Buster Keaton

Joseph Frank Keaton was born on October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas, a small town where his parents happened to be staying while touring with a traveling medicine show ^[1]. His father, Joe Keaton, was a knockabout comedian, and his mother, Myra, performed as a musician. The family act, eventually billed as The Three Keatons, became a fixture of American vaudeville around the turn of the century ^[2].

The boy joined the act as a toddler. Its centerpiece was rough physical comedy in which Joe hurled his small son across the stage, into scenery, and occasionally toward the orchestra pit, while young Keaton learned to land safely and, crucially, without visible reaction. Audiences laughed harder when the child stayed expressionless, a discovery that shaped his entire performing style ^[2]. The nickname Buster, according to family legend, came after the infant tumbled down a flight of stairs unhurt, though the details of the story shifted over the years and its origins remain uncertain ^[1].

Constant touring left little room for formal schooling; Keaton later said he spent only a single day in a classroom. His education came instead from theaters, boarding houses, and the mechanics of stagecraft, which gave him a lifelong fascination with how physical objects, from props to locomotives, actually worked ^[3].

The family act dissolved in 1917, strained by Joe Keaton's drinking and the increasing danger of the routines. That year, in New York, the 21-year-old Keaton visited the studio of comedian Roscoe Arbuckle, then one of the most popular screen performers in the country. Invited to appear in the two-reel comedy The Butcher Boy, Keaton was captivated by the camera itself, reportedly taking one apart to understand its mechanism before agreeing to work in pictures ^[3].

Between 1917 and 1920 he appeared in more than a dozen Arbuckle shorts, interrupted by service in the United States Army in France during the First World War ^[1]. Arbuckle proved a generous mentor, and Keaton absorbed the grammar of film comedy quickly. When Arbuckle moved to feature films, producer Joseph M. Schenck gave Keaton his own production unit and a studio in Los Angeles ^[4].

From 1920 to 1923 Keaton wrote, directed, and starred in a run of two-reel shorts, among them One Week, The Playhouse, Cops, and The Boat, that established his screen identity: a small, unsmiling, endlessly resourceful figure contending with a hostile mechanical universe ^[4]. One Week, in which a newlywed assembles a mail-order house with catastrophic results, announced at once that Keaton's comedy would be built on architecture, physics, and impeccable timing rather than sentiment ^[5].

Anyone asking who was Buster Keaton at his peak need only look at the features he made between 1923 and 1928, the core of any Buster Keaton biography. Working with near total creative control at his own studio, he produced Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), a body of work that film historians regard as one of the great sustained runs in cinema ^[5].

Sherlock Jr., in which a film projectionist dreams his way into the movie on the screen, contains effects sequences so precise that later filmmakers studied them frame by frame. During its production Keaton fractured his neck while performing a stunt with a railroad water tower, an injury he did not discover until a doctor examined him years afterward ^[3]. The General, his Civil War railroad chase, was among the most expensive comedies of the silent era; one shot, in which a real locomotive plunges through a burning bridge into a river, is often cited as the costliest single take of the period ^[5]. The film fared poorly with critics and audiences on release in 1926 and 1927, yet it now appears regularly near the top of international polls of the greatest films ever made ^[6].

Among the most repeated Buster Keaton facts is the falling house front in Steamboat Bill, Jr.: a full-scale two-ton wall collapses around him while he stands in the exact spot of a small open window, a stunt performed with inches of clearance and no trickery ^[3]. Keaton did his own stunt work throughout, and his willingness to risk genuine injury, combined with rigorous geometric staging, distinguishes Buster Keaton achievements from those of every rival of the era ^[5]. In 1959 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized this legacy with an honorary Oscar for his unique talents that brought immortal comedies to the screen ^[1].

Keaton married actress Natalie Talmadge in 1921, joining a powerful Hollywood family: her sisters Norma and Constance Talmadge were major stars, and her brother-in-law was his producer, Joseph Schenck ^[4]. The couple had two sons, but the marriage deteriorated through the late 1920s and ended in a bitter divorce in 1932, which cost Keaton much of his fortune and, for a time, contact with his children ^[2].

The collapse of his career and marriage coincided with severe alcoholism. A brief second marriage to Mae Scriven, contracted in 1933 during a period Keaton later said he could barely remember, ended in divorce in 1936 ^[2]. Stability arrived in 1940 when he married Eleanor Norris, a 21-year-old dancer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The marriage lasted until his death, and Eleanor is widely credited with helping him manage his drinking and rebuild his working life ^[1].

Off screen, friends described a modest, practical man devoted to bridge, baseball, and elaborate mechanical hobbies. At his San Fernando Valley home he built working gadgets and ran a miniature railway that delivered snacks to guests, the private echo of the engineering mind visible in his films ^[3].

Keaton's independence ended in 1928 when Schenck persuaded him to give up his studio and sign with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Keaton later called it the worst business decision of his life ^[3]. MGM's committee system stripped him of creative control; although his first films there made money, the arrival of sound, studio interference, and his worsening alcoholism led to his dismissal in 1933 ^[2].

The following decades were leaner but never idle. He made cheap two-reel comedies for Educational Pictures and Columbia, worked without credit as a gag writer at MGM, including on Marx Brothers and Red Skelton pictures, and took small character parts ^[2]. Billy Wilder cast him in Sunset Boulevard (1950) as one of the bridge-playing waxworks, and Charlie Chaplin gave him a celebrated stage duet in Limelight (1952), the only film in which the two appeared together ^[1].

Television revived him. From the late 1940s he appeared constantly in variety shows, commercials, and his own local Los Angeles series, and a 1957 Hollywood biopic, however inaccurate, along with James Agee's influential 1949 essay on silent comedy, returned his name to public attention ^[6]. Revival screenings, including a triumphant reception at the Venice Film Festival in 1965, let him witness the beginning of his critical rehabilitation. He kept working almost to the end, filming the short The Railrodder and a role in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in his final years. Keaton died of lung cancer at his home in Woodland Hills, California, on February 1, 1966, at the age of 70 ^[1].

Critical opinion, which in the 1920s generally ranked Keaton below Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, reversed almost completely after his death. The General appeared in the Sight and Sound critics' polls of the greatest films, and Sherlock Jr. and Steamboat Bill, Jr. are preserved in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for their cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance ^[6]. The American Film Institute placed The General among the top twenty American films of all time in its 2007 list ^[7].

His influence runs through generations of filmmakers and performers. Jackie Chan has repeatedly named Keaton as the model for his own stunt-driven comedy, and directors from Orson Welles, who called The General perhaps the greatest film ever made, to Wes Anderson and the makers of modern action cinema have acknowledged the debt ^[7]. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's 1987 documentary series Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, along with biographies by Rudi Blesh, Marion Meade, and James Curtis, secured his story for later readers ^[5].

A century after One Week, his films still play to full houses with live orchestras, and his image, the flat porkpie hat above an unreadable face, remains one of the most recognizable in movie history. Few careers illustrate so sharply how quickly an artist can be discarded and how completely posterity can repair the judgment ^[6].