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MR. BUSTER KEATON
GREAT CLOWN OF THE SILENT SCREEN
Buster
Keaton, one of the great clowns of the silent screen, who will be remembered above all for
his performance in The General, died at his home in Hollywood yesterday. He was 69.
His interpretation of comedy was unique. His was
"the great stone face". In a film world that exaggerated everything, and in
which every emotion was dramatized and elaborated, he remained impassive and solemn, his
poker-faced inscrutability suppressing all emotion. And yet emotion was conveyed.
Disaster might be encountered with no more than a lifting of the eye-brows; astonishment
by a single blink of the eyes. But, even so, the character he portrayed never failed to
arouse the sympathy of an audience. This sombre, mournful clown had a great capacity for
pathos. When circumstance defeated him it was as though some patient, kindly donkey were
being beaten by a bully with a stick.
He was a comedian of many parts. A man of close
observation and remarkable inventiveness, the majority of the best gags in his films were
of his own creation. He was also a fine and fearless acrobat, who scorned a stand-in and
insisted on himself carrying out all the dangerous stunts which a script might demand. He
had a thorough understanding of the technique of the silent cinema, and edited his own
pictures. Speech, of course, had no part in his mime, and the coming of sound robbed him
of his greatness, even if it did not end his film career, which continued spasmodically
for many years. But he belonged essentially to the golden era of film comedy, during the
silent twenties, when Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy were also at their peak.
He differed from them in many ways, one of them being in his relationship with his
heroines. Chaplin and Lloyd had to fight to win the girl in the end, but Keaton was
plagued by well-intentioned young women who loved him devoutly throughout but tried him
sorely by their lack of intelligence. When in Go West, he lifted up his bride
triumphantly so that she might glimpse the promised land in front of them, she faced in
the wrong direction and looked back from where they had come.
Joseph Francis Keaton was born in Pickway, Kansas, on
October 4, 1896, the son of Joe H.Keaton, a well-known acrobatic comedian of the circus
and vaudeville. At the age of six months he was nicknamed "Buster" by Houdini
after he had fallen down a flight of stairs and been picked up unhurt. At the age of 3½
he was already part of his father's knockabout act. He was therefore a fully experienced
tumbler and comedian long before he entered films.
It was Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle who
introduced him to the screen after a chance meeting in the street. This was in 1917, and
his first film was The Butcher Boy. He made several short comedies and then joined
the army. He returned to the screen in 1919, and made many films, including one
"straight part" The Saphead in 1920 – but it was not until 1923 that
he first developed his poker-faced approach to comedy. Possibly the rigid unsmiling
demeanour was a relic of his acrobatic days, when an intense concentration was essential.
A long succession of short comedies was followed in the middle of the twenties by
full-length silent films which were constructed with much more care. These included Sherlock
Jnr (1924), The Navigator (1925), Go West, Battling Butler, and The
General (1926), College (1927), Steamboat Bill Jnr and The Cameraman
(1928) and Big Shot (1929). The best of these was undoubtedly The General,
the story of a wonderful train chase enacted against the background of the American Civil
War, in which Keaton played an engine driver of the Southern forces.
The remainder of his screen career, after the coming
of sound, was an anti-climax. He made various talking pictures over a long period,
including one in France and one in England; and like Laurel and Hardy he also made a tour
of provincial music halls in England during the fifties - a sad affair for those with any
nostalgia for the past. Billy Wilder used him in Sunset Boulevard in 1950; Chaplin
gave him a piano-playing scene in Limelight in 1953; and he appeared with almost
other screen veteran in Mike Todd's Around The World in Eighty Days in 1956. In
1957 Hollywood made a so-called biography of his life, The Buster Keaton Story, an
inaccurate and shabby tribute to one of its finest comedians. Most recently he appeared in
It's A, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
But as a great comedian, he belonged only to the
silent screen. His solemn resolution in adversity had a certain dignity; he was the patron
of the stiff upper lip.
He had no imitators, for his style was so essentially
his own. His was a magnificent resignation in the face of inevitable disaster. Last year
it was announced he was to star in The Chase, a silent production except for sound
effects and music and a tribute to silent films. His last great triumph was in September,
1965, when he received an enthusiastic reception for his performance in a 22-minute silent
film scripted by Samuel Beckett, which was shown at the Venice Film Festival. It was
called simply Film.
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