard to sparkle as she sings (passably) and dances (clunkily); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their first sound film, doing a magic act with Jack Benny's intervention; Cliff Edwards and the Brox Sisters doing "Singin' in the Rain," which gets a Technicolor reprise with most of the company at the film's end; Keaton acrobatically clowning his way (silently) through an "underwater" drag routine; and Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in Technicolor performing a bit of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, first as Shakespeare wrote it and then in 1929's slang. To get to them, however, you have to sit through a lot of dud routines and dated songs like Charles King's paean to maternity, "Your Mother and Mine," which must have been aimed right at the mushy heart of Louis B. Mayer.  

The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926)

The Civil War had been over for 60 years when The General was made, and from the tone of it you might think the South had won. That was, however, the usual attitude in Hollywood, and would remain so for perhaps another 40 years. The reason usually given for Hollywood's avoidance of treating the Southern states as what they really were -- i.e., racist traitors -- is a fear of losing the considerable market that the former states of the Confederacy constituted. So The General seems biased toward treating the Confederacy as a genteel homeland full of honorable, self-sacrificing heroes. There's no shying away from waving the Confederate battle flag as there would be today, and the strains of "Dixie" are used to stirring effect even in the score composed for the restored version seen on TCM -- as they would have been in any theatrical showing in the year of its release. If all this sounds like a curious quibble about one of the great silent comedies, now regarded as Buster Keaton's masterpiece (or at least one of them), so be it. But I was born a Southerner and raised to take such sentimentality about the region's past as a matter of course, in large part because Hollywood encouraged it. Now that I know better, I don't think it hurts to quibble about such things, especially when the political air is currently filled with legislated tolerance of discrimination, much (but not all) of it emanating from the states of the Old South. But let's lighten up: The General is a great film despite its wrongheaded view of history, and Keaton is one of the masters of the medium. Every time I watch it I see something new: This time, for example, I was taken with the sequence near the start of the film when Johnnie Gray (Keaton) arrives home with the first of his two loves (his engine, the General) and goes to see the other love, Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack). He is trailed to her house by two small boys, following in single file, and unknown to them Annabelle joins the little procession. Arriving at her door, he knocks, only to notice with a double-take that she's right behind him. They enter her living room, with the two boys following and seating themselves on the couch to observe. Johnnie sees them, pretends that he's leaving, goes to the door, ushers them out first, and then closes the door behind them. It's a simple gag routine of no importance to the plot (we never see the boys again), but it's executed with such straight-faced precision, as if it were being performed to a metronomic beat, that it becomes a small delight. Henri Bergson's theory of comedy is as unreadable as most theories of comedy are, but he makes a point that some things are funny because they show human beings behaving mechanically. Human beings are elastic and unpredictable, and when they turn inelastic and predictable, they can become funny. Almost everything in The General is done with this straight-faced precision, so that we laugh even when Keaton departs from it. Marion Mack proves herself a game performer here, subjected to all sorts of torments from being caught in a bear trap to being tied in a sack and flung into a boxcar to being drenched with water. Throughout it all she remains a ditz, and we often want to throttle her because of it. So when Keaton gives in to the exasperation we are all feeling with her, he does start to throttle her -- and then, endearingly, changes his mind and kisses her.