Buster Keaton during filming of The Cameraman
Buster Keaton’s nickname, “the Great Stone Face,” was only partially accurate. Keaton may never have smiled, but if you look really hard, you can spot a few shades of grey. In The Cameraman (1928), he plays an aspiring newsreel photographer, and when a roomful of studio executives laugh at his amateurish footage, he glances to his left, then gulps, and then widens his eyes very slightly, although not enough to make his eyebrows change position. By contrast, his face is more serene when he clings to the side of a moving firetruck, camera in tow: he stares straight ahead with his chin up, not moving his head at all. Later, when his date is interrupted by another, more imposing gentleman-caller, Keaton arches his eyebrows about ten degrees, exhales, and rolls his eyes, in a combination of anguish and frustration that qualifies as the closest he’ll come to a change in disposition.
In most of his films, Keaton clumsily pursues a girl, and oftentimes he is rejected, and it is these moments of rejection where he is at his most Stone-Faced. Most of the major screen comedians — from Charlie Chaplin to Jerry Lewis to Jim Carrey — have indulged in sentimentality in a way that sometimes suggests neediness for audience approval. Keaton is a rare case: when his characters are rejected, they simply stand still and stare into space, completely internalizing their grief. Even when Keaton pulls off his most deft and dangerous pieces of physical comedy, he never winks at the camera, never hams it up — really, never seems to express any outward enjoyment of his own phenomenal talents.
One of the most touching traits of Keaton’s screen persona is his resiliency. While he never appears happy, he remains levelheaded even in the face of overwhelming opposition. In the spectacular finale of Sherlock Jr. (1928), he is literally thrown up and down and left and right by a cyclone, but like the Energizer Bunny, he takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. Even when the wall of a house collapses on him, and he narrowly survives by standing in the exact spot where the window will land, he acts remarkably nonplussed. Foolish as it may be to equate an actor with his screen persona, Keaton’s adult life was marked by alcoholism, depression and neglect for so long that it’s more comforting to imagine the offscreen Keaton as being as stoic as his onscreen alter-ego.
The Cameraman (screening Sunday at the Revue Cinema) was Keaton’s first film after signing an exclusive contract with MGM, a move he described in his 1960 autobiography My Wonderful World of Slapstick as “the worst mistake of my career.” After serving an apprenticeship as second-banana/protégé to Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle from 1917 to 1920, producer Joseph Schenck gave Keaton his own production unit and near-total creative control over his own series of comedies. In an uninterrupted burst of creative energy, Keaton directed and starred in 30 classic shorts and features between 1920 and 1928, including innovative efforts like The Navigator, Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., and his monumental The General. By 1928, the major studios’ monopoly on theatres caused Joseph M. Schenck Productions to crumble, and the box office failure of The General had already hindered Keaton’s creative ambitions. Schenck recommended signing with MGM, and despite the studio’s poor handling of comedians and warnings from the likes of Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin (who said, “Don’t do it. They’ll ruin you helping you. They’ll warp your judgment. You’ll get tired of arguing for things you know are right”), Keaton agreed.
After The Cameraman, he could no longer perform dangerous stunts, and he could no longer spend days improvising scenes out of nothing. As an independent filmmaker, Keaton and his team never wrote a screenplay, but as the industry converted to sound, he was drafted into movies and genres that plainly didn’t suit him with scripts he couldn’t deviate from: door-slamming bedroom farce (Parlor, Bedroom and Bath), service comedy (Doughboys), musical (Free and Easy). His characters, once smart and agile, became cartoonishly dim-witted. That most of these films were greater box office successes than his independent work was dispiriting to Keaton, whose increasing alcoholism made him erratic and unstable. In 1933, MGM allowed his contract to lapse, and until his rediscovery by cinephiles in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and his concurrent resurgence as a popular performer on television, Keaton drifted around Hollywood as a lowly gag writer and occasional actor in B-grade shorts.
But still, there is The Cameraman — the only MGM film where Keaton was able to wrestle control from studio-mandated director Edward Sedgwick. The perfunctory plot: Keaton plays a tintype photographer who falls in love with an MGM secretary, buying a movie camera in hopes of landing a job at the studio’s newsreel department. As usual, the story is a clothesline for a series of fine comic set pieces: Keaton running up and down five flights of stairs while waiting for a phone call (seen in an impressive, three-walled, multi-tiered set); Keaton trying to change clothes in a changing-room stall with another, angrier man; Keaton trying to film a Chinatown gang war as it erupts around him; Keaton, alone in the middle of an empty Yankee Stadium, pantomiming a solitary baseball game (a sequence that was apparently improvised). Some of the most spectacular sequences, like the Yankees game and the staircase scene, have gained a melancholic air, suggesting an artist who had the resources of a studio at his disposal, but only very briefly.
Keaton appeared in many bad films after The Cameraman, and yet he was never bad in them. Not even The Passionate Plumber, Speak Easily, and What? No Beer!, the last and worst of the MGM films, where he was reduced to playing second-fiddle to Jimmy Durante. Durante’s brash, loudmouthed style couldn’t have been more different from Keaton’s, but while Durante is busy chewing the scenery, Keaton is usually off in the margins, doing his own bits of comic business quite independent of the rest of the film. He always seems to be marking his territory, and keeping to himself.
The same could even be said for his “special guest appearances” in dreadful beach party movies like Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. While it’s a little embarassing to see Keaton trotted out as a nostalgia act, dressed like a witch doctor and belting out ‘60s slang, he never condescends to the material, never acknowledges its absurdity — indeed, never breaks from his usual stone-faced stoicism. Like his characters, Keaton the actor stayed even-tempered in even the most demeaning circumstances. Keaton stood amidst all this inanity like Steamboat Bill Jr. stood amidst the cyclone.
The Revue Cinema screens Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman this Sunday (June 24) at 4 pm.
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