Wilbur Wright in the Lartigue portrait.
Keaton seems, in the combined integ-
rity and opportunism of his persona, to
explain how those alarming machines
emerge from an older American cul-
ture of tinkerers and bicycle repairmen.
K
eaton’s greatest work was made in
the five years between “Three Ages”
(1923) and “The Cameraman.” “The Gen-
eral” (1926), the first of Keaton’s features to
enter the National Film Registry, was—
surprisingly, to those who think of it as
Keaton’s acknowledged masterpiece—a
critical flop. A carefully plotted Civil War
tale, more adventure story than comic
spoof, it shared the typical fate of such
passion projects: at first a baffling fail-
ure, for which everyone blames the art-
ist, and which does him or her immense
professional damage, it then gets redis-
covered when the passion is all that’s
evident and the financial perils of the
project don’t matter anymore. Nobody
questioned Keaton’s decision to make it,
since the movies he had made in the
same system had all been profitable. But
businessmen, understandably, hate trust-
ing artists and waiting for the product,
and are always looking for an excuse to
impose a discipline the artists lack. It
takes only one bomb to bring the ac-
countants down on the head of the co-
median. Stevens, comparing the film to
Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” writes,
“The General was less a cause than a symp-
tom of the end of a certain way of mak-
ing movies. The independent produc-
tion model that for ten years had allowed
Buster the freedom to make exactly the
movies he wanted... was collapsing
under its own weight.” The thing that
baffled its detractors (even Sherwood
didn’t like it) and, at first, repelled audi-
ences was the thing that seems to us now
daring and audacious: the seamless mix-
ture of Keaton’s comedy with its soberly
realistic rendering of the period. No
American movie gives such a memora-
ble evocation of the Civil War landscape,
all smoky Southern mornings and aus-
tere encampments—a real triumph of
art, since it was shot in Oregon. Many
of the images, like one of a short-bar-
relled cannon rolling alone on the rail-
road, put one in mind of Winslow Homer.
Two years later, in a studio sleight of
hand so sneaky that Curtis spends a page
and a half figuring out what the hell
happened, Keaton became the subject
of a baseball-style trade, in which Joe
Schenck had Keaton transferred from
United Artists to his brother Nick, at
M-G-M. That gave M-G-M a clean-
up-hitter comedian—United Artists al-
ready had Chaplin—while making sure
that, post-“General,” Keaton would be
more closely supervised by M-G-M’s
boy genius, Irving Thalberg. Chaplin
tried to warn Keaton off M-G-M. “Don’t
let them do it to you, Buster,” he said.
“It’s not that they haven’t smart show-
men there. They have some of the coun-
try’s best. But there are too many of them,
and they’ll all try to tell you how to make
your comedies.” Keaton’s passivity made
him reluctant to heed the warning, and
off he went, Schenck to Schenck.
T
he mostly disastrous years that Kea-
ton spent at M-G-M are the real
subject of Stevens’s chapter on F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Thalberg will always have his
defenders, but once one gets past the
“quality” films he sponsored, it becomes
clear what a con artist he was. He sold
one observer after another—including
Fitzgerald, who took him as the model
for his idealized “last tycoon,” Monroe
Stahr—on the subtlety of his intellect,
while everything he did revealed him to
be the most ruthless kind of commer-
cial-minded cynic. Thalberg robbed the
Marx Brothers of their anarchy and Kea-
ton of his elegance, turning him, as Ste-
vens complains, into a mere stock rube
figure. The Thalberg system tended to
work well for an artist just once—as in
both the Marxes’ and Keaton’s first films
for M-G-M, “A Night at the Opera” and
“The Cameraman.” But Thalberg didn’t
grasp what had actually worked: the ex-
pensive style of the production, pitting
the Marxes against the pomposity of
opera, and placing Keaton against a full-
scale location shoot in New York City.
What Thalberg thought worked was
schlock imposed on genius: big produc-
tion numbers for the Marxes and unre-
quited-love rube comedy for Keaton. In
many subsequent movies, at M-G-M
and elsewhere, his character was named
Elmer (and once even Elmer Gantry), to
typify him as a backwoods yokel.
The M-G-M comedies did decently
at the box office, but Keaton, an artist
injured by the persistent insults to his
artistic intelligence, started to drink hard,
and soon the drinking drowned out that
intelligence. The actress Louise Brooks
recalls him driving drunk to the studio,
where he silently destroyed a room full
of glass bookshelves with a baseball bat.
She sensed his message: “I am ruined, I
am trapped.” In 1933, he was fired by
Louis B. Mayer, essentially for being too
smashed, on and off the set, to work.
Keaton’s M-G-M experience, despite
various efforts by Thalberg and others
to keep his career alive as a gag writer,
ruined his art. The next decades are truly
painful to read about, as Keaton went in
and out of hospitals and clinics, falling
“Come to think of it, these all probably could have been one wish.”
