This article appeared in The Times.

Buster Keaton Hopes for a Revival

FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Mr. Buster Keaton, the legendary "frozen-faced" comedian of silent pictures, sped through London earlier this month on his way back to America after a European tour. The tour had two purposes. One was that of combing Continental film museums for his early comedies and hunting down pirated prints of them (prints, incidentally, which at least saved his reputation from the total eclipse that has overtaken other stars who kept a more jealous guard on their performance rights). The second part of the mission involved a trip to Munich, where a substantial collection of the Keaton comedies are being prepapred for general reissue.

The scheme was prompted by the success of the film anthologies When Comedy Was King and The Chaplin Revue. A tentative Keaton revival in Hollywood recently brought in enthusiastic audiences; and now a New York cinema has opened with a programme coupling two Keaton shorts (The Boat and The Playhouse) with Sunset Boulevard, in which Mr. Keaton makes a shadowy appearance as one of a ghostly party of old-time actors gathered forlornly round a card table. This programme has been put on as a pilot experiment: if it attracts enough people then 10 feature films and 18 two-reelers will be released from Munich at the end of December, and Mr. Keaton may at last regain the reputation he lost when the silent studios closed down in 1928. At that time he was spoken of as the runner-up to Chaplin as the world's greatest comedian.

A LONG STRUGGLE

Mr. Keaton has spent almost half his life in the struggle to re-establish himself. Early in the 1930s he directed and starred in a number of talkies which he now dislikes, attributing his failure with M.G.M. to the multiplicity of writers at their studios. Since then he has worked as a free-lance actor without star-billing or production control (the clown act with Chaplin in Limelight is his most striking film performance of recent years), and he appears regularly on American television in plays and commercials. Now aged 64, he has the appearance of a tough, leathery veteran. He is a short, stocky man, nut-brown in complexion, and when he speaks it is with punchy, gravel-throated directness. There's nothing of the pathetic old-timer about him.

He seems more interested in talking about the mechanics of film-making than in discussing his performances. A recent article by Mr. David Robinson dwelt on his feats of engineering - "If Brunel had lived 80 years later, Keaton would no doubt have engaged him as a gagman". He led off the conversation by recalling a celebrated sequence from The Boat (a sequence reputed to have notched up one of the longest laughs in cinema history) in which a launched vessel runs smoothly down the slip-way and straight down to the bottom of the river with Keaton standing on the deck.

"I had", Mr. Keaton said, "to work like a dog to get the bugs out of that scene. First you find a wooden boat won't sink; you've got to make it sink - the whole thing has to be perforated with holes so that no air pockets collect. Then you find it won't slide down the slip way - it has to be pulled. We fixed that with a cable and a sea-anchor. The same things came up over again when Paramount did a remake of the scene in The Buster Keaton Story, and I ironed out the bugs for them in five minutes. But that scene alone cost them $60,000 to make - making The Boat, my salary included, cost only $22,000."

After explaining why so many of his films had found their way into European collections ("We used two cameras for every shot: one taking the home negative and one the foreign negative"), and stating that the Munich reissues would dispense with spoken commentary, Mr. Keaton embarked on more personal recollections.

"I began in vaudeville, on the stage: I was playing in the Palace Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in 1909 - my first trip to this country. And it was on the stage I learnt not to smile. I found that if I laughed at my own gags nobody else did; so I stopped laughing. I went into movies during the war. I was waiting for rehearsals to start for a Broadway show and I happened to meet Fatty Arbuckle, who was signed up to the Colony Studio in New York. Arbuckle asked me if I'd ever been in motion pictures and I told him I hadn't. So he asked me to come on down and play a couple of scenes with him. Which I did. I never went into the Broadway show, and I've never been back on the stage since."

The two scenes appear in The Butcher Boy, the first of a group of about eight two-reelers in which Arbuckle and Keaton collaborated on the lines of Abbot and Costello. After 18 months in the Army, Keaton came back to play his first lead in a feature film. This was The Saphead, an adaptation of Winchell Smith's Broadway success Henrietta: it was made in 1919, some of its scenes being shot in the Buster Kenton Studios, which were set up in the same year. Mr. Keaton had complete control here until the axe fell nine years later. He began with a series of two-reelers but after 1923 he made only full-length feature films, whose range of comic situation extended from being cast adrift alone with a girl (The Navigator) to being pursued over the mountains by a baying pack of 500 would-be wives (Seven Chances). As his own director, changing his leading lady from film to film (and always using an unknown name), Mr. Keaton set his image on these comedies as "the great stone face" and as the master of such pieces of mechanical wizardry as the locomotive race in The General.

INFORMAL FILM-MAKING

By the usual slap-happy standards of production in the silent days, these films were made slowly: three weeks was the minimum period even for a two-reeler But there was never a script. Mr. Keaton says his method was to " get with a few writers, about three of them, and work until we'd got something we thought would make a story. Then we'd go ahead with the movie. There wasn't even a shooting script. When it came to properties you'd tell the man - a row of houses there, a cabin, or whatever - and he'd go off and make them. I didn't have any fixed acting company, but we had ensemble playing: if any ideas came up while we were shooting, fine, we'd use them. It was flexible.

"Action. That's what went out when the talkies came in. It's like vaudeville. In the old days you really had variety: variety of pianists, comics, singers. Then the thing went into a decline, and now there are no schools to train those kind of people. It's the same in movies. When talking pictures arrived the edict went around Hollywood - they all have to talk: and they overloaded the scripts with talk, unnecessary talk - it was a novelty. The script writers got an upper hand and action got left out. There'd never have been comics like Bob Hope and Benny in the pre-talkie era: the only one who could have fitted in is Red Skelton. And Lupino Lane in England. But with somebody like me, you don't give me a long speech to recite. Let somebody else say it, let somebody else do the explaining."