![]() ![]() The next seven years were lost in the fog of a disastrous second marriage, more drinking and a pile of forgettable short comedies and second-banana parts.Įleanor Norris saved his life, though, when she became the third Mrs. Despite the money he made for MGM, in 1933, Louis B. He behaved erratically his absences delayed filming his first marriage deteriorated. ![]() MGM turned him into a scripted comic, and he disliked these pictures because they came at the expense of comedy and at the promotion of farce.Īs Eleanor Keaton and Jeffrey Vance point out in “Buster Keaton Remembered,” he disdained farce “because it is based on simple misunderstanding or mistaken identity, which in a legitimate story would be quickly resolved.” He responded to this misuse of his talent as his father had handled his own distinct problems, by drinking. In his early films, Keaton was a controlled improviser. Many of the half a dozen MGM films that Keaton made in the 1930s were his greatest commercial successes, but the studio clearly didn’t know how to transfer the silent specialness of Keaton to talkies. Nothing was as articulate as his carefully planned pratfalls.Īlthough Keaton worked almost steadily until his death in 1968, none of his performances in those ensuing 40 years match the incandescence of his early work. The problem for Keaton after the silent era was not his voice, but rather the studios’ insistence that virtually every second of talkies have somebody saying something, regardless of whether it advanced the story. The advent of talking pictures in 1927 ruined the careers of many actors who looked great mouthing dialogue but had terrible delivery or accents. (Keaton felt this earned the biggest laugh of all his gags.) There was, in fact, no use for dialogue in any of the 45 two-reel and feature silent films he made starting with “The Butcher Boy” in 1917 and ending with “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” in 1928. ![]() ![]() In that last story, for instance, the scene fades, followed by a card that reads, “Years later,” and then Keaton emerges from the hole, dressed in Oriental clothes, followed by his Chinese wife and two children. What needs to be said as Keaton opens a newspaper that unfolds and unfolds until it is the size of a bed sheet and envelops him in “The High Sign,” or as he spills a bottle of glue on his counter in “The Haunted House,” or as he does a swan dive, in “Hard Luck,” into the cement next to the pool, leaving a large hole? The visual punch lines speak for themselves. Whether it was Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock, or Charlie Chaplin spinning on roller skates, or Lillian Gish on an ice floe, actors soon developed an eloquence that needed no words, and few matched the majestically stony countenance of Buster Keaton. He recovered in the 1940s, remarried, and revived his career as an honored comic performer for the rest of his life, earning an Academy Honorary Award in 1959.For anyone who delights in cinematic sight gags, silents are golden. His career declined afterward with a loss of artistic independence when he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, his wife divorced him, and he descended into alcoholism. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" on a series of films that make him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies". He is best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". Joseph Frank Keaton (Octo– February 1, 1966), known professionally as Buster Keaton, was an American actor, comedian, film director, producer, screenwriter, and stunt performer. ![]()
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