![]() Neither of us had time while growing up to study anything but show business.” It’s to Keaton’s credit that he realized this, and wasn’t seduced by the pretty lies being sprinkled throughout Hollywood by commies in those decades. With feet (and ego) firmly on the ground, he was thus able to see Chaplin’s preening leftism for what it was: “I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do, Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers. The elderly serial killers of Arsenic and Old Lace at least were portrayed as crazy - Chaplin’s sardonic wife-murderer justifies himself by pooh-poohing his comparatively meager killings when set against the much greater casualties of war.īy the end, the guy who had started by wagging a cane and walking funny fancied himself one of the greatest artistes of the age, whereas Keaton judged his own career far more humbly, seeing himself as a mere gag man and entertainer. Based off a script by Orson Welles and championed by critics like the selfsame James Agee who praised the work of Keaton’s silents, it nevertheless repulsed American theatergoers. Meanwhile, as communism became a faddish preoccupation of liberals in the 1920s and ’30s, Chaplin’s movies became increasingly politicized and culturally rebellious, culminating in Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a subversive serial-killer comedy that Chaplin considered “the cleverest and most brilliant film of my career” even as ordinary Americans fled from it in droves, leaving it to flop catastrophically at the box office. That sort of ordinary common sense shines through in Buster Keaton movies like The Cameraman. ![]() He must know by now that communism, wherever it has been practiced, bears not the slightest resemblance to the benign system he described to me forty years ago. I myself have gone through life almost unaware of politics, and I only wish my old friend had done the same. The well would help the sick, the rich would help the poor. He said that communism was going to change everything, abolish poverty. He was going on at a great rate about something new called communism which he had just heard about. …a night away back in 1920 when Charlie and I were drinking beer in my kitchen. Take Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp - at base a hobo, petty thief, and conniving opportunist, his humor derived from his boundless ingenuity in skirting the law, and his pathos came from being an oppressed victim of a cruel society. That quiet indomitable spirit, what Ebert calls his “sustained act of optimism,” separates Buster Keaton’s stone-faced everyman from the other great comedic characters of the age. I realized that my feature comedies would succeed best when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for me as I indomitably worked my way out of mounting perils.” We also discontinued what we called impossible gags or cartoon gags. no pie was ever thrown in a Buster Keaton feature. “One of the first decisions I made,” Keaton wrote in his autobiography, “was to cut out custard pie throwing. When first making features, their longer length dictated fundamental adjustments in the way his comedy and cinema interacted. Keaton chalked up a large part of his success to changes undertaken while maturing out of his early, vaudeville-inspired shorts with Fatty Arbuckle (a subject we’ll address in a future FCML series). he was the only major comedian who kept sentiment almost entirely out of his work, and he brought pure physical comedy to its greatest heights.”Īs for me, I agree more with another critic, Roger Ebert, who once wrote that Keaton’s movies, “seen as a group, are like a sustained act of optimism in the face of adversity surprising how, without asking, he earns our admiration and tenderness.” Marshaling all of the critical gumption he’s earned over the years, Ebert also calls Keaton, “the greatest actor-director in the history of the cinema, and that includes Orson Welles.” Much has been made about James Agee’s affectionate judgment of Buster Keaton: “Keaton worked strictly for laughs, but his work came from so far inside a curious and original spirit that he achieved a great deal besides, especially in his feature-length comedies.
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